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With the aid of Brutus’ lost works, I have completed the first two thirds of my argument. I used Brutus’ activity as historical epitomizer to connect the reader’s alternative sense of distance from and continuity with the narrated past to a perception, due not just to the civil wars but already to the impact of Sulla, that the course of Roman history had been interrupted, the mechanisms of memory altered, and perceptions of time challenged. Next, the comparison between Sallust’s history and the epideictic literature describing the life and death of Cato pointed to a new break from the past, resulting from the recent deaths of the major figures of Sallust’s narrative. This new separation now places the text even more strikingly at the point separating the past it recounts, the present in which it is written, and the future in which it will be read. And these competing perceptions of the text’s position in time correlate the question of the persistence of the res publica it describes not only with the shift from reality to representation but with the alternative of a story written about, by, and for individuals who live independently from and perhaps after that res publica. In this final section, I want to zero in on that fundamental tool Sallust uses to represent such a past, language, to demonstrate how Sallust creates an awareness of words themselves as responsive to different views of time. Thereby, the act of interpreting his text generates and responds to the readers’ consciousness of their position within history.

The impression of a misalignment between the aims of praising and blaming individuals and narrating res gestas populi Romani results from the challenge of matching the quality of virtus to the record of public action. As actions and honors no longer in themselves reveal the character of men, res gestae must give way to panegyric, and both the reader and the potential actor will need to find an alternative to political success to create a memory of themselves. This notion of a virtus that stands apart from achievements becomes so pervasive in the literature of the period as to appear as a commonplace, but it is no less important for that. Virtus above all transcends temporal limits. Thus, after the death of his friend Scipio, Cicero’s Laelius will say, “he lives for me because I loved the virtus of the man, which has not been snuffed out” (mihi quidem Scipio, quamquam est subito ereptus, vivit tamen semperque vivet; virtutem enim amavi illius viri, quae extincta non est, Cic. Amic. 102). Virtus also follows the exile across spatial boundaries, as is shown by a sententia preserved by Seneca from a late Republican treatise de Virtute (On Virtue) whose author considered it “sufficient that it is permitted for those going into exile to bring their own virtutes with them” (quod licet in exilium euntibus uirtutes suas secum ferre, Sen. Helv. 8.1).

The author of this recognition that virtutes come in individual travel sizes, independent of the dimensions of space and time that Rome’s political imperium strives to measure and control, was Brutus himself. And this third lost work, de Virtute, represents the last of the three discourses against which I want to read the Catiline, philosophy. For, if the formal aspect of Sallust’s prefaces suggests an engagement with epideictic oratory, the substance of these openings comes from philosophy. And the connection between the two alternatives to history will be obvious. The ethical philosophy Sallust presents in his openings will be true for all people in all times. Also, it proposes a system of value, and a way of describing action, that liberates the individual from the judgment of the state, from the exchange of praise and blame that, far from measuring worth from a position outside history, has been made subject to the historical transformations of the res publica. Of course, Sallust was not the only writer to import the language of philosophy into history, to challenge Aristotle’s claim that history was inevitably less philosophical than poetry because of its intrinsic connection with the specific rather than the general (Poet. 9=1451b). But here too, just because the incorporation of philosophy and history was possible, does not mean it was inevitable or unproblematic.¹⁹ In the remainder of this chapter, I will take the approach that Sallust does not so much take over a tradition of generic blending but draws attention to the relationship between the aims of history and philosophy, and in doing so he evokes that contrast with which we began between a point of view of the Roman past located outside of it and of the temporal continuities that continue to control the audience’s understanding of the text and draw them back to the position of those spectators of Catiline’s corpse.

