1. While Sallust’s remarks have often been characterised as commonplaces, Syme justly resists simple genealogical research here: ‘A large number of the “borrowings” and “influences” are insignificant, their accumulation tedious’ (Syme, R., Sallust [Berkeley 1964Google Scholar], 241n.7). Earl, D., The Political Thought of Sallust (Cambridge 1961)Google Scholar, 7, likewise rescues Sallust from his antecedents: ‘It is worth while to examine the prologues and to try to discover what Sallust meant from what he wrote and not from one’s opinion of his sources and their value.’ Tiffou treats exhaustively of Sallust’s prefaces, and he notes that they cannot be removed without a loss to the whole of the work (Tiffou, E., Essai sur la pensée morale de Salluste à la lumière de ses prologues [Paris 1973], 34Google Scholar). See also Büchner, K., Sallust (Heidelberg 1982), 104fGoogle Scholar. It is precisely in the coordination or lack thereof between these morsels of philosophy that a tension emerges that produces a strain felt throughout the whole work. Vretska’s commentary offers extensive documentation of the antecedents of Sallust’s thought. See Vretska, K., Sallust: De Catilinae Coniuratione (Heidelberg 1976)Google Scholar, ad locc, and compare McGushin, P., Bellum Catilinae: A Commentary (Leiden 1977), 293–95Google Scholar. Note also Leeman, A., ‘Sallusts Prologue und seine Auffassung von der Historiographie’, Memnosyne n.s. 7 (1954), 323–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and 8 (1955), 38–48, for the importance of reading the preface for itself and in its relation to the whole of the work.

2. Here we will have to entertain the conceptual apparatus of the Hegelian dialectic even if Sallust’s version routinely fails in its efforts at sublation. Hegel himself sees already in antiquity a variety of powerful early versions of dialectic in the Sophists, the Socratics, and so forth. In fact, Sallust’s thought is perhaps closest to Hegel’s portrait of Anaxagoras: the emphasis is on mind, but there is a difficulty in making its relationship to its object truly dialectical. See G. Hegel, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, tr. Haldane, E.S. and Simson, F.H., 2 vols. (New York1974), i.319–49Google Scholar.

3. Hegel, Compare G., The Philosophy of History, tr. Sibree, J. (New York 1956), 60Google Scholar, on the necessary relationship between the subjective and the objective, the historia rerum gestarum and the res gestae themselves. See as well the comments of White, H., The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore 1987), 11–14Google Scholar, where White specifically glosses this passage in terms of a conflict between desire and the law.

4. One could compare Kraus, C., ‘Jugurthine Disorder’, in Kraus, (ed.), The Limits of Historiography: Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts (Leiden 1999), 217–47Google Scholar, on the untidiness of the Jugurtha, and the origins and consequences of this untidiness. It should be noted, though, that Kraus herself accepts the claim that the Catiline has a ‘neat dramatic arc’ (218). (Here she is following Scanlon, T., Spes Frustrata: A Reading of Sallust [Heidelberg 1987], 63Google Scholar).

5. Foucault, Compare M., ‘What is an Author?’, tr. Bouchard, D. & Simon, S., in Bouchard, D. (ed.). Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (Ithaca 1977), 113–38Google Scholar. The basis for this kind of close literary/philosophical rereading of Sallust has been laid principally, I believe, by the work of Batstone and the related efforts of Sklenàr. My essay, though, is more earnestly engaged with the whole post-structuralist discourse of the ‘death of the author.’ Though not formally a post-structuralist account, see Kraus (n.4 above), 220 and 244–45, for the suggestion that Jugurtha threatens Sallust’s own project in that text. Dillery’s review of this essay makes the mistake of conflating that which exceeds authorial intention as the zone of meaninglessness. See J. Dillery, ‘Review of The Limits of Historiography: Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts’, BMCR 01.02.07: ‘If we treat the slippages and discontinuities of Sallust’s narrative as signs of his inability to write coherently about his topic, then all of the meaning of his text would seem to be thrown into doubt.’

