After reading Tom Holland’s Rubicon, I decided I really needed to read more primary sources (in translation) of Roman history. Oh, I’ve read lots of excerpts from various Roman historians, but the only works I’ve read completely are Caesar’s Gallic Wars and Tacitus’ Annals of Rome.

Coincidentally, I recently discovered Quintus Curtius’ excellent blog and decided to pick up his translation of Sallust, a source drawn on in Holland’s book.

Review: Sallust: The Conspiracy of Catiline and The War of Jugurtha, trans. Quintus Curtius, 2017.

What makes a Roman patrician turn against the Roman Republic? Why does a foreign prince, a friend of Rome, risk its wrath? These are the questions addressed by Sallust.

He is the first historian of Rome with works that have come down to us complete though not all of them survived.

Living from 86 to 34 BC, he was well enough thought of that his house was preserved with its destruction in the 410 AD sack of Rome being noted by Procopius.

Sallust came from a family of modest means. From the beginning, Curtius’ notes he possessed a “seething hostility” toward the patrician class. And his attitude certainly didn’t change when he was expelled from the Senate in 50 BC on a charge of “moral turpitude”. The details of his crime and punishment (once source says he was publicly flogged) aren’t clear, but, as Curtius’ introduction notes, political prosecutions and loose morals were certainly a product of the time, and Sallust probably wasn’t worse than his contemporaries.

Sallust’s populism made him a member of Caesar’s faction, and he accompanied Caesar to Numidia in 46 BC where he served as a governor, a post that was useful in gathering information for his work on Jugurtha.

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