Sources et modèles des historiens anciens - Sallust, between past and present (original) (raw)

The "Devotio" of Sallust's Cotta, American Journal of Philology 2011

American Journal of Philology, 2011

This paper considers the speech assigned by Sallust in his Historiae to C. Aurelius Cotta, cos. 75 B.C.E., and argues that our reading of the speech must proceed from a consideration of the devotio which is its logical and emotional climax. Sallust constructs this devotio as an incomplete and therefore inherently problematic act. Cotta’s inconsistent and self-contradictory rhetoric draws the reader’s attention to the problematic status of this non-act. Moreover, Sallust has seized an opportunity to comment upon Cicero’s de natura deorum, in which the very same Cotta appears as interlocutor. In literary dialogue with Cicero, we find a Sallustian perspective on the role of civic religion, sincerity, and patriotism in the late republic.

Matrices of Time in Sallust’s Historiography

It is generally agreed upon today that there is no de nite narrative of the past, especially of the era before the development of the historical science, given the subjectivity of the narrative construction process. According to Reinhart Koselleck, a leading theorist of history and historiography in the second half of the twentieth century, historical process is distinguished by a special kind of temporality di erent from that found in nature and experienced by the various historical subjects. This temporality is not linear but «multileveled and subject to di erent rates of acceleration and deceleration, and functions not only as a matrix within which historical events happen but also as a causal force in the determination of social reality in its own right». 1 The historiographical process observes a similar course of multileveled development but from a speci c, conditioned perspective, which determines, by means of varied repetition, the speed of progression of time and the nature of causality involved in bringing about this progression.

Sallust's Historiae and the Voice of Sallust's Lepidus, Arethusa 2013

Arethusa, 2013

This paper considers how the speech assigned to M. Aemilius Lepidus (cos. 78 BC) in Sallust’s fragmentary Historiae exploits the ancient reader’s instinctive sensitivity to rhetorical form and technique. The use of the rhetorical narratio, confutatio, and conventional rhetorical locus of safety shows Sallust constructing a powerful voice for his speaker which is neither simply endorsed nor simply undermined. Moreover, the power of individual voices within Sallust’s Historiae suggests that the text, even when complete, was fractured: this quality of the Historiae can make us more confident of our ability to study the text in its present fragmentary state.

The Thematic Web of Sallust's Political Thought in the Bellum Catilinae

What is the modern verdict on Sallust's mission to invent political history as an indigenous form for the Romans? There is broad agreement upon the merits of Sallust's literary style, and its aptness to his subject matter in the Bellum Catilinae. 1 As for interpretation however, there is little consensus about whether Sallust even has a grasp of his task. Syme is confident that he does: 'The writer is wilful and impatient, not chaotic. He knows what he is trying to do, he dominates the subject' (Syme, 1964, p. 67) Feeney is less certain, asserting that 'very few people read the opening of the Catiline with the assumption that Sallust is fully in control of his material' (Feeney, 1994, p. 139). Others are far less kind: for example, Goodyear on the character study of Sempronia: 'In a work clumsily planned as a whole Sempronia is the worst blemish'. McGushin concurs that the episode is 'a grave structural fault, indeed far the worst fault in a generally rather clumsy work.' 2 Few aspects of Sallust's methodology, analysis and judgement have escaped negative scrutiny and challenge. Latte for example unfavourably contrasts Sallust with his model Thucydides: the latter '…seeks to unearth the power dynamics lurking behind processes and determining all political life' but 'Sallust's thinking is oriented towards moralizing observations which are basically unsuited to politics.' 3 (Latte, 2020, p. 70) The tension between this inadequacy of ideas to explain events erupts in his style and propels the text out of control into nihilism (perhaps appropriate to the 40s BCE): '…history disintegrates into a series of individual struggles and becomes accidental and meaningless.' (ibid. p. 71) Another line of attack centres on Sallust's adoption and use of the monograph form. For Latte this form 'requires an accentuation of the principal characters' (Latte, 2020, p. 60). Schwartz goes further: In the introduction to the syncrisis of Cato and Caesar he enlightens his readers, in dry, unmistakable words, that history is made by only a handful of significant characters. (Schwartz, 2020, p. 131) This emphasis runs counter to the tradition in Cato-like Thucydides, another of Sallust's putative exemplars-and Polybius that Rome's strength derives from collective organic development and the subordination of the individual to the collective. It also raises a question of interpretation about Cicero's apparent side-lining in the text: ..if Sallust had his narrative unfold through individual personalities, then where is that personality who claimed centre stage for himself throughout his lifetime and, more 1 His style like his narrative faces forwards and backwards, employing archaic or elevated words from high poetry, inventing new words and syntactic formulations to forge a 'crabbed, difficult, elliptical style' (Kraus and Woodman, 1997, p. 12) reflecting troubled times. His frequent use of antithesis primes the tension between style and content by forcing the reader to confront stark binary judgements 2 Goodyear and McGushin quotes from (Boyd, 1987, p. 184) 3 Schwartz notes elaborate characterization as a further departure from Thucydides (Schwartz, 2020, p. 125

SALLUST AND INTELLECTUAL INNOVATION

Histos, 2023

hese are happy days for our cranky Roman historian (or are they?), as he has received rather more than his fair share of attention of late. Limiting myself to most recent monographs dedicated to Sallust specifically and as known to me, there are: Jennifer Gerrish's Sallust's Histories and Triumviral Historiography: Confronting the End of History, with its concept of 'analogical historiography', whereby Sallust addresses contemporary issues of the triumvirate under cover of his post-Sullan history; Rodolfo Funari's Lectissimus pensator verborum: tre studi su Sallustio, with its discussions of Cicero's linguistic influence on Sallust, the latter's proclamations of doubt as expressions of his commitment to veracity, and his changing estimation of superbia (rounded off by Gerard Duursma's comprehensive collection of testimonia, which replaces the one by Alfons Kurfess); and Andrew Feldherr's After the Past: Sallust on History and Writing History, which offers historiographical and, more especially, intertextual and narratological interpretations of the monographs, where Sallust is primarily cast as 'a hermeneut who wants his readers to participate in his hermeneutics' (as I characterised the approach in a recent review). The last time Sallust received this much monographic attention was in the early 1960s. The latest contribution is Edwin Shaw's Sallust and the Fall of the Republic, whose rather bland title fails to do it justice: It is a thorough and in parts stimulating reappraisal of Sallust as a fully-fledged-and-versed man of letters with political experience and interests ('politically astute but no longer personally invested', Shaw calls him happily), who engages with the 'wider intellectual milieu' in executing his political analyses. In particular, Shaw argues that the misnamed 'digressions' carry much of that intellectual weight, that they are, in fact, 'central contributions to the argumentation of [each respective] monograph … [and] play major roles within the articulation of the ideas which give the monographs meaning', and he offers a number ...

The Complexities of the Narrator Persona in Historiography – the Case of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae

2015

This paper explores the complex persona of the narrator in historiographic texts. It would seem that in historiography, the narrator should be a rather straightforward notion, since it is generally assumed that historiographic texts ideally represent something that actually happened in the past. A historiographic narrator should be, according to the prevailing doctrines, a reliable and coherent intratextual function that must always stay outside the reported story, which bestows on him/her a cloak of omniscience. Yet in some of the most important historical works, the narrator proves to be less than a stable and reliable instance.