I Reading fragments
Before proceeding further, it is necessary to address the textual elephant in the room: the Histories are a fragmentary text. While the monographs are the subject of a vast and wide-ranging body of scholarship, the Histories have been comparatively neglected. This is surely due to the fragmentary state of the text rather than an intrinsic lack of interest. Sallust’s narrative of the 70s and 60s is our most contemporary account of that period, and the events of the post-Sulla years – foreign conflicts, civil discord, rumbles of looming societal change – provided Sallust ample material to exercise his talents; from what we possess, it is clear that this was a masterpiece.2 Nevertheless, La Penna’s studies from the 1960s are, to date, the only large-scale, holistic treatments of the Histories.3 La Penna is one of the great readers of Sallust and these works remain essential pieces of the conversation about Sallust. Far from hoping to eclipse La Penna’s valuable work with the present study, I hope rather to complement it. While La Penna was interested in Sallust’s role as a political thinker concerned with the role of class struggles in the breakdown of the republic,4 I am drawn more to Sallust the self-conscious historian, and my study thus focuses on his views about the nature and purpose of historiography and how his historiographical method responds to the disorder of civil war, topics which have gone largely unexplored in the context of the Histories. Beyond La Penna’s studies, the majority of scholarly work on the Histories has fallen into one of two categories: the arrangement and editing of the fragments and discussion of the speeches and letters. The former category is not a principal concern of this study; I will discuss the collocation of particular fragments when relevant but rely for the most part on the expertise of the editors who have shaped “our” version of the Histories. Much of the work in the latter category is excellent and has offered great insight into the Histories; individual contributions will be discussed throughout this book when we turn to the speeches and letters. However, the overall impact of this corpus of scholarship is weakened by its aversion to drawing conclusions about the Histories as a whole. Sallust surely did not write the four speeches and two letters as set-pieces, meant to be read in isolation, and we do the author and the work an injustice if we treat it that way.
That said, the process of reading and interpreting a work like the Histories is without a doubt complex. In the Histories’ case, the challenge is compounded by the fact that nearly all of the surviving text (essentially, everything but the speeches and letters) has been handed down in brief quotations by grammarians, mostly three lines or fewer in length. In many cases, passages have been preserved for their stylistic, lexical, syntactic, or etymological interest and may not reflect the major themes and plot points of the narrative. But if we make the most of what we do have, even the briefest fragments can richly repay careful study. The reader of the Histories has three distinct advantages. First, the quantity of fragments and the quality of the available editions; second, our familiarity with Sallust as an author; and third, the availability of later texts that used the Histories as a source. I will rely on all three of these advantages throughout my discussion of the fragments in the following chapters.
The large number of fragments we possess and the diligence with which they have been curated by modern editors present our first great advantage. Given the general hesitance to approach the Histories, one would imagine that we are dealing with a prohibitively scanty amount of text. In fact, over 500 fragments of the Histories survive. To put this in perspective, we have just over 600 fragments of Ennius’ Annales, a work that has received much more attention from scholars. Although many of the Histories’ fragments are brief (three lines or fewer), there are also many substantial ones; however, rigorous philological analysis of even the shortest fragments pays dividends. It is also in our favor that the architecture of the Histories is fairly secure; while editors have found cause to tinker with the arrangement of the fragments, the overall macro-structure of Maurenbrecher’s standard edition has been more or less retained. Maurenbrecher’s arrangement has held up well in large part due to the quality of the testimonia on which it is based. While the grammarians did not always single out the passages that modern readers may wish they had, they were usually diligent in citing book numbers and often preserved other important contextual information as well.5 We may thus be reasonably confident that, when Sallust died, the Histories consisted of five books composed in annalistic style6 and that the sequence of major events as modern editors have restored it is generally accurate.7
Our second advantage is that we know Sallust. The fragments of the Histories are not the tantalizing but inscrutable traces of an otherwise unknown author. Sallust’s first two works, the monographs about Catiline and Jugurtha, are extant and securely attributed to Sallust. They are compact; the entire Sallustian corpus, including the remnants of the Histories, totals around 50,000 words.8 Still, the monographs represent a virtual treasure trove of information unavailable to scholars of many other fragmentary authors. From these texts we are deeply familiar with Sallust’s syntax, lexical choices, themes, and rhetoric, and our interpretation of the Histories benefits from the existence of this framework. We must remain open-minded about stylistic and ideological evolution (or inconsistency) through Sallust’s career and the generic differences between monographs and annalistic history; still, with the use of reasonable caution we can use what we know from the Catiline and Jugurtha to make informed inferences about the language and ideas of the Histories (as I shall do at various points in the following chapters). We are also broadly familiar with Sallust’s troubled political career, as several ancient sources fill in the blanks between Sallust’s own oblique references to his turbulent experience in public life.9 The extent to which this influences a reading of the Histories is up to the individual critic. Sallust’s political biography will not play a large role in my discussion of the work here, but the information exists for those who wish to consider it.
