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Sallust on Catiline

The subtitle of this monograph indicates its hybrid character. First we have a detailed study of the narrative of Sallust's Bellum Catilinae from the arrest of the alleged conspirators in Chapter 46 to the end of Cato's speech in Chapter 52; then a treatment of the actual issues, legal and political, involved in the debate over the punishment of the conspirators. The justification of concentrating on just one source for these events—admittedly the fullest and most continuous narrative—is D.'s conviction that Sallust's narrative has usually been approached with preconceptions derived from the other literary evidence or from modern assumptions about what the issues really were. Its accuracy and historiographical function, he feels (p. 10), need to be assessed before the wider issues can be addressed. Inevitably many questions treated are well-worn, many of the judgements familiar. Sallust's weaknesses are traced to his determination to vindicate his general ideas about Roman moral decline, to his striving for literary effect, to his gullibility in the face of Cicero's version, and to his anachronistic assumptions. Thus Sallust's ideas about the inertia and corruption of the Senate in this period help to explain his misplacing of the allegations against Caesar in such a way that he appears as the victim of personal rancour, when in fact it was his role in the debate that caused suspicions of his complicity (pp. 19-21). The historian's desire to mark a new phase in his narrative with the strong support given to Cicero by the Senate is held to explain his exaggeration at 29.3 of the scope of the senatus consultum ultimum (pp. 80-1). Sallust swallows Cicero's claim in the Fourth Catilinarian 16-17 that his allegations had won overwhelming popular acceptance when, in fact, Nero's deferment proposal, the execution at night, and Cato's later corn bonanza point to popular opinion being anything but unanimous (pp. 18-19). As for anachronism, Sallust fails to reflect Caesar's actual concern in the debate with the danger of violating the Lex Porcia and Lex Sempronia, and makes him concentrate entirely on the question of the penalty, because the historian would have felt popular authorization a specious irrelevance for senatorial defendants (p. 41). Moreover, he depicts Cato as the man who later pilloried his contemporaries for their extravagance and greed, rather than reporting Cato's rebuttal of Caesar's arguments and the full vehemence of his jibes about Caesar's complicity (p. 74).