6. I will translate both animus and ingenium with terms that stress these as rational and intellectual words. Tiffou (n.l above), 143, though, offers a more precise definition of their relationship in Sallust: ‘[L’animus] représente l’esprit et toutes les qualités qui lui sont attachés, intelligence, intuition, compréhension, raison, etc. L’ingenium comprend aussi l’ensemble de ces qualités, mais en tant qu’elles se trouvent chez tel ou tel individu et qu’elles obéssent à un équilibre entre elles qui varie avec chaque cas particulier. II est, aux yeux de Salluste, susceptible d’ être amélioré ou dépravé.’ Hence, in concentrating on the more plastic ingenium over animus, Sallust allows for a history of the vicissitudes of intelligence, reason and the spirit.

7. Batstone, W., ‘The Antithesis of Virtue: Sallust’s Synkrisis and the Crisis of the Late Republic’, CA 7 (1988), 1–29Google Scholar, shows how ‘virtue’ or uirtus is a category that is destabilised in Sallust’s comparison of Cato and Caesar later on in the text. Sklenár, R., ‘La république des signes: Caesar, Cato, and the Language of Sallustian Morality’, TAPA 128 (1998), 205–20Google Scholar, follows up on a number of key strands from Batstone’s various essays on Sallust.

8. Batstone, W., ‘Intellectual Conflict and Mimesis in Sallust’s Belium Catilinae’, in Allison, J. (ed.), Conflict, Antithesis, and the Ancient Historian (Columbus 1990), 112–32Google Scholar, at 120, also sees the prologue as failed and hence also as a suitable introduction to the narrative. Batstone, though, thinks the failure pointed and intentional while I am representing it otherwise. Despite the significant overlap in our concerns, it could fairly be said that I am drawing the precisely opposite conclusions from those reached by Batstone. Nevertheless, I take his work as being the clearest exposition to date of the stakes involved in reading Sallust. The promise of Batstone’s method is further revealed in Sklenar (n.7 above).

9. See Sklenár (n.7 above), 215f., for a discussion of the phrase and a review of the pertinent bibliography.

10. Compare M. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Bouchard (n.5 above), 139–64, at 143–45. And notice as well the requirements laid out by Hegel (n.2 above) that a history of philosophy be a manifestation of the evolution of philosophy itself. That is, the account of the past history of mind is fundamentally bound up with the question of the status of mind as it produces that very account. This is a proposition fundamental to a reading of Sallust as well. And just as The History of Philosophy is necessarily a genealogy of Hegelianism specifically, so too is Sallust’s philosophy of mind itself necessarily bound to Sallust’s specific role as producer of a history of mind. The Sallustian version, though, for me has a much less happy ending.

11. See Sklenár (n.7 above), 206, for the invocation of ‘autologomachy’ or a text against itself. My approach is thus in sympathy with Sklenár’s reading of the stakes of the Cato and Caesar speeches.

12. Leeman, A., ‘Formen sallustianischer Geschictsschreibung’, Gymnasium 74(2) (1967), 108–15Google Scholar, usefully analyses the relationship between Sallust’s monographs and Roman tragedy. The pitfalls of over-working the ‘tragic’ reading of Sallust can be found in Biichner’s summary of the history of efforts wherein Sallust’s work was forced into five acts. See Büchner (n.l above), 246f.

13. Syme (n.l above, 67) usefully summarises the problem of the narrative flow as follows: ‘The structure is complicated. The author has refused to write a biography or reproduce a portion of Roman annals, from 66 to 63. Disdaining the easy way, he wrecks the narrative order and he brings digressions.’ Sallust chooses to wreck his narrative: Syme offers an interesting non-solution to the problems I am investigating. Tiffou (n.l above), 355–77, offers his own and others’ summaries of the structure of the narrative. Compare Vretska, K., ‘Der Aufbau des Bellum Catilinae’, Hermes 72 (1937), 202–22Google Scholar, which summarises the state of the question a generation earlier. Büchner (n.l above, 132–43) specifically addresses the question of Sallust’s use of the excursus in the Bellum Catilinae. Wiedemann, T., ‘Sallust “Jugurtha”—Concord, Discord, and the Digressions’, G&R 40 (1993), 48–57Google Scholar, stresses the literary and historical usefulness of digressions in Sallust’s Bellum lugurthinum.

