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Agbamu, Samuel
2024.
Restorations of Empire in Africa.
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IDEALIZATION AND IRONY IN SALLUST'S JUGURTHA: THE NARRATOR'S DEPICTION OF ROME BEFORE 146 B.C.*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2015
Extract
An examination of the idealized image of Rome before 146 b.c. constructed in the Jugurtha (Jug.) reveals that despite the narrator's own stated opinions, his depiction of it is perverse and unhistorical. The narrator's value judgements are unappealing, his archaizing affected, his history plainly wrong: these are serious interpretative problems. Is this an attempt, as in the dialogues of Cicero, to re-educate the moral intuitions of his day by means of a fictitious past? Perhaps; but narratological analysis of the relevant sections suggests another solution, an extrapolation to the narratorial persona of the technique of ironic subversion used in the speeches. The key to understanding the depiction of Rome before 146 lies in the identification of political and historical discourse and the consequent extension to the latter of the factionalization characteristic of the former. The problematic aspects of the depiction of Rome before 146 empower the reader to articulate a critique of faction; the text needs to be surmounted to be understood.
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Footnotes
*
I am very grateful to Dr Tim Rood and Dr Rhiannon Ash for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. They are of course not responsible for the views that are expressed or the faults that remain.
References
1 There is some ambiguity about which Q. Maximus and P. Scipio are meant; Grethlein, J., ‘Nam quid ea memorem: the dialectical relation of res gestae and memoria rerum gestarum in Sallust's Bellum Jugurthinum’, CQ 56 (2006), 135–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 137, rightly notes the significance of the ambiguity, although the generals of the Second Punic War seem the most likely referents. On imagines, see generally Flower, H., Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar, who briefly discusses this passage at 46.
2 Similarly, Grethlein, J. and Krebs, C. (edd.), Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography: The ‘Plupast’ from Herodotus to Appian (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1 coin the term ‘historian's plupast’ for ‘a past completed prior to the past that the narrator focuses on’.
3 See Earl, D., The Political Thought of Sallust (Cambridge, 1961), 11–12Google Scholar on bones artes; Lintott, A.W., ‘Imperial expansion and moral decline in the Roman Republic’, Historia 21 (1972), 626–38Google Scholar on metus hostilis.
4 Compare Cat. 10–12, where Sulla is the more important turning point.
5 See Scanlon, T.F., ‘Textual geography in Sallust's “The War with Jugurtha”’, Ramus 17 (1988), 138–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 149.
6 Echoed elsewhere: at Jug. 29, peace is achieved through dishonourable dealings.
7 Cf. Kraus, C.S., ‘Jugurthine disorder’, in Kraus, C.S. (ed.), The Limits of Historiography: Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts (Leiden, 1999), 217–47Google Scholar, at 235.
8 Similarly Volux (105.3) and the Gauls (114.2) excite metus hostilis. Neither has any beneficial effects. I distinguish conceptually metus hostilis from metus experienced in or before combat (at 58.2, 67.1, 92.9, 97.5, 106.6).
9 See O'Gorman, E., ‘The politics of Sallustian style’, in Marincola, J. (ed.), A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography (Oxford, 2007), 379–84Google Scholar; Syme, R., Sallust (Cambridge, 1964), 240–73Google Scholar; Levene, D.S., ‘Sallust's Catiline and Cato the Censor’, CQ 50 (2000), 170–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Florus 1.31.5; Appian, Pun. 69; Plut. Cat. Mai. 27; Diod. Sic. 34.33.3–6.
11 Earl (n. 3), 47–9; Syme (n. 9), 249.
12 Cato, frr. 163, 164 ORF; Earl (n. 3), 45; Syme (n. 9), 116, 267–8. Compare also the beginning of Cato's Origines (Cic. Planc. 66) with Jug. 4.4; and if La Penna, A., ‘Rapere, trahere: uno slogan di Catone contra i ladri di stato?’, in Boldrini, S. and Corte, F. Della (edd.), Filologia e forme letterarie: studi offerti a Francesco della Corte, vol. 2 (Urbino, 1987), 103–10Google Scholar, is correct, Jug. 41.5 has a Catonian slogan (‘rapere trahere’); cf. Levene (n. 9), 179.
13 Suet. Aug. 86.3; Fronto, Ep. 4.3.2.
14 So Levene (n. 9), 177–80.
15 Earl (n. 3), 40; cf. Syme (n. 9), 248.
16 Cf. Earl (n. 3), 41–47; Syme (n. 9), 248–54; Feeney, D., Caesar's Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginning of History (Berkeley, 2007)Google Scholar, 118. References to the Historiae follow Maurenbrecher's numbering.
