I have often found the Oxford Readings in Classical Studies series to be a useful format for introducing advanced undergraduate and graduate students to a given topic in Classics and a valuable resource for teachers. The volume under review is no exception, and I will make great use of it for the Latin reading course on Sallust I regularly teach.

After an engaging and helpful introduction by the editors, establishing the scholarly context of Sallustian studies and marking out the main themes the selected chapters will address, the volume is organised roughly by work, beginning with the Catiline, followed by the Jugurtha and rounding off with the Histories. The chapters are bookended by K. Latte's 1935 monograph, offering a lengthy treatment of Sallust's style, influences and context (by far the longest entry in the volume, at 60 pages), and P.J. Osmond's 1995 study of Sallust's reception in Renaissance political thought. The selection and organisation of the chapters is sensible and balanced, and the editors are to be commended for undertaking the difficult task of paring down the body of work on Sallust in a way that does the Latin author justice and will sow the seeds of much future study and research.

The introduction is an important contribution to the scholarly conversation in its own right. In today's world, when the practice and role of history is so contested – think of the conflicts surrounding controversial monuments, what material is included in and excluded from school history textbooks, and the bias and partisanship of those who write history –, the editors stress that Sallust's importance extends far beyond his Latin style and literary influences, or his interpretation of the causes of the decline of the Roman Republic. Sallust, like many historians, was a product of and participant in his times, the very times about which he wrote as a contemporary. Sallust forces his readers to confront the catch-22 that authors can be criticised both for being too involved in the events they relate, and thus overly biased, and for not being involved enough, thus lacking in authority. As a writer working within a particular context to produce narrative history for readers who themselves are in a particular context, can Sallust or any historian really tell us the truth of what happened, and, if so, can we really comprehend it, or are we all, writer and readers alike, too bound up with our own points of view? And, as Sallust meditates on at some length, is the recording of action itself an action? If so, how can the action of writing history not itself be part of history? Such historiographical questions, which Sallust, perhaps more than other ancient authors, addresses and forces us to confront, remain vitally important for historians and their readers today.

The study of Sallust is therefore interesting in its own right but also profoundly important and relevant. As I write this review, I am working from home as part of the social-distancing measures enacted to combat the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, a world-historical event that, like the crises of the Late Republic, will reverberate for decades to come. Would I, a trained historian and witness to and participant in these events, be able to narrate ‘what actually happened’, or would I be too bound up in my own parochial perspective to take a wider and objective view of things? Such questions are part of why we should still read and wrestle with Sallust today.

A theme present throughout the volume, woven into chapters on all three of Sallust's works, is the historian's diagnosis of Rome's moral decline, its causes and the date at which the decline began. As opposed to the communis opinio of his own day, Sallust marked the beginning of Rome's descent in 146 bce, with the destruction of Carthage and the removal of the metus hostilis that had kept the Republic united, a topic treated at length in D.C. Earl's contribution. D.S. Levene complicates this picture by treating Sallust's debt to Cato the Censor, who complained of moral decay in his own day in the early second century. As the ultimate paradox, and one through which Sallust's work must be read, Cato did more than anyone to ensure that Carthage was destroyed in 146, thereby unwittingly catalysing the ultimate moral decline of the Republic. C.S. Kraus considers the decay and disorder of the Late Republic in the context of the Jugurtha, concluding that the disordered nature of the subject matter threatened the very act of history-writing itself, something with which Sallust struggled as he continued to write history anyway. More on the theme of discord and disorder is offered by Feldherr, who argues that visual imagery, including the description of mutilated bodies such as that of Marius, serves to highlight the decline of the Republic.

Another major theme of the volume is Sallust's relationship to and portrayal of some of the major players in the Late Republic. E. Schwartz's lengthy chapter, originally from 1897, argues that in the Catiline Sallust elevates the characters of Catiline, Caesar and Cato while erasing Cicero, who had himself tried so hard to commission a work praising his achievements as consul. U. Egelhaaf-Gaiser provides a penetrating analysis of Marius’ speech in the Jugurtha, concluding that Sallust implies that, while Marius excoriates the traditional nobility and their appeals to their ancestors’ imagines, Marius himself becomes the imago of Caesar. While many have assumed that Sallust was merely a Caesarian partisan, Egelhaaf-Gaiser's argument suggests that Sallust's Caesarian allegiances might have been less than absolute and his interpretation of events far more nuanced than once thought.

Nearly every entry addresses compositional questions, such as the use Sallust makes of digressions, how he imitates or diverges from the compositional strategies of his predecessors, and whether or not seeming inconsistencies and infelicities in his text are intentional. R. Renehan demonstrates that Sallust often comments indirectly on events or characters by alluding to famous literary passages, the context of which speaks to Sallust's own topic. For example, Sallust has Cato the Younger, in his speech in the Catiline, make remarks very similar to Eteocles’ words in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, which serves to paint Cato in the image of a tragic hero. Other sources such as Thucydides and Cicero are employed in similar ways, and Renehan goes further to demonstrate that these sources themselves used imitation in similar ways. In what I find to be the most interesting pairing in the volume, Batstone and E. Gunderson each analyse the Catiline in light of its famous prologue and come to precisely opposite conclusions. Batstone thinks the prologue contradicts itself and thus forces the reader to wrestle with the ethical uncertainties of the events and personalities of the Catilinarian Conspiracy, an effect Sallust intends. Gunderson, on the other hand, believes that Sallust's inconsistencies demonstrate that the text's author cannot be the one who masters the text's intended meaning. In a densely argued chapter that draws heavily on the Hegelian master–slave dialectic, Gunderson concludes that ‘Sallust's problems and his attempts at a solution bring into stark relief the perils and products of a historical narrative that evinces a will to knowledge and to mastery’ (p. 213). As foregrounded in the introductory chapter, the dialogue between Batstone and Gunderson involves historiographical questions that have an enduring relevance and makes for important reading for those who study and write history.

The final chapter, by Osmond, on Sallust in Renaissance political thought, provides the ideal ending to the volume. The chapter is wide-ranging and, instead of merely providing a summary or a selection of proof-texts of Sallust references in various Renaissance authors, offers a close analysis of the ways in which political thought changed over the course of the Renaissance and how Sallust was brought to bear to bolster at one time republicanism and at another monarchy. This chapter goes a long way towards explaining why Sallust remains an important part of the Classics curriculum today. As a complement to this chapter, I would like to have seen an entry dedicated to the reception of Sallust in the Late Antique / Early Medieval period. While F. Klingner's chapter touches on the use of Sallust made by Augustine in The City of God, a dedicated treatment of Augustine's reception of Sallust (such as P.C. Burns, ‘Augustine's Use of Sallust in the “City of God”: the Role of the Grammatical Tradition’, Augustinian Studies 30 [1999], 105–14) might have been a useful addition, even though space is at a premium in such volumes.

One aspect of the Oxford Readings series I find somewhat perplexing is the lack of editorial introductions at the head of each entry, including the original bibliographic information of the contribution. While the introductory chapter by the editors does provide an overview of Sallustian scholarship and justify the contributions that have been selected, a brief contextual comment for each entry would perhaps make the volume more useful, at least for the scholar, if not the student. Then again, by leaving out the bibliographical information and even the original language in which the piece was written, readers must confront the chapter's arguments as they are, on their merits, rather than trying to contextualise the arguments in a way that might not be relevant to the strength of the arguments themselves. So, in the end, I am of two minds on this question and respect the choice of the editors – or perhaps the series editors – to mingle old with new, English with non-English, and let the chips fall where they may.