14. For example, sed (‘but’) frequently opens a paragraph. Sometimes it introduces a digression that will be closed by an igitur. Yet sed also introduces a paragraph contrasted with one that precedes it: here the ‘but’ is adversative. Then again, sometimes sed is used loosely and may merely introduce a new idea.

15. Leeman (n.l2 above, 111) highlights the abstract and impersonal quality of Sallust’s opening. Apart from a few concrete events, ‘der Reste ist reine Sittengeschichte, Geschichte der politisch-moralischen Kräfte, dieser in ihrer Dynamik konkret gemachten Abstrakta, die für das römische und speziell das sallustianische Menschenbild so charakteristisch sind.’

16. Köstermann, E., ‘Das Problem der römischen Dekadenz bei Sallust und Tacitus’, ANRW 1.3 (1973), 781–810Google Scholar, at 789f.

17. Foucault (n.10 above), 143.

18. The difficulties surrounding the translation of this last clause will be discussed below.

19. Hock, R., ‘Servile Behavior in Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae’, CW 82 (1988), 13–24Google Scholar, discusses the politics of servility in Sallust. On the mind as master, see esp. 17–19.

20. For Hegel, though, the specific problem within the ancient philosophy of mind is the inability of antiquity to think of spirit as developing out of itself. Hegel accordingly criticises the entire tradition of mind/matter dualities. See Hegel (n.2 above), ii.38. And yet it is precisely the materiality of matter and the materiality of history that most troubles Sallust’s portrait of the history of mind.

21. See Tiffou (n.l above), 108–17, and Earl (n.l above), 7–9.

22. And one must everywhere keep in mind that uirtus will not in the end prove to be a stable concept within Sallust, as Batstone (n.7 above) has so deftly argued and as I shall shortly question again. One can compare a traditional reading like Pöschl, V., Grundwerte römischer Staatsgesinnung in den Geschictswerken des Sallust (Berlin 1967)Google Scholar, where uirtus is not seen as a problem for the text.

23. Earl (n.l above, 11) also unites mind and uirtus: ‘Virtus, then, for Sallust is the function of ingenium according to certain rules.’ We can add to this the proposition that a crisis in ingenium necessarily results in a crisis of uirtus.

24. Vretska (n.l above, 29) notes that the trajectory of Sallust’s text leads to the author’s virtue and labour from the very opening words. Questioning uirtus thus tends to put into crisis the whole of the work.

25. Ernout (n.l above), 55. Vretska (n.l above, 46) labours similarly.

26. McGushin (n.l above), 34. On the other hand, Batstone (n.8 above, 121) squarely confronts the ambiguities provoked by Sallust’s Latin.

27. Again compare Kraus (n.4 above), 245, for Jugurtha as a sort of ‘infection’ within Sallustian thought that spreads out to the historiographic level.

28. This is to force memoria back into the monograph. This time we read it as retrospective (memory as history) rather than as prospective (memory as future glory).

29. See Tiffou (n.l above), 48.

30. Glücklich, H.-J., ‘Gute und schlechte Triebe in Sallusts Catilinae coniuratio’, AU 31(5) (1988), 23–41Google Scholar, offers an interesting reading of Sallust along the axis of desire.

31. Compare Sklenár (n.7 above), 208, and Büchner (n.l above), 96. Scanlon, T., The Influence of Thucydides on Sallust (Heidelberg 1980), 51Google Scholar, and Vretska (n.l above), 57, see an allusion to Thucydides here at the expense of the striking quality of the Latin phrase.

