C. Sallustius Crispus
Rome's first great political historian
86 BC – 35 BC
Gaius Sallustius Crispus was born around 86 BC in Amiternum, in the Sabine country northeast of Rome. His political career was undistinguished and, by his own admission, morally compromised. He was expelled from the Senate in 50 BC, officially for immorality — possibly because he was caught with another man's wife, possibly for political reasons. He joined Caesar's side in the civil war, served as governor of Africa Nova, and allegedly enriched himself spectacularly. When Caesar was murdered, Sallust retired from politics and took up history.
He wrote two monographs that survive complete: the Bellum Catilinae (The War of Catiline), on the conspiracy of 63 BC, and the Bellum Jugurthinum (The Jugurthine War), on Rome's war against the Numidian king Jugurtha in the late second century BC. Both are short, intense, and morally driven. Sallust is not interested in military operations for their own sake — he wants to explain how Rome's governing class became corrupt and what that corruption costs.
His prose style is deliberately archaic and abrupt, modelled on Thucydides and the elder Cato. Sentences are clipped, transitions are sudden, and the narrative moves with a journalist's urgency. His character portraits — Catiline, Jugurtha, Marius, Sulla — are vivid and damning. He writes as a moralist who has seen the inside of the system and found it rotten.
His Historiae, covering the period 78–67 BC, survives only in fragments. What we have of it suggests it was his most ambitious work. The fragments include some of his finest writing.
Rome, 63 BC. A ruined aristocrat named Catiline gathers an army of the desperate — debtors, veterans, the dispossessed — and plots to overthrow the Re...
A war in North Africa that Rome should have won in months took years, because the enemy kept bribing Roman generals. Jugurtha, king of Numidia, unders...
The conspiracy that nearly destroyed the Roman Republic from within. Sallust reconstructs Catiline's plot of 63 BC — the secret meetings, the debt-rid...