Catiline's War and The Jugurthine War

Summary

Sallust wrote two short monographs on episodes of the late Roman Republic, each opened by a philosophical preface and each meant to show how ambition and greed were corrupting the state. The library text is the Rev. John Selby Watson's literal English version, with his argument (chapter outline) before each work and his explanatory notes after it. Catiline's War (61 chapters) tells of the conspiracy of 63 BC. Sallust first sketches Lucius Sergius Catiline, a noble of great endurance and daring but depraved character, and then pauses for a history of Roman morals: the early city, he says, was held together by courage and justice, but after the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC avarice and ambition took hold, and Sulla's army learned luxury in Asia. Catiline gathers debtors, ruined young nobles and Sulla's old veterans, including the clever and dissolute Sempronia. Fulvia, mistress of the conspirator Quintus Curius, leaks the plot, and alarm helps elect Marcus Tullius Cicero consul. Catiline sends Gaius Manlius to raise troops in Etruria, plans to murder Cicero, and, after Cicero denounces him in the senate, leaves Rome for the army. The conspirators left in the city, led by Publius Lentulus Sura and Gaius Cethegus, approach envoys of the Gallic Allobroges, who betray them; letters are seized at the Mulvian Bridge. In the senate debate of 5 December, Julius Caesar argues against the death penalty and Marcus Porcius Cato demands it; Sallust gives both speeches at length and then compares the two men. The prisoners are strangled in the Tullian dungeon, and early in 62 BC Catiline dies fighting near Pistoria, found far ahead of his men among the enemy dead. The Jugurthine War (114 chapters) covers Rome's war of 112-105 BC against Jugurtha, grandson of Masinissa and adopted heir of King Micipsa of Numidia. Trained under Scipio at Numantia, Jugurtha murders his cousin Hiempsal, besieges and kills Adherbal at Cirta, and repeatedly bribes Roman envoys and generals. The tribune Gaius Memmius rouses the people; Jugurtha, summoned to Rome, has his rival Massiva assassinated there and leaves calling Rome a city for sale. After the disgrace of Aulus Albinus's army, sent under the yoke, the honest aristocrat Quintus Metellus restores discipline and fights at the Muthul. His officer Gaius Marius, a new man, wins the consulship with a fiery speech against the nobility, takes Capsa, and carries the war toward Mauretania, where Marius's quaestor Lucius Sulla persuades King Bocchus to hand Jugurtha over. Marius triumphs on 1 January 104 BC. Watson's translation was published in Bohn's Classical Library in the mid-nineteenth century; Project Gutenberg's transcription keeps both monographs complete with the notes.

Top Lessons

• Prosperity can be harder to bear than danger

  Sallust's history of Roman morals in Catiline X turns on a paradox: the Romans who had endured toil and peril easily found ease and wealth a burden once Carthage was gone. Love of money came first and love of power after, and with them came deceit, contempt of religion and venality. He presents Catiline not as a monster dropped from the sky but as the product of a city that had changed its loves.

• Two kinds of greatness

  After the debate of 5 December Sallust sets Caesar and Cato side by side: Caesar famed for generosity, mercy and energy, Cato for integrity, firmness and austerity. He praises both. Cato wished rather to be good than to seem so, and glory followed him the less he sought it. Readers can weigh the two speeches, Caesar's appeal to precedent and calm judgment and Cato's appeal to the safety of the state, on their own merits.

• Money that buys a state

  In the Jugurthine War, Jugurtha's gold opens senators' doors, buys a partition of Numidia and a peace from a consul, and leads him to call Rome a city for sale. Sallust uses the war to show how private bribery becomes public weakness, and how men like Memmius and Metellus, in different ways, refuse it.

• Merit and birth

  Marius's speech in Jugurtha LXXXV contrasts nobles who boast of ancestors' portraits with a new man who can show only his own scars and service. Sallust, himself a new man, gives the speech force while also showing Metellus as an honest noble and Sulla as a gifted one. The work asks how a republic should recognize ability.

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Medical Lens

Sallust is not a medical writer, but Catiline XV gives one of the best-known ancient portraits of a guilty conscience expressed in the body: sleeplessness, pallor, haggard eyes, a walk alternately hurried and slow, and visible distraction. It belongs to a long classical and Christian tradition, running through Plato's account of the tyrant's soul and later through Macbeth, in which crime disorders sleep and bearing; it is a moral portrait rather than a clinical one, and any retrospective label would be interpretive. Catiline V records his extraordinary tolerance of hunger, cold and lack of sleep. Catiline XXXI describes the collective fear that seized Rome as each citizen 'measured the public danger by his own fear'. In LIX the consul Antonius is said to be unable to fight because of lameness of the feet, which Watson's note discusses as possibly gout or a convenient pretext; LXI notes that Catiline's men fell with wounds in front.

• Catiline's War, ch. XV

  Catiline's guilty conscience: no rest waking or sleeping, pale complexion, haggard eyes, irregular gait.

• Catiline's War, ch. V

  Catiline's bodily endurance of hunger, cold and want of sleep beyond belief.

• Catiline's War, ch. XXXI

  Gloom and alarm spread through the city; citizens feel safe nowhere and with no one.

• Catiline's War, ch. LIX and Watson's note 298

  Antonius absent from the battle through lameness of the feet; the translator weighs whether it was gout or a pretext.