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IF the achievement of Roman historians was disappointing, the fault did not lie altogether in a lack of interest about the past, as is witnessed by the list of historians of the closing era of the Republic which has been given in the last chapter; and historians were not the only ones to contribute antiquarian lore. There were, in addition to poets and historians, other scholars as well, at work on all kinds of curious investigation, interpreting auguries or the archaic hymns of the Salii, studying the history of law or philosophy or the etymology of words, or simply writing encyclopædic surveys of things in general. This movement of scholarship forms a notable supplement to Roman historiography, reaching as it does all the way from Cato, through Varro, to the elder Pliny. Partly in the form of practical manuals, partly in erudite volumes, it preserved a mass of data for the learned society of Cato’s day and later; and it helped to satisfy curiosity as to striking events or unusual customs. But the essentials of criticism were lacking, — that is, adequate tools; and it need not surprise the reader of this study to find that the work of these scholars was, upon the whole, on a lower plane than that of the historians. The test of success for the antiquarian at Rome seems to have been what it was for the American capitalist in the nineteenth century, mere amount of output. Varro, for instance, wrote between six and seven hundred volumes. The author of so many works could not examine with discerning care the sources from which such a vast store of learning was drawn. The credulous, uncritical character of Pliny’s great Natural History, the final summing up of this encyclopædic literature, is a fair indication of its inability to sort out fact from fiction; due to the absence not only of historical disciplines, but also of those of the other sciences which deal with human evolution: the sciences of language, philology; of society, anthropology; of 237 comparative religion. Yet, inaccurate or not, these collections of the data of history were at hand for the Romans to read; and as the reader is generally still less critical than the writer, there were probably few who had any idea of how thin the line of established fact really was. On the contrary, at least from the day of Varro, it must have seemed to them more like an enveloping — if hazy — sea, in which only the most expert could find his bearings.
We should have a better idea of the situation if the works of Varro had come down to us in anything like the way in which those of Cicero were preserved. But whether it be, as Augustine suggests, that the appeal to the lover of words is stronger than that to the lover of facts,1 or that the facts ceased to have any meaning by themselves, there remain but slight fragments of the many writings of Varro. Born in 116 B.C., and therefore Cicero’s senior by ten years, Varro lived a long and busy life, not as a hermit-scholar, but as a man of affairs, taking an active part in politics; a somewhat whimsical man, as his satirical miscellany shows. The only work which concerns us, however, is his treatise on Roman Antiquities, published in 47 B.C. There were twenty-five books dealing with human and sixteen with “divine” antiquities. The data were grouped into large sections under Persons, Places, Times and Things. There was no attempt to establish their interconnection historically, but simply an amassing of curious facts. Strangely enough, while the part dealing with human affairs was lost, portions of the religious section, the Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum, were destined to be passed down to us because of the interest of Christian theology in combating the pagan deities. Augustine’s City of God quoted, in order to ridicule them, Varro’s accounts of the early cults of Rome. Modern scholarship, correcting Varro in places, is upon the whole able to profit better from the data he offers than were the Fathers of the Church; and perhaps, also, better than the believing pagans. To these Varro supplied something like a “counterblast” to the negative criticism of Lucretius,2 and helped to restore that emphasis upon the good old Roman virtue of pietas, upon which the Vergilian epic was so strongly to insist.
But however much this work of Varro may have served its purpose, 238 we find in the attitude of Cicero towards him, an indication that those days were strangely like our own; that literary men sometimes did not read the works of scholars. Cicero did not quote Varro, whose works were not to be found in his library. His friend, Atticus, the book-publisher and author, had them, however, and urged Cicero to use them; but when Cicero and Varro both made their peace with Cæsar and returned to their literary pursuits, Cicero’s letters to Varro are still general and somewhat formal.3 Even under the stress of having to exchange dedications to some of their works, the mutual regard of scholar and man of letters is none too cordial.