My effort at complication begins by challenging what may seem the most obvious path for harmonizing Sallust’s philosophical perspective on events with the expected aims of historiography. If Sallust’s readers could simply recognize true virtus, and if they could actualize their own virtue in a way that made it independent of fama, then ambition and avarice would fall away. A new consensus on what virtue was could provide the basis for a collective evaluation of behavior that makes attention to individual worth not an escape route from history but a new basis for a shared history.²⁰ Yet the quote Seneca preserves from Brutus’ de Virtute about virtutes as present comforts for exiles suggests another alternative.²¹ The recognition of virtus becomes something readers can take with them as they look in on the res publica from outside, not an exhortation to act but a consolation or validation for those who have not won honores in the traditional way, and perhaps even a spiritual exercise for those who are learning to put virtus ahead of other apparent goods. Whether the “utility” of Sallust’s text will reside in persuading people to act virtuously in the res publica or in accepting their separation from it depends in part upon historical circumstances beyond his control, the political fortunes of the state and his individual readers. But it also depends on the prior generic assumptions those readers will make, themselves doubtless conditioned by their own situations, about whether they are reading philosophy or history. In this way the generic openness of the works becomes dynamic and interacts with a reader’s sense of position in the civic order. Reading in otium can set the stage for a more abstracted, philosophical perspective on the past. Having been witness to events, or connected to those who were, or imagining them in the present, by contrast, draws the reader into an economy of judgment and emulation.

As the final stage of my demonstration of the importance of temporal perspective for making sense of Sallust, I want to show how the opening of the Catiline stages the tension between the timeless truths of philosophy and history’s account of passing time.²² The generic interference of philosophy teaches its audience how to read history in two important ways. First, it continually raises the question of how to view the recent past, with a recognition of the temporal continuities that make the audience’s reading contingent upon the history the text describes, or from the perspective of a philosophical audience, taking their virtues with them as they depart from Rome. Equally important will be the image we form of the nature of Sallust’s own language, for consideration of that key term virtus, where the twin discourses of history and philosophy intersect, makes the reader decide both whether Sallust’s history represents the “real reality” of history, as Aristotle suggests he should, or some more general abiding essence, and, more fundamentally, whether his words can represent anything at all.

To begin, it is important to remember that the question of how to conceptualize time is raised for the reader not just through subtle play with generic conventions, such as the retrospective contrast between claims about omnis homines and history’s focus on the increasingly fragmented parts of this whole; indeed, it is central to the argument of the passage. The distinction between what lasts and what passes away quickly structures the human individual. However, as emerges throughout the work, there are some who nevertheless focus their energies on the brief and fleeting glory of wealth and bodily attributes. There are thus those who look at themselves from the perspective of eternity and those who do not.

But as Sallust defines an audience who perceive human action from the loftier and more lasting perspective afforded by virtus, a new tension develops between the general truths articulated and the increasingly specific voice that articulates them. The differences that unfold from the initial separation of body and soul come to include the distinction between what the text says, which falls on the side of eternity, and the action of saying it.²³ Batstone (1990, 120) has aptly described the first sentence’s evocation of absolute moral necessity as “making a fine promise of generalizable truth.” Its oracular authority comes from its seeming to derive from no man, much less an individual. The next sentence however gives special prominence to the possessive adjective, nostra. Such emphasis primarily points the distinction between humans and animals, but it also importantly contributes to our sense of the author behind this statement. He is one of “us”: not the voice of nature, but the voice that names nature. The final stage in the argument makes the particularization of the author even clearer. No longer one of us humans, he is now a “me,” and the conclusions he draws are a matter of opinion not authority.²⁴ This is how things seem to him. But as the authority of the speaker contracts, the magnitude of the claim itself seems only to increase. The argument moves from an account of the bodies of animals, to a description of the divided human vis, to a virtus that is clara and aeterna.²⁵ Not only does the crucial term virtus appear only in this climactic position in the argument, but in context it contrasts strongly with terms based on mere human appraisal. Men are responsible for giving one another glory, but virtus appears a possession, a thing that is held.²⁶ If humans can at best create a memory that lasts as long as possible, virtue escapes those limits by becoming eternal. A sequence of thought that began with a description of downward looking animals has forced us to look up. It represents directly the attributes of a divine being, combining both apprehensibility—virtus is clara—and eternity. In the shift from glory to virtus, therefore, two transitions are made; from a very long time to the eternal, and from a record, reputation, trace, or memory to the thing itself. In the strongest reading of the sentence, eternal virtue stands out like a beacon from the language and the argument that has preceded it, promising an immortality that comes not through historiography’s concern with preserving memory, but from the quality of virtus directly, possessed and held as though it were a thing.

Yet the very verb that seems to produce the epiphany of virtue as a materially apprehensible manifestation of the divine, something that is both eternal and that we can hold, also suggests that the biggest claim made by the sentence is both the most contested and the least authorized. Habetur can refer to the process of judgment—virtus is held or considered such.²⁷ The present tense of “is being held” looks as much like a description of an immediate struggle engaging author and audience now as it does a generalizing description of virtus always and everywhere.