Finally, later works that used the Histories as a source can help us sketch a more complete picture of Sallust’s narrative. Authors in antiquity probably would have had access to the complete text; while other historical narratives of the 70s and 60s besides the Histories would have been available (like Livy’s), Sallust’s narrative would have been the one composed closest in time to that period.10 It is reasonable, then, to posit the Histories as a possible source for later works covering the same time period: for example, the relevant books of Livy,11 Appian, and Cassius Dio.12 Plutarch is especially helpful, as he seems to have relied on the Histories as main source for the Lives of Crassus, Lucullus, Pompey, and Sertorius; a robust body of scholarship catalogues correspondences between the two authors and examines Plutarch’s use of sources, including Sallust.13 Maurenbrecher made extensive use of Plutarch in his organization of the fragments. While my task here is not to reconstruct the overall architecture of the work (since this has been ably accomplished by others), sources like Plutarch will be useful for reconstructing the details of specific episodes. A note of caution on using Plutarch in this way: while Plutarch’s biographies may be useful for reconstructing the form and content of Sallust’s narrative, it is important that we not assume a correspondence between Plutarch’s and Sallust’s attitudes toward their common characters, especially in light of the different generic imperatives of history and biography. This has been a pitfall of much of the existing scholarship of the Histories, since previous approaches to the work have often focused on Sallust’s evaluation of individual figures: did he admire Sertorius? Was Spartacus heroic? Was Pompey the villain? These questions are not central to my reading of the Histories, and where I do consider Sallust’s personal estimation of individual figures (his view of Pompey will be a recurring theme), I will hew as closely as possible to the fragments themselves and avoid the temptation to draw overly broad conclusions from Plutarch.
The fragments of the Histories and the supporting material described here give us a great deal to work with. Scholars are divided on whether and how we should try to fill in the remaining gaps. Gumbrecht articulates the dilemma:
[T]he active use of the imagination appears to be as necessary for the restitution of texts from fragments as the self-control of the philological work by standards of academic rationality… . On the other hand, we can never be sure whether we manage to completely eliminate all those heterogeneous traces which the unavoidable use of our imagination may have left in the restituted text.14
It is important to recognize the challenges posed by fragmentary evidence and to try to avoid aggressive or fanciful reconstructions.15 However, no less a critic than Syme was optimistic about the potential for the Histories’ recovery: “In these diverse ways, the lost masterpiece becomes palpable – content, architecture, and tone. Moreover, since the grammarians frequently cite the books by their numbers, erudition can combine with imagination to reconstruct both the outline and the detail of sundry notable transactions. That scholars should be found divergent is no proof that the method is vain and delusive.”16 By extracting as much as possible from each word of our fragments and supplementing them with our other sources of knowledge about the Histories, it is possible to say a great deal more about this work than most scholars have been willing to risk.