This is all the more evident when one turns to the little manual on the history of eloquence which Cicero wrote at this time, under the title Brutus. The book itself is of interest to us, for it is the nearest to history of Cicero’s writings. It passes in review about two hundred orators, Greek and Roman, but all in the form of a pleasant dialogue, suitably held under the statue of Plato on a quiet lawn, by Brutus, Atticus and Cicero. But the incident with which it opens is most significant. Atticus had written a short general outline of universal history. From all that we can gather, it was a poor enough affair, an annal based, like that of his predecessor Cornelius Nepos,4 upon the Athenian chronicle of Apollodorus, and hence in the direct line that leads through Eusebius, to Christian monastic annals. But it got away from the beaten path of purely Roman antiquities and presented the world as one; and perhaps its very slightness combined with its extended perspectives constituted its chief charm. There is no subtler appeal to our intellectual amour propre than to have great and difficult truths in science or philosophy made obvious by keeping us unaware of the difficulties. In any case Cicero hails this manual with lyric joy; it has restored his drooping spirits and made life worth living in these dark days; it opens out the obscurities of the past to the daylight and furnishes a sure guide where all was so confused! In short, Atticus’ outlines have done for Cicero what H. G. Wells’ 239 Outline has done for the modern busy reader, led him to that “peak in Darien” where he might discover the expanse of Time, not so much with the shock of wild surmise, as with the comfortable assurance that he already had the chart for its exploration. The significance of this incident is not that Atticus has written a manual of general history, but that Cicero needed it so badly.
Reference to this general history naturally recalls at this point the works of the later Greek historians described above, and we may perhaps anticipate here enough to mention the one attempt to carry over into Latin the scheme for universal history, which we met first in Ephorus and Theopompus. Pompeius Trogus, the younger contemporary of Livy, covered the history of the near East in forty-four books, beginning with Ninus and including the Macedonian Empire. The title of the work, Historiae Philippicae, sufficiently indicates the Greek point of view, for the culminating figure was Philip of Macedon. Rome came in only incidentally, and rather as seen by her enemies. This was not the kind of history to rival Livy; and it would have perished utterly had not a certain M. Junianus Justinus made a synopsis of it which was destined largely to satisfy the meagre curiosity of the Middle Ages in the great story of the pagan world. For it was to this that Orosius, the pupil of Augustine, mainly turned for his materials when writing that story of the sufferings of the pre-Christian era which was the historical counterpart to the City of God.5
Consideration of works like these has carried us somewhat afield from the main lines of Roman historiography. But before we proceed to the first of the great historians of Rome, Sallust, whose figure already stands before us, we must pause for a moment more to consider the historical writings of another class, not scholars this time but men of action.
For in the controversial atmosphere of late republican politics most statesmen who could write left narratives to justify their conduct, and those who could not write them themselves employed others to do so. The dictator Sulla (138-78 B.C.) after his retirement from public life wrote an autobiography, which seems to have resembled the semi-fabulous narrative of an Oriental rather than of a sober Roman; for it points to a series of miraculous occurrences 240 coincident with his public work to show that the hand of the goddess Tyche was visible throughout.6 Yet such a narrative could impose upon Plutarch. Lucullus also (114-57 B.C.) early in life wrote a history of the war with Marius; but the use of current narrative as apologetic pamphlet literature reached its height in the last years of the Republic, when Pompey on the one side and Cæsar on the other, defended their actions at the bar of history. Pompey did not plead himself, but maintained a “literary staff”7 to present his story in the light of hero-worship. For this purpose slaves or Greeks were best; and Theophanes of Mytilene described the third Mithridatic War as a repetition of the conquest of Asia by Alexander, repeating the hero-myth even down to a conflict with Amazons.8
It is only when we turn from nonsense like this to Cæsar’s Commentaries that we suddenly realize the full measure of achievement of these war-memoirs.9 Few books, however great, can stand the test of use in school and still retain a hold upon us in later life, and it was a questionable gain to Cæsar that he wrote in such simple, lucid phrases as to make his works the object of the desolating struggles of the young with Latin prose. But if one does, by any chance, go back to Cæsar after years of absence from the schoolroom, one finds a surprise awaiting him. For these works, written primarily to justify himself before the Roman people, dictated in camp and in the midst of the world’s affairs, contain not a word of open eulogy of the author, and present the narrative as if from an impersonal observer, interested not only in the war but in the manners and customs of peoples; in short a detached, objective account such as Thucydides himself might approve. This is the external, however; for so happily is the illusion of 241 impartiality maintained that it is only when one has read the story through that one realizes the possibility of another point of view. It was a work of genius to use the quality of self-restraint to increase the impression of reality, and so, after all, to make what was left out speak for the writer.
