Sources et modèles des historiens anciens - Sallust, between past and present (original) (raw)
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Abstract
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The paper delves into the historical study of Sallust, emphasizing his incomplete works and their impact on modern historiography. It explores the interplay between past and present in historical narrative construction, particularly how Sallust's political positions and methodologies reflect the fragmented nature of his sources. By analyzing Sallust's approach to history, the authors aim to unravel the complex relationship between ancient historians and their contemporary interpretations.
Related papers
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.
THE " RETURN OF THE SUBJECT " AS A HISTORICO-INTELLECTUAL PROBLEM 1 ELÍAS PALTI
Recently, a call for the " return of the subject " has gained increasing influence. The power of this call is intimately linked to the assumption that there is a necessary connection between " the subject " and politics (and ultimately, history). Without a subject, it is alleged, there can be no agency, and therefore no emancipatory projects—and, thus, no history. This paper discusses the precise epistemological foundations for this claim. It shows that the idea of a necessary link between " the subject " and agency, and therefore between the subject and politics (and history) is only one among many different ones that appeared in the course of the four centuries that modernity spans. It has precise historico-intellectual premises, ones that cannot be traced back in time before the end of the nineteenth century. Failing to observe the historicity of the notion of the subject, and projecting it as a kind of universal category, results, as we shall see, in serious incongruence and anachronisms. The essay outlines a definite view of intellectual history aimed at recovering the radically contingent nature of conceptual formations, which, it alleges, is the still-valid core of Foucault's archeological project. Regardless of the inconsistencies in his own archeological endeavors, his archeological approach intended to establish in intellectual history a principle of temporal irreversibility immanent in it. Following his lead, the essay attempts to discern the different meanings the category of the subject has historically acquired, referring them back to the broader epistemic reconfigurations that have occurred in Western thought. This reveals a richness of meanings in this category that are obliterated under the general label of the " modern subject " ; at the same time, it illuminates some of the methodological problems that mar current debates on the topic.
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References (12)
- Thomas Strunk, Deconstructing the Monuments: Tacitus on the Mausoleum and Res gestae of Augustus 219
- Kelly E. Shannon, Livy and Tacitus on Floods: Intertextuality, Prodigies, and Cultural Memory 233
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- Luis Ballesteros Pastor, Salustio, Casio Dión y la tercera guerra mitridática 281
- Moisés Antiqueira, Festus the Epitomator? The 'Historical Monograph' of Festus 295
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- Gilvan Ventura da Silva, Memoria, storia e agiografijia nella Tarda Antichità: alcuni commenti sull'Epitaphios Logos di Giovanni Crisostomo 335
- Luise Marion Frenkel, Mustering Sources and Vindication: Theodoret of Cyrrhus' Sources and the Models of Greek Ecclesiastical Historiography 349
- Christopher T. Mallan, The Historian John Zonaras: Some Observations on his Sources and Methods 359
- Guillaume Flamerie de Lachapelle Florus comme modèle et source de trois abrégés du xvii e s. : Florus Francicus, Florus Gallicus et Florus sanctus 373 Bibliographie générale 391 Index des passages cités 429 Index des noms
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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.
2010
In un'orazione contenuta nel corpus dei Panegyrici Latini il retore Eumenio, dopo aver celebrato la restaurazione della potenza romana dovuta alla tetrarchia, insiste sulla necessità di stimolare la rinascita dell’eloquenza e cita un passo (l’inizio del frammento I.11 Maurenbrecher) delle Historiae di Sallustio, fornendone così una importante testimonianza finora ignorata. Eumenio sembra non accorgersi della amara riflessione di Sallustio sul contrasto tra la crescita della potenza materiale e la degenerazione morale di Roma dopo la terza guerra punica. Quello che interessa all'oratore è infatti la rinascita delle scuole di retorica e quindi Eumenio non ripropone la complessità ideologica del frammento, bensì lo usa strumentalmente per sottolineare che uno degli aspetti della grandezza romana nel passato era l’eloquenza e auspicarne quindi il rifiorire. Draft of the article published in "Revue de l'Histoire des Textes", n. s. 5 (2010), pp. 281-290.
Osservazioni sulla struttura dei libri II e III delle Historiae di Sallustio
Euphrosyne, 48, 27-43, 2020
In the reconstruction of the quaternio containing the two bifolia of the Orleans codex, the allotment of fr. 3.3 M to the third book of Sallust’s Historiae has always been followed, but actually the Arusianus’ manuscript tradition assigns the fragment to the second book. The consequence is remarkable: if we accept the manuscript support for Arusianus’ book-number, we miss the only clue that assures us that between Fol. VI and Fol. VIII of the Orleans codex the second book of Sallust’s Historiae came to an end and the third began, as has always been thought. As we try to demonstrate in this essay, an indirect confirmation to this possibility is provided by some weak points in Maurenbrecher’s reconstruction of the second and third book of the Historiae.
On Teaching Sallust in Latin: The Why and the How
New England Classics Journal, 2022
There exist many pedagogical methods we can use to examine, expound and explain ancient authors to our students. In this paper I propose an alternative approach to teach Sallust in an undergraduate setting, with explanatory aids, exercises, tests and quizzes. The latter result not from quick consideration, but from daily use and application in my own classes. In addition, I give reasons why it is helpful to teach Latin in Latin and what advantages it has for students who have learned well the grammar and have moved on to reading and analysis of the ancient texts. Students who had had no prior exposure to this approach completed an evaluation at the end of the academic year; the results are provided as a conclusion to the article.