History of Roman Literature from its Earliest Period to the Augustan Age. Vol. II

by John Colin Dunlop

Some of these more modern annalists wrote the History of Rome from the commencement of the state; others took up the relation from the burning of Rome by the Gauls, or confined themselves to events which had occurred in their own time. Their narratives of all that passed before the incursion of the Gauls, were indeed as little authentic as the relations of Fabius Pictor, since they implicitly followed that writer, and made no new researches into the mouldering monuments of their country. But their accounts of what happened subsequently to the rebuilding of Rome, are not liable to the same suspicion and uncertainty; the public monuments and records having, from that period, been duly preserved, and having been in greater abundance than those of almost any other nation in the history of the world. The Roman authors possessed all the auxiliaries which aid historical compilation—decrees of the senate, chiefly pronounced in affairs of state—leagues with friendly nations—terms of the surrender of cities—tables of triumphs, and treaties, which were carefully preserved in the treasury or in temples. There were even rolls kept of the senators and knights, as also of the number of the legions and ships employed in each war; but the public despatches addressed to the Senate by commanders of armies, of which we have specimens in Cicero’s Epistles, were the documents which must have chiefly aided historical composition. These were probably accurate, as the Senate, and people in general, were too well versed in military affairs to have been easily deluded, and legates were often commissioned by them [pg 80]to ascertain the truth of the relations. The immense multitude of such documents is evinced by the fact, that Vespasian, when restoring the Capitol, found in its ruins not fewer than 3000 brazen tablets, containing decrees of the Senate and people, concerning leagues, associations, and immunities to whomsoever granted, from an early period of the state, and which Suetonius justly styles, instrumentum imperii pulcherrimum ac vetustissimum[183]. Accordingly, when the later annalists came to write of the affairs of their own time, they found historical documents more full and satisfactory than those of almost any other country. But, in addition to these copious sources of information, it will be remarked, that the annalists themselves had often personal knowledge of the facts they related. It is true, indeed, that historians contemporary with the events which they record, are not always best qualified to place them in an instructive light, since, though they may understand how they spring out of prior incidents, they cannot foresee their influence on future occurrences. Of some things, the importance is overrated, and of others undervalued, till time, which has the same effect on events as distance on external objects, obscures all that is minute, while it renders the outlines of what is vast more distinct and perceptible. But though the reach of a contemporary historian’s mind may not extend to the issue of the drama which passes before him, he is no doubt best aware of the detached incidents of each separate scene and act, and most fitted to detail those particulars which posterity may combine into a mass, exhibiting at one view the grandeur and interest of the whole. Now, it will have been remarked from the preceding pages, that all the Roman annalists, from the time of Fabius Pictor to Sylla, were Consuls and Prætors, commanders of armies, or heads of political parties, and consequently the principal sharers in the events which they recorded. In Greece, there was an earlier separation than at Rome, between an active and a speculative life. Many of the Greek historians had little part in those transactions, the remembrance of which they have transmitted. They wrote at a distance, as it were, from the scene of affairs, so that they contemplated the wars and dissensions of their countrymen with the unprejudiced eye of a foreigner, or of posterity. This naturally diffuses a calm philosophic spirit over the page of the historian, and gives abundant scope for conjecture concerning the motives and springs of action. The Roman annalists, on the other hand, wrote from perfect knowledge and remembrance; they were the persons who had plan[pg 81]ned and executed every project; they had fought the battles they described, or excited the war, the vicissitudes of which they recorded. Hence the facts which their pages disclosed, might have borne the genuine stamp of truth, and the analysis of the motives and causes of actions might have been absolute revelations. Yet, under these, the most favourable circumstances for historic composition, prejudices from which the Greek historians were exempt, would unconsciously creep in: Writers like Sylla or Æmilius Scaurus, had much to extenuate, and strong temptations to set down much in malice[184].

Nor is it always sufficient to have witnessed a great event in order to record it well, and with that fulness which converts it into a lesson in legislation, ethics, or politics. Now, the Roman annals had hitherto been chiefly a dry register of facts, what Lord Bolingbroke calls the Nuntia Vetustatis, or Gazette of Antiquity. A history properly so termed, and when considered as opposed to such productions, forms a complete series of transactions, accompanied by a deduction of their immediate and remote causes, and of the consequences by which they were attended,—all related, in their full extent, with such detail of circumstances as transports us back to the very time, makes us parties to the counsels, and actors, as it were, in the whole scene of affairs. It is then alone that history becomes the magistra vitæ; and in this sense