For the ten or eleven years following the murder of Julius Cæsar in 44 B.C. there was living in retirement, in his luxurious villa on the Quirinal, the first really great historian whom Rome produced, Gaius Sallustius Crispus, known to us as Sallust. He had been a partisan of Cæsar, and his great wealth, which showed itself in the elaborate gardens (horti Sallustiani which he laid out on the northern hillsides of the city, was probably partly due to his having held the governorship of the province of Numidia for a while after Cæsar’s victories. But during the hot factional fights and the civil wars of the period of the Triumvirate and the founding of the Imperial Principate of Augustus, he withdrew from present politics to devote himself to a narrative of those of the age which had just passed away.
Such a course of action needed, in the eyes of a practical Roman, some apology, and the two works of Sallust which have come to us begin with such apologies. Since they supply the point of view from which he wished us to judge of his performance, we may first listen to what he has to say on the matter. The third and fourth chapters of the Conspiracy of Catiline run as follows:10
“It is a fine thing to serve the State by action, nor is eloquence despicable. Men may become illustrious alike in peace and war, and many by their own acts, many by their record of the acts of others, win applause. The glory which attends the doer and the recorder of brave deeds is certainly by no means equal. For my own part, however, I count historical narration as one of the hardest of tasks. In the first place, a full equivalent has to be found in words for the deeds narrated, and in the second the historian’s censures of crimes are by many thought to be the utterances of ill-will and envy, while his record of the high virtue and glory of the good, tranquilly accepted so long as it deals with what the reader deems to be easily within his own powers, so soon as it passes beyond this is disbelieved as mere invention.
“As regards myself, my inclination originally led me, like many others, while still a youth, into public life. There I found many things against me. 242 Modesty, temperance, and merit had departed, and hardihood, corruption, and avarice were flourishing in their stead. My mind, a stranger to bad acquirements, contemned these qualities;11 nevertheless, with the weakness of my youth, I was seized and held amid this throng of vices by ambition. I presented a contrast to the ill behaviour of my fellows, none the less I was tormented by the same craving for the honours of office, and the same sensitiveness to popularity and unpopularity as the rest.
“At last, after many miseries and perils, my mind was at peace, and I determined to pass the remainder of my days at a distance from public affairs. It was not, however, my plan to waste this honourable leisure in idleness and sloth, nor yet to spend my life in devotion to such slavish tastes as agriculture or hunting. I returned to the studies I had once begun, from which my unhappy ambition had held me back, and determined to narrate the history of the Roman people in separate essays, wherever it seemed worthy of record. I was the more inclined to this by the fact that my mind was free alike from the hopes and fears of the political partisan.”
In his other book, The Jugurthine War,12 Sallust is even more on the defensive:
“Among the tasks that occupy the intellect, historical narration holds a prominent and useful place. As its merits have been often extolled, I think it best to leave them unmentioned, and thus escape any imputation of arrogantly exalting myself by praise of my own pursuit. And yet I have no doubt that there will be some who, because I have determined to pass my life at a distance from public affairs, will apply the name of indolence to my long and useful task. At any rate, the men to whom it seems the height of energy to court the mob, and buy favour by their public entertainments, will do so.”
In both these sections his defence involves a characterization of the politics of Rome — the other alternative field for his activity — which is, in a word, the essence of his history as well. For he dealt as a historian with just that corrupt and vicious political life of the closing years of the Republic, from which he sought refuge in the polite society of his friends and the delights of intellectual intercourse. The choice of the conspiracy of Catiline for a subject to be immortalized, revealing — as it did in his depiction — the degradation of Roman ideals and the failure of its social as well as of its political system, was typical of his outlook. The story of the war against Jugurtha, his other theme, has a constantly recurring 243 note as to the venality of Roman senators, and if we lose the thread of home affairs in the graphic — though sometimes fanciful — descriptions of battle in the wilds of Numidia, the climax of the tale is less the fate of Jugurtha than that striking passage which closed the disreputable manœuvres of the king and his partisans in Rome, in which, as he was leaving the city, “he is said, after looking back at it in silence, at last to have cried, ‘a city for sale, soon to fall if once it find a buyer.’ ”13 There is no wonder that in dealing with characters and events such as these Sallust should find history difficult.