In the sequence that follows, historiography itself becomes quite literally the field of combat for continuing this contest. When Sallust refers to a great “certamen,” he seems to gesture towards the traditional form of historiographic opening, which from Thucydides often centered on a war greater than any other war. But Sallust describes a competition to determine not the course of events but rather their interpretation. Its participants struggle not for virtue nor with virtue, but rather about its value:

Sed diu magnum inter mortalis certamen fuit vine corporis an virtute animi res militaris magis procederet. nam et prius quam incipias consulto et, ubi consulueris, mature facto opus est. ita utrumque per se indigens alterum alterius auxilio eget. igitur initio reges—nam in terris nomen imperi id primum fuit—divorsi pars ingenium, alii corpus exercebant. etiam tum vita hominum sine cupiditate agitabatur; sua quoique satis placebant. postea vero quam in Asia Cyrus, in Graecia Lacedaemonii et Athenienses coepere urbis atque nationes subigere, lubidinem dominandi causam belli habere, maxumam gloriam in maxumo imperio putare, tum demum periculo atque negotiis conpertum est in bello plurumum ingenium posse. quod si regum atque imperatorum animi virtus in pace ita ut in bello valeret, aequabilius atque constantius sese res humanae haberent, neque aliud alio ferri neque mutari ac misceri omnia cerneres. nam imperium facile iis artibus retinetur quibus initio partum est; verum ubi pro labore desidia, pro continentia et aequitate lubido atque superbia invasere, fortuna simul cum moribus inmutatur. Ita imperium semper ad optumum quemque a minus bono transfertur. (Cat. 1.5–2.6)

But for a long time there was a great contest among men whether military affairs succeeded better through bodily force or the virtue of the mind: before you begin, there is need for planning, and, when you have planned, for timely action. So each, insufficient in itself, wants the aid of the other. Therefore, at first the kings—for that was the first title of command on earth—were divided, with some working at their mental ability and others exercising their bodies. In that age, moreover, human life was still led without desires, and one lived content with one’s own possessions. After Cyrus in Asia and the Lacedaemonians and Athenians in Greece began to subjugate cities and peoples, to make their lust for being masters the cause of war, to count the greatest glory in the greatest power, then at last it was learned by danger and efforts that mental ability is worth most in war. But if the virtue of mind of kings and commanders had been as strong in peacetime as in war, human history would have been managed more evenly and consistently; you would be observing neither things being borne here and there nor all undergoing change and confusion. But when sloth bursts in in place of work and lust and arrogance in place of moderation and fairness, outcomes change along with character. And so power always passes to the best from the less good.

Sallust’s metahistorical perspective on the past itself suggests quite an optimistic trajectory, at least for the progress of human understanding. This trajectory inscribes the emergence of virtus in the first paragraph within all of human history. Sallust here not only views history teleologically, with a knowledge of how things will end. He steps further away from the perspective of the actors in his narrative in that the knowledge he gains from hindsight affirms a universal truth about human nature. From this vantage point, men win knowledge from the outcome of events, and they can apply that knowledge to shape the future. But this requires a curious approach to both events and their representation. Obviously, the contestants whose battles Sallust learns from were not fighting for knowledge but out of a desire for power. So too, Sallust’s knowledge demands a view of human development that seems breathtakingly schematized and abridged especially in comparison to the historiographic texts to which he makes reference. All of Herodotus and Thucydides run together to become a single turning point: “after Cyrus in Asia and the Athenians and Lacedaemonians in Greece began to subjugate cities and nations, etc.”²⁸

If Sallust gains his wisdom by positioning himself not only after events but after the representation of events, it puts him in the place of his own reader and allows him strongly to influence the reception of the work to come.²⁹ The reader can convert the lubidines imperii of the characters within the past into a further affirmation of what Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ narratives now turn out to prove, even if their own authors did not know that was what they were doing. Again, progress into the eternal requires hindsight. But this conceptual key to all historiography appears immediately complicated by two factors. First, the difference between the contestant and their post-historical observer at this point seems to shrink. The combatants may have started out aiming only for power, but they gain wisdom nonetheless. “It was learned by danger and struggles that ingenium has the greatest power in war.” The fortunate reader can acquire the knowledge without the danger, but by an inverse identification their learning gets put back into history in the assimilation of the audience with participants. Just as knowledge itself prompts competition, learning itself becomes a struggle. The meaning of the past can be disputed and misunderstood.