SALLUST

has been generally considered as the first among the Romans who merited the title of historian. This celebrated writer was born at Amiternum, in the territory of the Sabines, in the year 668. He received his education at Rome, and, in his early youth, appears to have been desirous to devote himself to literary pursuits. But it was not easy for one residing in the capital to escape the contagious desire of military or political distinction. At the age of twenty-seven, he obtained the situation of Quæstor, which entitled him to a seat in the Senate, and about six years afterwards he was elected Tribune of the people. While in this office, he attached himself to the fortunes of Cæsar, and along with one of his colleagues in the tribunate, conducted the prosecution against Milo for the murder of Clodius. In the year 704, he was excluded from the Senate, on pretext of immoral conduct, but more probably [pg 82]from the violence of the patrician party, to which he was opposed. Aulus Gellius, on the authority of Varro’s treatise, Pius aut de Pace, informs us that he incurred this disgrace in consequence of being surprised in an intrigue with Fausta, the wife of Milo, by the husband, who made him be scourged by his slaves[185]. It has been doubted, however, by modern critics, whether it was the historian Sallust who was thus detected and punished, or his nephew, Crispus Sallustius, to whom Horace has addressed the second ode of the second book. It seems, indeed, unlikely, that in such a corrupt age, an amour with a woman of Fausta’s abandoned character, should have been the real cause of his expulsion from the Senate. After undergoing this ignominy, which, for the present, baffled all his hopes of preferment, he quitted Rome, and joined his patron, Cæsar, in Gaul. He continued to follow the fortunes of that commander, and, in particular bore a share in the expedition to Africa, where the scattered remains of Pompey’s party had united. That region being finally subdued, Sallust was left by Cæsar as Prætor of Numidia; and about the same time he married Terentia, the divorced wife of Cicero. He remained only a year in his government, but during that period he enriched himself by despoiling the province. On his return to Rome, he was accused by the Numidians, whom he had plundered, but escaped with impunity, by means of the protection of Cæsar, and was quietly permitted to betake himself to a luxurious retirement with his ill-gotten wealth. He chose for his favourite retreat a villa at Tibur, which had belonged to Cæsar; and he also built a magnificent palace in the suburbs of Rome, surrounded by delightful pleasure-grounds, which were afterwards well known and celebrated by the name of the Gardens of Sallust. One front of this splendid mansion faced the street, where he constructed a spacious market-place, in which every article of luxury was sold in abundance. The other front looked to the gardens, which were contiguous to those of Lucullus, and occupied the valley between the extremities of the Quirinal and Pincian Hills[186]. They lay, in the time of Sallust, immediately beyond the walls of Rome, but were included within the new wall of Aurelian. In them every beauty of nature, and every embellishment of art, that could delight or gratify the senses, seem to have been assembled. Umbrageous walks, open parterres, and cool porticos, displayed their various attractions. Amidst shrubs and flowers of every hue and odour, interspersed with statues of the most exquisite workmanship, pure streams of [pg 83]water preserved the verdure of the earth and the temperature of the air; and while, on the one hand, the distant prospect caught the eye, on the other, the close retreat invited to repose or meditation[187]. These gardens included within their precincts the most magnificent baths, a temple to Venus, and a circus, which Sallust repaired and ornamented. Possessed of such attractions, the Sallustian palace and gardens became, after the death of their original proprietor, the residence of successive emperors. Augustus chose them as the scene of his most sumptuous entertainments. The taste of Vespasian preferred them to the palace of the Cæsars. Even the virtuous Nerva, and stern Aurelian, were so attracted by their beauty, that, while at Rome, they were their constant abode. “The palace,” says Eustace, “was consumed by fire on the fatal night when Alaric entered the city. The temple, of singular beauty, sacred to Venus, was discovered about the middle of the sixteenth century, in opening the grounds of a garden, and was destroyed for the sale of the materials: Of the circus little remains, but masses of walls that merely indicate its site; while statues and marbles, found occasionally, continue to furnish proofs of its former magnificence[188].” Many statues of exquisite workmanship have been found on the same spot; but these may have been placed there by the magnificence of the imperial occupiers, and not of the original proprietor.

In his urban gardens, or villa at Tibur, Sallust passed the close of his life, dividing his time between literary avocations and the society of his friends—among whom he numbered Lucullus, Messala, and Cornelius Nepos.