But the difficulty was enhanced by the fact that he never quite saw the perspective as a historian. He was intent upon preserving “the memory of gallant deeds that kindled a fire in the breasts of brave men, that cannot be quenched until their own merit has rivalled their ancestors’ fame and renown,”14 and so he sought to bring out, partly by contrast, against that dark background, the patriotism of a Cato or the military genius of a Metellus. Yet he was too much of a historian to do this at the expense of the narrative as a whole; the episodes are not allowed to dominate as they would in the case of a mere writer of memoirs. The attempt to be impartial prevents him from that brilliant sort of sketching which would have distorted the narrative for the sake of a few strong effects. On the other hand, the background never becomes really clear. He did not set himself, in these works at least, the larger theme, of which they furnished the notable illustrations, — the theme of Roman government in the days when an outworn oligarchy was attempting to rule through an outworn constitution, and the democratic statesmen had not yet found their Cæsar.
If, therefore, there is something inherently weak about the work of Sallust, why is it held in such high regard? For, not only have we the praise of the one most competent to pass judgment in Rome, Tacitus himself,15 but modern critics are agreed that Sallust stands head and shoulders above his predecessors, and remains, with Livy and Tacitus , one of the three really great Latin historians. The reason is mainly that he applied to Rome the standards of Thucydides and Polybius, whom he took as his masters; and, cutting 244 adrift from the current of complacent rhetorical composition, honestly tried to tell the truth. Moreover, in style as well as in content, he held himself aloof from the florid or oratorical traditions and wrote with dignity and gave a certain fitting, archaic flavor to his narrative.16 Like Thucydides, he polished and repolished his phrases; and the speeches he introduced, evne when he had the text before him,17 were rewritten in keeping with the rest of his work. Fortunately one orator, Cicero, saved him the trouble of so doing with his particular orations, by rewriting and polishing them for posterity himself.
It is generally held that one of Sallust’s chief merits is his depiction of character; and it is true that his characters are for the most part drawn with real impartiality and are life-like. But the qualities assigned them seem to smack a little of formula; they are not subtle combinations of temperament and capacity, capable of swiftly surprising the reader, but share that element of the commonplace which makes so much of antique literature seem or or less like stage-property.18 However, it is open to the classicist to take exception to this, for the full merit and charm of Sallust’s art demand more time and study than his subject-matter makes otherwise profitable.
Finally, there are two frank weaknesses in Sallust as a historian. In the first place he is weak in chronology and geography. His editors have all pointed out how incredibly careless he is in both respects. He uses vague phrases for lapse of time and even then gets hopelessly wrong, while his geography of Africa is a fanciful bit of writing, such as putting cities near the coast that should be forty miles inland. This would have shocked Polybius, and if Sallust found Thucydides vague in his time-reckoning, Thucydides would never have failed, as Sallust did, where the data were at hand.
245The second weakness of Sallust came from his very advantages. A retired capitalist, living in elegant ease, employing scholars to do the drudgery of research,19 he missed some of that keen sense of the value of accuracy which comes from constantly feeling the iron discipline of the scientific method. But, more than this, he saw the world much as such a one would today, through the windows of a Pall Mall or Fifth Avenue club. His philosophy, which he outlines in his prefaces, is one of self-denial, but it is the kind of self-denial that goes with club-life. It reminds one of Polonius. It does not reach out to grapple with the real problems of a work-a-day world. It is placid and sure of itself, properly censorious, but lacking in grasp of fundamentals.
If Sallust’s other work, a history of the whole era just preceding his own, was ever finished or not,20 we have traces of only a few fragments; and the fact that he proposed to concentrate on certain main features, as a rule for historical composition, leads us to surmise that his performance in the larger task was hardly one to cause us to revise our judgment upon him. Yet he may have suffered from the fact that in the ages that followed, particularly in the closing period of imperial history, it was the charm of his style and the power of his portrayal which preserved for us what it did, rather than any more solid merit in historical synthesis.
The philological work of Varro has been brought out by G. Goetz and F. Schoell, De Lingua Latina Quae Supersunt (Teubner, 1910); but the student of history should consult H. Peter Historicum Romanorum Reliquiae (2 vols., 1906-1914), Vol. II, for the fragments which are of historiographical interest. For bibliography see Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, Vol. CXLIII (1910), pp. 63 sqq., for 1898-1908; Sup. Vol. CLXV (1913), pp. 307 sqq.; Vol CLXXIII (1915), pp. 91; Vol. CLXXVII (1916-1918), pp. 89 sqq., p. 254.