The second complication comes with the recognition of a deeper separation between Sallust’s interpretation of the past and the reality that history ought to record. For just at the moment when we expect the union of philosophy with history to proclaim its triumphant payoff, when humans apply what they have learned to avoid the errors of the past, the verbs shift to counterfactual subjunctives. The world where people apply what they learned in war to the peace that comes after war is not one that matches present reality. And at the same time, Sallust’s text has crossed the barrier that defines historiography by its distance from philosophy—he has moved from the indicative account of what did happen to describe what might happen. For people really are what they were in the beginning, motivated by lubido and a desire to be superior. These are, we may recall, the real motives of the real Cyrus and the real Athenians and Spartans, which appear at odds with the post eventum analysis of the post-historical historian. Yet a reading of history that attends not to the conclusions drawn from events but to the events themselves will yield a different view of human consistency, one that ends not in triumph but in the inevitable failure and decline signaled by the final eternally valid gnome presented in Sallust’s opening. Imperium, that object of their lubido, always passes to the best from the less good.

The philosophical reading of the past may offer a way out of this pattern, if Sallust’s readers can position themselves at a further distance from a narrative (Sallust’s) that already signals its own place after other narratives of events. But if everyone is a part of history, and history really implies the transience of power, the confusion of everything through a consistent human desire, if the historian must always contest the conclusions he draws, and the readers be unable or unwilling to translate learning to action because of who they really are, then history and philosophy will always offer fundamentally different maps of how the past becomes the future. Indeed, as Batstone points out, from a historical perspective closure is impossible, for to decide finally that virtue should be used to describe a Caesar or a Cato would be to take sides in a struggle to which we are condemned by the very nature of language.³⁰ An alternative is to posit a world of words outside of history, that virtus means something that applies to both Caesar and Cato, even if it is impossible to say what it is. Historical reality struggles to impose its limits on how the text is read, even as the text struggles to change that reality. At stake will be the position of virtus simultaneously on the page and in the world. Can Sallust’s narrative, as history, reveal virtus in action, or only its passing away? And can Sallust’s text, as philosophy, even name virtus, or do his own words inevitably enter a great historical certamen that obscures it?

At this stage, it would be helpful to take stock of the different ways in which reading Sallust’s texts becomes a way of experiencing aspects of temporality. I suggested first that the preface’s concern with distinguishing the ephemeral and the eternal manifested itself in the generic tension between historiography and philosophy. The general descriptions of, and norms for, human activity provide a challenging guide to the historiographic narrative that follows. But the divergent strategies of reading history and philosophy point to a more specifically formal opposition between approaching these generalizations as ideas, which can themselves sometimes be recognized as cross-cultural borrowings, and their exposition in the linear dimension of the text. Virtus, to take a classic example, but one crucial to the Catiline’s aims as both history and philosophy, seems to lose any stable and universal signification when it is appropriated by and for the various actors in the events Sallust describes, but it can be said to do so already as the language of the preface unfolds through new oppositions.

But when we consider not just the disposition of ideas in the text but the very process by which words are interpreted, similar struggles between the transhistorical and the contingent come into play. Cicero provides a deceptively simple precept for reading history that points to some of these Sallustian complexities: “in historiography all things are referred to ‘truth’” (cum in illa (sc. historia) omnia ad veritatem, Quinte, referantur, Leg. 1.5).³¹ Although truth there is being defined specifically against pleasure as the criterion for evaluating history, when we apply this dictum to the interpretation of historical narrative,³² it possesses an element of ambiguity which Sallust’s procedures here make acute. What do we mean by veritas? For even this word might find a different signification in a philosophical treatise (not to speak of the debates among different philosophical schools) and in history, where it defines what actually was done against falsifications. If we imagine this formula describing the specific hermeneutic predisposition a contemporary reader would bring to his work, it could only complicate the referential dimension of Sallust’s own words, and this might immediately appear as the Catiline’s own universals (omnis homines, omnis vis) are immediately anatomized into warring factions (the energetic vs. the slothful; the mind vs. the body). Presenting the historical truth of events and absolute philosophical truth as the alternative referents of Sallust’s language would direct the reader equally to absolute intellectual formulations, potentially like Platonic forms whose truth precisely cannot be apprehended through earthly experience, and to that confusing experience itself, to the competing appropriations of language that would also have shaped a reader’s practical sense of what virtus was.