17 Cf. now Champion, C., ‘Historiographic patterns and historical obstacles in Polybius' Histories: Marcellus, Flaminius and the Mamertine crisis’, in Gibson, B. and Harrison, T. (edd.), Polybius and his World: Essays in Memory of F. W. Walbank (Oxford, 2013), 143–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Champion asks some of the same questions of Polybius, noting also in that author a ‘dissonant narrative tension ... when Roman immoral behaviors occur in the period in which Rome was ostensibly at its height of political and moral excellence’ (p. 145). Compare especially Champion's three explanations for this tension: ‘influences from political pressures applied by the senatorial aristocracy’, Polybius' inability ‘to reconcile his commitment to painstaking accuracy and impartiality with his historiographic patterning’, and – closest to this paper's argument about Sallust – ‘a subtle attempt to give voice to anti-Roman sentiments among Polybius' Greek readership, offering subtexts that create a tension with and resist the straightforward idea of Roman excellence’ (p. 147). One wonders if there is any connection to be made between this tension in Polybius and Sallust; or if, perhaps, any historical idealization will inevitably conflict with fact.
18 This claim alludes to the beginning of Cato's Origines (clarorum virorum atque magnorum non minus oti quam negoti rationem exstare oportere). See generally n. 12 on how the narrator's voice has Cato as a model.
19 A view of the importance of history that would be echoed elsewhere: cf. (e.g.) Cicero's description of history in De oratore as the vita memoriae (2.36). In the Catiline (4.1–2), however, history is described only as a bonum otium. It is useful to consider how the different narratorial personae serve the Catiline and the Jugurtha.
20 Cf. Cat. 33.2, 51.4–6, 52.19–21, 52.30–2; Jug. 31.6, 85.12, 85.36–7, 85.21–5, wherein speakers cite the maiores for particular, often conflicting, rhetorical purposes. On moral re-education, cf. Comber, M. and Balmaceda, C., Sallust: The War against Jugurtha (Oxford, 2009), 188–9Google Scholar.
21 Cf. Zetzel, J.E.G., Cicero, De Re Publica: Selections (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar, ad loc.; Fox, M., ‘Dialogue and irony in Cicero: reading De republica’, in Sharrock, A. and Morales, H. (edd.), Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations (Oxford, 2000), 263–86Google Scholar; Feldherr, A., ‘Cicero and the invention of “literary” history’, in Eigler, U., Gotter, U., Luraghi, N. and Walter, U. (edd.), Formen römischer Geschichtschreibung von den Anfänger bis Livius: Gattungen, Autoren, Kontexte (Darmstadt, 2003), 196–212Google Scholar. Cicero wrote to his brother that a certain Sallustius to whom he read an excerpt remarked that quae tam antiquis hominibus attribuerem, ea visum iri ficta esse (QFr. 3.5.1). Cicero used this device anyway.
22 Cf. Zetzel, J.E.G., ‘Looking backward: past and present in the late Roman Republic’, Jackson Knight Lecture, Pegasus 37 (1994), 20–32Google Scholar, at 32.
23 On this technique generally, see Skinner, Q., ‘Some problems in the analysis of political thought and action’, Political Theory 2.3 (1974), 277–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Skinner focusses on the use and manipulation of these evaluative-descriptive terms (terms that simultaneously evaluate and describe, as, for example, the English ‘frugal’): ‘It is essentially by manipulating this set of terms that any society succeeds in establishing and altering its moral identity. It is by describing and thereby commending certain courses of action as (say) courageous or honest, while describing and condemning others as treacherous or disloyal, that we sustain our picture of the actions and states of affairs which we wish either to disavow or to legitimate. This being so, the task of the innovating ideologist is a hard but an obvious one. His concern, by definition, is to legitimate a new range of social actions which, in terms of the existing ways of applying the moral vocabulary prevailing in his society, are currently regarded as in some way untoward or illegitimate. His aim must therefore be to show that a number of existing and favorable evaluative-descriptive terms can somehow be applied to his apparently untoward actions. If he can somehow perform this trick, he can thereby hope to argue that the condemnatory descriptions which are otherwise liable to be applied to his actions can in consequence be discounted’ (p. 294).
24 Cf. Thuc. 3.82.4, imitated twice by Sallust: Cat. 52.11, Hist. 3.48.13; this strategy is expressed explicitly in Cat. 38.3–4.
25 See Konstan, D., Catullus' Indictment of Rome: The Meaning of Catullus 64 (Amsterdam, 1977)Google Scholar, 108.
26 See Goldhill, S., ‘Framing and polyphony: readings in Hellenistic poetry’, PCPhS 32 (1986), 25–52Google Scholar.
27 Compare Virgil's education in Hellenistic poetry; see Clausen, W., Virgil's Aeneid and the Tradition of Hellenistic Poetry (Berkeley, 1987), 4–10Google Scholar. Syme (n. 9), 232 sees in Sallust's geographical digressions ‘a recollection of the poets’, remarking that during the Triumvirate, ‘for others of the educated class who refused to fall back on farming and hunting or vegetate in an apathy dull or querulous, various avocations offered: literature, scholarship, or the higher thought’.
28 Perrochat, P., Les modèles grecs de Salluste (Paris, 1949), 53–60Google Scholar.
29 Cicero, Acad. 1.46; Fox (n. 21), 267–8; Annas, J., ‘Plato the Sceptic’, in Klagge, J.C. and Smith, N.D. (edd.), Methods of Interpreting Plato and his Dialogues (Oxford, 1992), 43–72Google Scholar.