There are editions of Cæsar’s Commentarii by B. Kübler (3 vols., ed. maior, 246 Teubner, 1893-1897; ed. minor, Teubner, 1897-1911; E. Hoffmann (2 vols., 3d ed., 1898); B. Dinter (3 vols., Teubner, 1864, 1890); T. R. Holmes (1914); E. S. Shuckburgh (1912-1915); R. Du Pontet (Oxford Library of Classical Authors, 2 vols. [1900-1901]). There is a large literature on Cæsar but the translations of The Gallic War by H. J. Edwards (1917), The Civil Wars by A. G. Peskett (1914), in the Loeb Classical Library and the works of T. R. Holmes, Ancient Britain and the Invasion of Julius Cæsar (1907), Cæsar’s Conquest of Gaul (2d ed., 1911), will furnish the best introduction. See also E. G. Sihler, Annals of Cæsar (1911). For general literature see Jahresbericht, etc., Sup. Vol. CLVI (1912), pp. 168 sqq.
Of the various editions of Sallust the following may be mentioned: T. Opitz (2d. ed., Teubner, 1909); A. Eussner (Catalina, De Bello Jugurthino, Teubner, 1887; new ed., 1912); J. H. Schmalz (Catalina, 8th ed., 1909; De Bello Jugurthino, 8th ed., 1912); C. Stegmann (Catalina, Teubner, 4th ed., 1914; De Bello Jugurthino, Teubner, 3d ed., 1915). There are translations by A. W. Pollard, The Cataline of Sallust (1886; 2d ed., 1891, reprinted 1913), and by J. C. Rolfe, Sallust . . . . (1921), in the Loeb Classical Library. The bibliographies in the Jahresbericht, etc., are in Vol. CLX (1912), p. 64; Sup. Vol. CLXV (1913), pp. 165 sqq.; Vol. CLXXVII (1916-1918), pp. 84, 248.
1 Cf. De Civitate Dei, Bk. VI, Chap. II.
2 J. Wight Duff, A Literary History of Rome (2d ed., 1910), p. 338.
3 Cf. E. G. Sihler, Cicero of Arpinum (1914), pp. 249, 334. This is a suggestive book, crowded with facts, but hard to follow.
4 Atticus’ chronicle was written about 47 B.C., that of Cornelius Nepos about 63 B.C. On Apollodorus see above, p. 50, n.. 1.
5 Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri Septem.
6 It bore the title Commentarii Rerum Gestarum.
7 The expression used by H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst, p. 323. See also his Die geschichtliche Litteratur die römische Kaiserzeit bis Theodosius I und ihre Quellen, Vol. I, pp. 163 sqq. Varro wrote for Pompey.
8 The use of slaves or freedmen to exalt the fortunes of the great was common in Rome as elsewhere. But none of the achievement is notable enough to come within this survey.
9 Cæsar’s Commentarii are ostensibly merely “sketches” for a history, to be written later; but this was partly a stylistic self-depreciation, recognizable among the rhetorical devices of the day. Cicero wrote the account of his consulate in the same vein.
10 The Cataline of Sallust (The Conspiracy of Catiline), English translation by A. W. Pollard (1886; 2d ed., 1891; reprinted 1913).
11 Sallust’s life, before his retirement, by no means escaped criticism; but we are not concerned here with questions of private morals.
12 Sallust, Bellum Jugurthinum, Chap. IV.
13 Ibid., Chap. XXXV.
14 Ibid., Chap. IV. .
15 Tacitus, Annales, Bk. III, Chap. XXX.
16 A good example of a deftly turned phrase, even were it not original, is the crisp comment on the Numidians who were “protected rather by their feet than by their swords” (Bellum Jugurthinum, Chap. LXXIV).
17 As for instance that of Cato against Catiline or Memmius against Jugurtha. His speeches are admittedly well done, and if there are too many for us, and the moralizing is overdone, they suited the age for which they were written.
18 The portrait of Marius is perhaps an exception. Cf. Sallust, Bellum Jugurthinum, Chap. LXIII et seq.
19 He employed scholars to do the “grubbing” for him. Suetonius, De Illustribus Grammaticis, Chap. X. Yet he should get due credit for recognizing the value of scholarly aids. “Such pains were seldom taken by a Latin Historian.” Cf. J. W. Mackail, Latin Literature (1895; reprinted 1907), p. 84.
20 It bore the title Historiae, and apparently covered from about 78 to 66 B.C., continuing where L. Cornelius Sisenna had left off. Vide Teuffel-Schwabe, op. cit, Vol. I, Sect. 205, n. 4. On Sisenna see H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst, p. 301.
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