32. Compare Scanlon (n.4 above), 25, for a reading of this passage.

33. Sallust’s portrait of desire as insatiable can be found below.

34. See Hegel, G., Phenomenology of the Spirit, tr. Miller, A.V. (Oxford 1977), 111–19Google Scholar.

35. See Hegel (n.34 above), 115.

36. Sempronia is by no means an unambiguous figure, though. She will be discussed in more detail below.

37. For a version of Hegel that stresses desire’s role, see Kojève, A., Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Ithaca 1980), 3–30Google Scholar. Lacan also routinely uses desire and the other in explaining the mirror stage within his psychoanalysis. See, for example, Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, tr. Forrester, J. (New York 1988), 146fGoogle Scholar., which is explicitly Hegelian. Similarly, the insistence upon the world of man and desire as the desire of the other in all three authors helps to explain the strange slip of habetur in section one: virtue is considered eternal because it is a standard that only exists within the world of man as structured by desire and the production of alterity.

38. Here I wish to resume the observation from Leeman (n.12 above) as to the affiliation between history and tragedy. Leeman also emphasises as a source of this tragedy man’s split body/soul nature. See Leeman (n.12 above), 114.

39. The collocation uirtus animi produces a nice moment of consolidation between the moral and the intellectual registers. Below, though, the two will be found at odds with one another. Earl (n.l above, 16ff.) notes the association of uirtus with virility and aristocracy. Hence the phrase also contains allusions to a presumptive gender and dominant social status for mind. These two registers will likewise be disturbed by the trajectory of intellect in Sallust. Earl would probably not go so far, as he sees in Sallust a redefinition of uirtus to make it personal and not hereditary. See Earl (n.l above), 111. Yet this formulation still leaves room for the notion of a legitimate domination patterned after aristocratic mastery.

40. Compare Scanlon (n.4 above), 64f. Scanlon also draws attention to the parallel with Polybius 10.3.6. See also Due, O., ‘La position politique de Salluste’, C&M 34 (1983), 113–39Google Scholar, for the connection between Sallust and Polybius. Scanlon (n.31 above) explores in detail the connections between Sallust’s thought and that of Thucydides.

41. Wiedemann (n.13 above, 54f.) notes the connection between mental and political disorder in Sallust’s Bellum lugurthinum.

42. Compare the remarks of Due (n.40 above), 113–24.

43. See, though, Richter, W., ‘Der Manierismus des Sallust und die Sprache der römischen Historiographie’, ANRW 1.3 (1973), 755–80Google Scholar, for a reading of Sallust’s ‘archaic’ style that stresses the novel and invented qualities of this prose. Sallust is nowhere simply reactionary: the present always complicates any relationship to a departed past. The past is not a mere object, but instead an object engaged in a dialectic with the present and with the mind that contemplates it.

44. Such would be a rather active translation of the Latin phrase ubi de magna uirtute atque gloria bonorum memores (3.2).

45. 1 am taking bonum otium as quasi-sarcastic given the way that Sallust frames it with terms whose resonances are so clearly negative.

46. Syme (n.l above, 2) remarks that for Sallust ‘his writing is also a continuation and a kind of revenge’ after the end of his political career.

47. This notion also cuts against the virtue of the primary Roman knower/doer of section 8. Sallust the historian profits, but Roman politics and virtue lose at the same time.

48. These patres can be found in 6.6. They will also be discussed at greater length below.

49. Compare Vretska (n.l above), 134.

50. I accept the reading cumque his which, along with the variants iis or eis, is the paradosis.

51. The term anarchy as a translation for liberum atque solutum was inspired by Ernout (n.l above), 60.

52. magisque in decoris armis et militaribus equis quam in scortis atque conuiuiis lubidinem habebant (7.4).

53. I call it a fanciful Rome because once again we are in an almost pre-historic time: there is no specific date attached to these events, nor are there any proper names of Romans representative of the era. All we know is that this is ‘early Rome’.

54. prudentissumus quisque maxume negotiosus erat, ingenium nemo sine corpore exercebat (8.5).

55. Above and again below I argue that Sallust is a doer in his own right, but the performative aspect of historiography is not immediately at issue here.

56. Scanlon (n.31 above, 41–47) covers the varied roles fortuna plays in Sallust’s work, though Scanlon’s effort to unite Sallust’s uses is perhaps somewhat forced. Note that fortune is good when it is either made or mastered, or when it is cognisant of virtue (meliores sequitur). It is bad where its iubido is in control. Hence fortune itself plays into the master-slave dialectic and is not itself a term with an independent value.