Such having been his friends and studies, it seems highly improbable that he indulged in that excessive libertinism which has been attributed to him, on the erroneous supposition that he was the Sallust mentioned by Horace, in the first book of his Satires[189]. The subject of Sallust’s character is one which has excited some investigation and interest, and on which very different opinions have been formed. That he was a man of loose morals is evident; and it cannot be denied that he rapaciously plundered his province, like other Roman governors of the day. But it seems doubtful if he was that monster of iniquity he has been sometimes represented. He was extremely unfortunate in the first permanent notice taken of his character by his contemporaries. The decided enemy of Pompey and his faction, he had said of that celebrated chief, in his general history, that he was a man “oris probi, animo [pg 84]inverecundo.” Lenæus, the freedman of Pompey, avenged his master, by the most virulent abuse of his enemy[190], in a work, which should rather be regarded as a frantic satire than an historical document. Of the injustice which he had done to the life of the historian we may, in some degree, judge, from what he said of him as an author. He called him, as we learn from Suetonius, “Nebulonem, vitâ scriptisque monstrosum: præterea, priscorum Catonisque ineruditissimum furem.” The life of Sallust, by Asconius Pedianus, which was written in the age of Augustus, and might have acted, in the present day, as a corrective, or palliative, of the unfavourable impression produced by this injurious libel, has unfortunately perished; and the next work on the subject now extant, is a professed rhetorical declamation against the character of Sallust, which was given to the world in the name of Cicero, but was not written till long after the death of that orator, and is now generally assigned by critics, to a rhetorician, in the reign of Claudius, called Porcius Latro. The calumnies invented or exaggerated by Lenæus, and propagated in the scholiastic theme of Porcius Latro, have been adopted by Le Clerc, professor of Hebrew at Amsterdam, and by Professor Meisner, of Prague[191], in their respective accounts of the Life of Sallust. His character has received more justice from the prefatory Memoir and Notes of De Brosses, his French translator, and from the researches of Wieland in Germany.

From what has been above said of Fabius Pictor, and his immediate successors, it must be apparent, that the art of historic composition at Rome was in the lowest state, and that Sallust had no model to imitate among the writers of his own country. He therefore naturally recurred to the productions of the Greek historians. The native exuberance, and loquacious familiarity of Herodotus, were not adapted to his taste; and simplicity, such as that of Xenophon, is, of all things, the most difficult to attain: He therefore chiefly emulated Thucydides, and attempted to transplant into his own language the vigour and conciseness of the Greek historian; but the strict imitation, with which he has followed him, has gone far to lessen the effect of his own original genius.

The first book of Sallust was the Conspiracy of Catiline. There exists, however, some doubt as to the precise period of its composition. The general opinion is, that it was written immediately after the author went out of office as Tribune of the People, that is, in the year 703: And the composition of the Jugurthine War, as well as of his general history, are fixed [pg 85]by Le Clerc between that period and his appointment to the Prætorship of Numidia. But others have supposed that they were all written during the space which intervened between his return from Numidia, in 708, and his death, which happened in 718, four years previous to the battle of Actium. It is maintained by the supporters of this last idea, that he was too much engaged in political tumults previous to his administration of Numidia, to have leisure for such important compositions—that, in the introduction to Catiline’s Conspiracy, he talks of himself as withdrawn from public affairs, and refutes accusations of his voluptuous life, which were only applicable to this period; and that, while instituting the comparison between Cæsar and Cato, he speaks of the existence and competition of these celebrated opponents as things that had passed over—“Sed mea memoria, ingenti virtute, diversis moribus, fuere viri duo, Marcus Cato et Caius Cæsar.” On this passage, too, Gibbon in particular argues, that such a flatterer and party tool as Sallust would not, during the life of Cæsar, have put Cato so much on a level with him in the comparison instituted between them. De Brosses agrees with Le Clerc in thinking that the Conspiracy of Catiline at least must have been written immediately after 703, as Sallust would not, subsequently to his marriage with Terentia, have commemorated the disgrace of her sister, for she, it seems, was the vestal virgin whose intrigue with Catiline is recorded by our historian. But whatever may be the fact as to Catiline’s Conspiracy, it is quite clear that the Jugurthine War was written subsequent to the author’s residence in Numidia, which evidently suggested to him this theme, and afforded him the means of collecting the information necessary for completing his work.

The subjects chosen by Sallust form two of the most important and prominent topics in the history of Rome. The periods, indeed, which he describes, were painful, but they were interesting. Full of conspiracies, usurpations, and civil wars, they chiefly exhibit the mutual rage and iniquity of embittered factions, furious struggles between the patricians and plebeians, open corruption in the senate, venality in the courts of justice, and rapine in the provinces. This state of things, so forcibly painted by Sallust, produced the Conspiracy, and even in some degree formed the character of Catiline: But it was the oppressive debts of individuals, the temper of Sylla’s soldiers, and the absence of Pompey with his army, which gave a possibility, and even prospect of success to a plot which affected the vital existence of the commonwealth, and which, although arrested in its commencement, was one of those violent shocks which hasten the fall of a state. The [pg 86]History of the Jugurthine War, if not so important or menacing to the vital interests and immediate safety of Rome, exhibits a more extensive field of action, and a greater theatre of war. No prince, except Mithridates, gave so much employment to the arms of the Romans. In the course of no war in which they had ever been engaged, not even the second Carthaginian, were the people more desponding, and in none were they more elated with ultimate success. Nothing can be more interesting than the account of the vicissitudes of this contest. The endless resources, and hair-breadth escapes of Jugurtha—his levity, his fickle faithless disposition, contrasted with the perseverance and prudence of the Roman commander, Metellus, are all described in a manner the most vivid and picturesque.