Sallust is the first Roman historian whose work has survived, and his Bellum Catilinae is an excellent text for students. It provides a riveting narrative of a significant event in an important period of Roman history, the Catilinarian Conspiracy of 63 BC. His literary models were Thucydides and the Elder Cato; nevertheless, his Latin is significantly more straightforward than that of Livy or Tacitus. His work was immensely influential in antiquity, in terms not only of style and expression (Tacitus…