After the past : Sallust on history and writing history
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After the past : Sallust on history and writing history
（Blackwell Bristol lectures on Greece, Rome and the classical tradition）
John Wiley & Sons, c2021
- : pbk
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Includes bibliographical references (p.285-300) and index
Summary: "The most important modern treatment of the 'revolution' that ended the last Roman Republic concludes as follows: 'For power he [sc. Augustus] had sacrificed everything; he had achieved the height of all mortal ambition and in his ambition he had saved and regenerated the Roman People,' (Syme 1939, 524). Sallust, the Roman historian whose first experiment in the genre zeroes in on a representative moment in that crisis, stands clearly in the background. The protagonist of Sallust's work, Catiline, an aristocrat who unsuccessfully tried to seize power in 63 BCE, was equally driven on by ambition. Indeed, Sallust identifies such ambition as, with avarice, the cause of revolution, moral and political. But the idea that individual ambition could be a salvific force for the Roman People is unimaginable in his writing, and so the recollection of his contemporary perspective highlights the profound historical irony of the story that Syme has told. There is an obvious reason why Sallust would have been shock
Contents of Works
- 1. Lives and Times
- 2. Words and Deeds
- 3. Pity and Envy: The Emotions in Sallustian Historiography
- 4. Tragic Jugurtha: Numidia, New Media, New Medeas
- 5. Lines in the Sand: The Representation of Space in the Jugurtha
- 6. Brevitatis Artifex: Sallust as Text
