Sallust's Histories, long understudied, have seen a recent surge of interest in Anglophone scholarship. In addition to J. Ramsey's Loeb edition (2015), two monographs dealing extensively with the Histories have appeared in 2019: A. Rosenblitt's Rome After Sulla and G.’s book under review. Both draw new conclusions from the work's fragments and in different ways reconstruct Sallust's masterpiece as a profound contribution to the intellectual discourse of his period. There is some overlap between G.’s and Rosenblitt's treatments: both read the period of Sallust's activity as one scarred by trauma (although they differ in identifying its source – Rosenblitt highlights the transformative effect of the Sullan period, while G. deals with the civil wars of the first century more generally). Nonetheless, G.’s more historiographically-oriented approach to Sallust makes a distinctive contribution to the text's ongoing reassessment.
G. reads the Histories as a work of ‘analogical historiography’: that is, a historiography operating on multiple levels, which as well as the narrative of the subject period (from 78 bc down to probably 67 bc) also deploys historical analogy to address the civil and political strife of the more recent past. Through such techniques, G. argues, Sallust in the Histories not only provided a narrative treatment of a key period in Rome's recent history, but also set out a series of arguments about contemporary politics: ‘two simultaneous narratives, one explicit and one implicit’ (p. 147). Sallust, G. suggests, was concerned with making sense of Rome's trauma and expressing it for society as a whole; given that the trauma was still ongoing under the triumvirs, his preferred method was to highlight previous examples of the cycle of discord, to spur his readers to reflect on its contemporary manifestations.
Parallels between Sallust's subject matter and his triumviral context have been noted before, particularly possible connections between individuals in the narrative and their relatives among Sallust's contemporaries; however, G.’s analogies operate on a thematic rather than a prosopographical level (indeed, she stresses that the complexity of Sallust's writing exceeds the simple identification of individuals). G. identifies two strands to Sallust's analogical technique: first, the exploitation of echoes between events described and those more recent; second, the deliberate construction of parallels through the insertion of markers of civil war into Sallust's narrative. The first of these, G. argues, draws out the repetition inherent in Roman civil war, for example by configuring the tumultus Lepidi treated in Book 1 as a precursor to the Perusine War (a point strengthened by the distinctly Ciceronian tone of the speech of Sallust's Philippus against Lepidus, as already noted by commentators and discussed too in Rosenblitt's book). The relevance of such episodes to Sallust's own period is clear.
The more distinctive part of G.’s argument relates to what she reads as the unexpected and anachronistic presence of civil war in Sallust's narrative: in a reversal of the triumvirs’ rebadging of civil conflicts as foreign wars, G. argues for a pattern of allusion based on the presentation of external conflicts with the terminology of civil strife. To support this, G. cites 4.27R, a fragment ascribed by Maurenbrecher to a contentious debate about strategy among the leaders of Spartacus’ revolt, which G. suggests draws heavily on Roman political vocabulary, and 3.42D R, describing a near-mutiny in Spartacus’ ranks as a seditio; these descriptions, G. argues, reframe these hostile leaders as rival Roman politicians or even leaders in Rome's civil wars. G.’s arguments here require some faith: as Ramsey notes in his edition, 4.27R may refer to Spartacus, but might equally be a reference to the disagreement between Crassus and Pompey during their consulship (where the vocabulary of political deliberation would be entirely expected). Similarly, seditio is the standard Latin term for mutiny, as used regularly by Caesar and Tacitus; in the fragment's military context, its use seems not unexpected. While the fragmentary status of the text makes certainty difficult, as G. acknowledges, the analogies identified are not always fully convincing; this is also true of G.’s extensive discussion of the Roman ‘original sin’ of the fratricide of Remus, based only on a single Sallustian reference to Romulus (from the speech of Lepidus, characterising Sulla).
Having argued for the Histories as a work of analogical historiography, G. applies the model in two thematic chapters. The first, ‘Historians in the Histories’, argues that through analogy Sallust comments obliquely on the limitations of historiography under an autocratic regime. In triumviral Rome, autocrats such as Octavian controlled their own representation and thus effectively served as their own historians: Sallust's presentation of Sertorius and Pompey, G. suggests, illustrates this, in that each subverts the historian's role through their self-presentation. Sertorius presented his history through his own bodily disfigurements, thus defeating the invidia scriptorum; Pompey – recalling Octavian – took control of his commemoration through his construction of trophies over the Spanish, rather than over Sertorius, and the letter Sallust reports from him to the Senate, G. suggests, exemplifies the contemporary priority of res over verba. G. identifies Spartacus as a counterexample to these triumvir-analogues: Sallust's elevation of the otherwise little-known leader of the revolt, through subversion of expected tropes of the barbarian, provides an illustration of the continuing possibilities and relevance of historiographical writing. G.’s focus on the themes of commemoration and self-representation in the text is illuminating, particularly in relation to Pompey; her emphasis on Sallust's problematisation of historiographical activity in the text is convincing. Perhaps more could be made of the speech of Licinius Macer, which G. does not mention in this chapter: himself a historian (according to the conventional identification), Macer's speech addresses themes including the Struggle of the Orders and the historical role of the tribunate of the plebs, and his speech could support G.’s argument about the role of historiography in reworking narratives imposed from above.
The final substantive chapter addresses the geographical digressions on Sicily and on the Isles of the Blest. G. argues that Sallust develops a critique of Octavian through analogy with Pompey; Pompey's extreme ambition, she suggests, made him a useful model for Octavian's rise to power. G. argues that Sallust's unexpected reference to Scylla at 4.18R should be read as an allusion to Sextus Pompey, in whose iconography the monster figured prominently. This conspicuous allusion introduces a kind of double analogy: Sallust connects Spartacus with Sextus, in order to link Pompey's victory with Octavian's; in each case, what was presented as a minor conflict was in fact a much greater threat to the republic's stability than its prosecutors allowed, and had enabled its victor to amass a dangerous level of individual power. Sallust's reference to Scylla is brief and perhaps not as jarring as G. suggests (Spartacus’ army did after all reach the Straits of Messina, so Sallust's description of the coastline is not altogether unexpected); while the connection between Scylla and Sextus is convincing, the complexity of the layers of analogy here requires a great deal of Sallust's reader.
G. also treats the utopian material on the Isles of the Blest as an illustration of connections between Pompey and Octavian, this time focusing on its counterfactual potential. Sallust's depiction of Sertorius’ desire to sail away, leaving civil war behind, sideshadows the possibilities open to Rome at this point: as such, G. suggests, Sallust hints at an alternative future, in which Pompey might not have won power by defeating Sertorius. However, in the end Sertorius’ failure to break the cycle simply restates the repetitive dynamics of Roman conflict: if not Pompey, if not Octavian, then someone else.
In her conclusion G. presents the Histories as lamenting the contemporary state of Rome, but also holding out some hope for the power of historiographical activity to address it. While individual analogies might be found more or less convincing, as a whole the book does illustrate the complexity of Sallust's thought and makes a useful contribution to reframing the author within the same uncertain context as the Virgil of the Eclogues and the Georgics or the Horace of the Epodes; G.’s treatment brings out well the profound impact of the trauma of the civil wars on the authors of this generation and its inescapability within their literature.