57. magisque uoltum quant ingenium bonum habere (10.5).

58. Compare the construction of section 2 with the sentiments here in section 10.

59. magis ambitio quam avaritia… (11.1).

60. auaritia pecuniae studium habet, quam nemo sapiens concupiuit (11.3).

61. One should, though, recall Sallust’s own honoris cupido in section 3.

62. neque copia neque inopia minuitur (11.3).

63. See Boyd, B., ‘Virtus effeminata and Sallust’s Sempronia’, TAPA 117 (1987), 183–201Google Scholar, at 187–90, for an extended discussion of Rome’s Asian problems in Sallust.

64. ibi primum insueuit exercitus populi Romani amare potare, signa tabulas pictas uasa caelata mirari, ea priuatim et publice rapere, delubra spoliare, sacra profanaque omnia polluere (11.6).

65. All of this is supposed to make the army faithful to Sulla (quo sibi fidum faceret, 11.5). Compare the program of Catiline in section 14 in which he indulges the pleasures of his men to win their loyalty.

66. See 13.3: sed Iubido stupri ganeae ceterique cultus non minor incesserat: uiri muliebria pati, mulieres pudicitiam in propatulo habere; uescendi causa terra manque omnia exquirere; dormire prius quam somni cupido esset; nonfamem aut sitim, neque frigus neque lassitudinem opperiri, sed ea omnia luxu antecapere.

67. This corrupt spiritual situation is thus antithetical to Earl’s much-cited characterisation of the essence of uirtus wherein it is ‘the functioning of ingenium to achieve egregia facinora and thus to win gloria by the exercise of bonae artes’. See Earl (n.l above), 16.

68. Scanlon (n.31 above, 33) highlights the function of war in Sallust: ‘Sallust appears to have adopted a scheme describing linear decline resulting from the removal of metus hostilis and breakdown of virtus.’

69. It will be worth while to recall that, in contrast to the lines of thought I am pursuing, Batstone (n.8 above) argues that Sallust means for his text to be broken in fundamental ways.

70. Sulla also is the key to the non-Roman fraction of Catiline’s army. For different reasons, both the victims of Sulla and his colonists evince a cupido and a Iubido that make them amenable to Catiline’s purposes in section 28. Notice the latent formula whose logic is in keeping with the rest of the narrative: Sullan extra-Roman desires would invade the state.

71. Newbold, R., ‘Patterns of Anxiety in Sallust, Suetonius, and Procopius’, AHB 4 (1990), 44–50Google Scholar, offers a rather unsatisfying psychological reading of Sallust that relies on pre-determined categories and word-counts.

72. Freud, S., ‘Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through’, tr. Riviere, J., in Rieff, P. (ed.), Selections from Sigmund Freud Vol. 3: Therapy and Technique (New York 1963), 157–66Google Scholar.

73. Freud (n.72 above), 160.

74. Freud (n.72 above), 162.

75. Forms of docere cluster around Catiline. See sections 16 and 17.

76. See Boyd (n.63 above), 197.

77. Sempronia’s brief appearance has provoked endless commentary of which I can only offer some highlights. For Syme (n.l above), 69, the quality of interruption predominates: she ‘has no part in the action’ and the choice to include her here ‘cannot fail to arouse curiosity or disquiet’. Later Syme wonders, ‘What is this lady doing in the pages of Sallust?’ See Syme (n.l above), 133. Perhaps, though, this unpleasant arousal is just what we ought to feel before her ingenium. Compare the strained efforts of Tiffou to offer an explanation for Sempronia at Tiffou (n.l above), 366n.43. Cadoux, T., ‘Sallust and Sempronia’, in Marshall, B. (ed.), Vindex Humanitatis: Essays in Honour of J.H. Bishop (Armidale 1980), 93–122Google Scholar, takes more time and trouble but eventually dismisses her (120). Earl (n.l above, 90) and Büchner (n.l above, 134f.) offer an interpretive advance by integrating Sempronia’s biography into the major themes of the narrative. One can compare here Paul, G., ‘Sallust’s Sempronia: The Portrait of a Lady2’, Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar 5 (1985), 9–22Google Scholar. Boyd (n.63 above) offers the most sophisticated collection of observations on Sempronia that fit her firmly into Sallust’s narrative.

