After the Past. Andrew Feldherr

After the Past - Andrew Feldherr


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for their historical author.14 Although the speaker of the first Eclogue is a purely textual creature, whose actions and attitudes are largely structured by the audience’s knowledge of earlier bucolic poetry, he nevertheless also becomes a mouthpiece for the author to address topics and figures from the world of the audience’s immediate experience. Thus, where the Ciceronian persona moves from reality to text, Vergil’s in the Eclogues travels in the opposite direction.

      As we shall see, Sallust’s presence in the Catiline stands poised between these two trajectories. Like Cicero, he too had had a multifaceted public career, including the offices of tribune and, after Caesar’s victory, of governor of the province of Africa.15 There was, therefore, a Sallust before there was a Catiline. Yet the story he tells about himself in that work is a tissue of literary allusions (Cat. 3.3–4.2).16 We can easily explain why Sallust’s self-presentation might require particular artifice: unlike Cicero’s, Sallust’s career included not only exile but disgrace and featured charges of extortion that would hardly add authority to the historian’s attacks on avarice. But a decision to explain Sallust’s literary strategy by reference to his historical biography itself begs a question that we would never feel the need to ask when reading Cicero: Is the author of this text to be identified with the Sallust we know from his public actions? And indeed the impulse to explain the text by reference to the actual misfortunes of the author (Sallust had to write this way because of his disgrace) may be balanced by an opposite tendency to redeem the reputation of the historical Sallust by attributing to him the much more laudable moral perspectives he voices as a historian. Such judgments equally involve the reader in deciding where the author stands in relation to historical reality.


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