30 See Kraus (n. 7), 244.
31 But cf. Marincola, J., ‘Odysseus and the historians’, Syllecta Classica 18 (2007), 1–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 56–66, on Herodotus.
32 Compare also the technique of ‘persona-directed humour’ identified in satire by Plaza, M., The Function of Humour in Roman Verse Satire: Laughing and Lying (Oxford, 2006), 167–256CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 See Zetzel, J.E.G., ‘Catullus, Ennius, and the poetics of allusion’, ICS 8 (1983), 251–86Google Scholar; Dué, C., ‘Tragic history and barbarian speech in Sallust's Jugurtha’, HSCPh 100 (2000), 311–25Google Scholar, on the resemblance of the laments of Ariadne and Adherbal (see Jug. 17.15–18).
34 Compare the wrong-footing of Catull. 64.116–17 (see Jenkyns, R., Three Classical Poets: Sappho, Catullus and Juvenal [London, 1982]Google Scholar, 123) with Jug. 4.9 (see Kraus [n. 7], 214); or the deflationary effect of Catull. 64.265–6 at the end of the ecphrasis (see Gaisser, J.H., ‘Threads in the labyrinth: competing views in Catullus 64’, AJPh 116 [1995], 579–616Google Scholar, at 607) with Jug. 114.
35 Fowler, D., ‘First thoughts on closure’, MD 22 (1989), 75–122Google Scholar; Townend, G.B., ‘The unstated climax of Catullus 64’, G&R 30 (1983), 21–30Google Scholar; Levene, D.S., ‘Sallust's Jugurtha: an “historical fragment”’, JRS 82 (1992), 53–70Google Scholar. Catullus omits the interruption of Discordia at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, its most important scene in the epic cycle; Sallust has omitted Jugurtha's death.
36 Konstan (n. 25), 31; Feeney (n. 16), 123–7; but cf. Jenkyns (n. 34), 97.
37 See Janan, M.W., ‘When the Lamp is Shattered’: Desire and Narrative in Catullus (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL, 1994)Google Scholar, 108, on the translation of nimis optato.
38 On this ironic, pessimistic interpretation, see Curran, L., ‘Catullus 64 and the heroic age’, YClS 21 (1969) 171–92Google Scholar; Bramble, J., ‘Structure and ambiguity in Catullus LXIV’, PCPhS 16 (1970), 22–41Google Scholar; and Konstan (n. 25).
39 Curran (n. 38), 181.
40 Cf. Gaisser (n. 34), 581: Catullus 64 needs a ‘neoteric reader’ to discern its subtleties.
41 Levene (n. 35), 64.
42 Wiedemann, T., ‘Sallust's Jugurtha: concord, discord and the digressions’, G&R 40 (1983), 48–57Google Scholar.
43 Cf. Jug. 72.1, 89.1.
44 Kraus (n. 7), 238.
45 Compare Wiedemann (n. 42), 55. Micipsa's speech resembles Cyrus' death-bed speech in Xenophon's Cyropaedia (8.7.6–28, esp. 15: τίνι γὰρ ἄλλῳ ἀδελφὸς μέγας ὢν οὕτω καλὸν ὡς ἀδελφῷ;); there the sentiments about fraternal concord are undercut when the reader recalls the subsequent fraternal strife in the Persian royal house (cf. Hdt. 3.30). Is there a generic point being made?
46 See Kraus, C.S. and Woodman, A.J., Latin Historians (Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics 27: Oxford, 1997), 25Google Scholar.
47 Perhaps the brief and negative reference to L. Opimius (16.2), who built the temple of Concordia to support his claim to be advancing concordia, is an oblique comment on its rhetorical manipulation. Compare also the treatment of the word factio in Sallust, described in Seager, R., ‘Factio: some observations’, JRS 62 (1972), 53–8Google Scholar.
48 Syme (n. 9), 198–9.
49 Perrochat (n. 28), 54; see also Grethlein (n. 1), 140–3, on the similarities between Marius' speech and the proem.
50 Cf. also Cat. 10.5, 38.3, 52.11.
51 Cf. A. Feldherr, ‘Magna mihi copia est memoranda: modes of historiography in the speeches of Caesar and Cato (Sallust, Bellum Catilinae 51–4)’, in Grethlein and Krebs (n. 2), 95–112, on the speeches of Cicero and Cato in the Catiline; and Grethlein and Krebs (n. 2), 9–11, on the ‘metapoetic significance of speeches’ in historiography generally.
52 Levene (n. 35), 64.
53 Syme (n. 9), 219. See ibid., 214–39, for the full historical context.
54 Syme (n. 9), 213, 216, 217.
55 Cf. Syme (n. 9), 226: ‘The historian's own survival, surmounting the hazards of war and revolution, enhanced his sense of isolation. His generation had been almost wiped out.’
56 As discussed above, in the text accompanying n. 30, and the work cited therein, the narratorial personae of the Jugurtha and the Catiline differ in important ways.
57 Syme (n. 9), 235.
58 I thank the referee for CQ for suggesting these points.
59 Syme (n. 9), 2.
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