After the past : Sallust on history and writing history
Bibliographic Information
After the past : Sallust on history and writing history
Andrew Feldherr
（Blackwell Bristol lectures on Greece, Rome and the classical tradition）
John Wiley & Sons, c2021
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Note
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
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Provides a unique and accessible understanding of Sallust and his influence on writing the history of Rome
Gaius Sallustius Crispus ('Sallust', 86-35 BCE) is the earliest Roman historian from whom any works survive. His two extant writings chronicle crucial moments of a political, social, and ethical revolution with profound consequences for his own life and those of his audience. After the Past: Sallust on History and Writing History examines what it meant to write the history of contentious events-Catiline's famous rebellion in 63 BCE and the war waged against the North African king Jugurtha fifty years earlier-while their effects were still so vividly felt.
One of the first book-length treatments of Sallust in over fifty years, the text offers a comprehensive reading of Sallust's works using the tools of narratology and intertextual analysis to reveal the changing functions of historiography at the end of the Roman Republic. Author Andrew Feldherr's comprehensive approach examines the literary strategies used by Sallust and many of the most interesting and significant aspects of the historian's accomplishment while advancing the study of historiography as a literary form, reconsidering its relationship to rival genres such as rhetoric and tragedy. Pursuing a focused and distinctive scholarly argument, this book:
Provides a comprehensive approach to Sallust's extant works
Explores how Sallust helped his readers to reflect on their own relationship with their tumultuous past
Contributes to understanding Roman conceptualizations of space and of writing
Challenges the core assumption that literary historiography of the time period is essentially rhetorical nature
After the Past: Sallust on History and Writing History is an accessible and useful resource for students of Latin literature and Roman history from the advanced undergraduate through professional levels, and for all those with an interest in historiography as a literary genre in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the literary history of the late Republic and triumviral period.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Lives and Times 18
2 Words and Deeds 52
3 Pity and Envy: The Emotions in Sallustian Historiography 97
4 Tragic Jugurtha: Numidia, New Media, New Medeas 136
5 Lines in the Sand: The Representation of Space in the Jugurtha 168
6 Brevitatis Artifex: Sallust as Text 213
Epilogue 268
Abbreviations 284
Bibliography 285
Index of Passages 301
Index 309
by "Nielsen BookData"