78. Boyd (n.63 above, 193) summarises the ties between luxury, effeminacy and moral decay in Sallust: ‘Indulgence in luxuria results in physical effeminacy complementing the moral denigration within, and virtus loses its true meaning.’

79. litteris Graecis Latinis docta, psallere saltare elegantius quam necesse est probae, multa alia, quae instrumenta luxuriae sunt, sed ei cariora semper omnia quam decus atque pudicitia fuit; pecuniae an famae minus parceret, haud facile discerneres; lubido sic adcensa, ut saepius peteret uiros quam peteretur (25.2–3).

80. A kind interpretation of this passage would say that this conspiracy is really only part of Catiline’s conspiracy. But why speak of it thus and here? Why bury it and/or stumble over it? Sallust had no compunction about giving the history of the world as a preface to the main narrative: why could not Piso have rubbed shoulders with Sulla as immediate antecedents sandwiched between the universal and the specific?

81. See Marx, K., ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Marx, K. and Engels, F., Collected Works Vol. 11, tr. Dutt, C., Livingstone, R. & Upward, C. (New York 1978), 99Google Scholar: ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’

82. quae quousque tandem patiemini, o fortissumi uiri (‘How long in the end are valiant men like you going to tolerate this state of affairs?’, 20.9) sounds suspiciously like quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? (‘How long in the end are you, Catilina, intending to abuse our tolerance?’, Cic. in Cat. 1.1) as commentators have long noticed. See McGushin (n.l above), ad loc. Of course, it is entirely possible that Cicero was himself offering a parody of Catiline’s rhetoric when he opened the First Catilinarian.

83. Catiline employs the same trope of luxury used by Sallust above when he talks of filling seas and levelling mountains.

84. Syme (n.l above), 68.

85. This line of thought accordingly parallels Sklenár’s version of Sallust against himself, but it reads this theme at a different point, arguing for Catiline instead of the Caesar/Cato pair as producing revision and split within the text.

86. See Syme (n.l above), 2 again.

87. Compare the twin use of periculum in sections 2.2 and 4.4: in the first instance periculum is mere ‘experience’, and it is derived from experior by way of an etymological play, a figura etymologica. In the second passage, periculum means ‘danger’ as soon as Catiline’s name is attached to it.

88. Think also of the original patres who governed Rome and the parricide of revolution: the mutual relations of father and son are a durable metaphor in Sallust.

89. Sections 38 and 39 offer the longest sustained segment of this kind of historiography in the monograph. Syme, who sees many advances rather than lapses in Sallust’s age, concludes of the historian that ‘he interpreted a process of economic change and political adjustment in terms of morals; and he fell an easy prey to conventional notions about old Roman virtue’ (Syme [n.l above], 17).

90. This line of thought follows Batstone, W., ‘Incerta pro certis: An Interpretation of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae 48.4–49.4’, Ramus 15 (1986), 105–21Google Scholar. At 116 Batstone concludes, ‘For Sallust, research and interpretation, the acquisition of facts, “Was Crassus guilty?” had become a problem.’

91. See Austin, J.L., How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Derrida, J., Limited Inc. (Evanston 1988)Google Scholar.

92. Freud, Compare, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, tr. Riviere, J., in Rieff, P. (ed.), Selections from Sigmund Freud Vol. 6: General Psychological Theory (New York 1963), 164–79Google Scholar, at 166 and 168.

93. This is only to say that Sulla is the first named villain, not that the movement of the history of mind is not already flawed before Sallust gives vice a name.

94. See Syme (n. 1 above), 256.

95. See Hegel (n.34 above), 117–19. Lacan, Compare J., ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, tr. Sheridan, A., in Écrits: A Selection (New York 1977), 30–113Google Scholar, at 99f., where the master/slave relation is translated into the bond between therapist and patient in the psychoanalytic venue.

96. Lyotard, J.-F., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis 1988), xxivGoogle Scholar.