Applying this view of the semantics of historiography to the basic units of the text shows how Sallust’s words are not only instruments for representing the past but themselves synecdochic instances of temporal change. Indeed, a speaker within the text, Cato, makes the same point explicitly: iam pridem equidem nos vera vocabula rerum amisimus: quia bona aliena largiri liberalitas, malarum rerum audacia fortitudo vocatur, eo res publica in extremo sita est (52.11). This much studied passage itself seems an instance of the specific application of a universal truth, Thucydides’ famous generalization about the linguistic disruptions that result from political revolution, itself induced from what happened in the Corcyran revolution of 427 BCE.³³ Cato on the contrary seems to be appropriating it as a description of a specifically Roman experience (“we have lost…”). What makes this appropriation so significant, and so crucial to the programmatic significance of the claim for Sallust’s work, is the subtle amplification of Thucydides’ point. As Batstone observes, Thucydides never said that any of the competing judgments expressed by words were true. Thus as Cato seems to be appropriating the impartial analysis of actions undertaken by the historian—and it is important to recognize that the revaluation Thucydides describes results from the polemics of both parties—he is also retrojecting ex post facto historical description into counterrevolutionary argument. This is signaled when he takes over the generic marker of historical discourse, its veracity, as a rhetorical ploy to declare that his own words are, like history, true. In fact, however, the reminder of the generic origins of his claim (viz. in Thucydidean historiography) potentially undermines such a move by reminding the reader that either side could assert that their own language was “true.”

But if Sallust, as historian, uses the allusion to Thucydides to point a distinction between the history that describes actions and the rhetoric that influences them, Cato’s own allusion to Thucydides pulls in the opposite direction by suggesting that history itself could become part of a political debate. And this blurring of the ability truly to name events when the naming itself becomes part of events points to another slippage in Cato’s own language that will also come to describe a key phenomenon of Sallust’s own text. Thucydides’ account of revolutionary language reveals the complexity of the relationship between words and things in part through the way it challenges interpretation. As Wilson (1982) argued, the most common and resonant rendering of the Greek words yields “nonsense”: the point is not that the words themselves have “changed their customary meanings,” as most translations would have it, but that the customary valuations placed on things by means of words have changed. Similarly, the main force of Cato’s complaint is that we no longer use the proper terms to designate actions: “giving away others’ possessions” is the “true” way of calling out what is going on, but we renounce that description in favor of a more positive sounding “liberalitas.” However, as the assonantial repetition of things (rerum ~ malarum rerum) and naming (vocabula ~ vocatur) in the next clause hints, this partisan euphemism simultaneously wrecks the possibility of describing things truly, and degrades language itself. For just as the term audacia is displaced as the true index of what Catiline is doing, so the replacing word “fortitudo” no longer uniquely refers to a brave action but also to a reckless one. In this sense, Cato’s phrase validates the “mistranslation” of Thucydides. If, in the real events of history, deeds are described by words that do not reflect their “true” nature (so that stealing becomes “generosity”), the ability of history as a genre that refers to reality to describe truth is similarly affected because the words it uses no longer retain a stable definition. Cato’s complaint about “the loss of words” might seem immediately falsified by their very persistence in the text: liberalitas and fortitudo are right before the readers’ eyes.³⁴ But just as Cato makes Thucydides’ timeless analysis a way of winning a particular argument in history, so he creates a split within the very words of the historical text between the synchronic and the diachronic: the forms of words stay the same, but what they refer to changes.

In this respect too, Cato’s claim can inform a reading of Sallust’s text. For, as Sallust’s restrictive and somewhat idiosyncratic moral vocabulary might make more noticeable, crucial words like virtus and ingenium will recur unchanged throughout his text, and yet their significations will be transformed, both because of the historically inspired tendentiousness of the other voices that appropriate them and simply because of the growing complexity of Sallust’s discourse. This double sense of words as always balancing a static form against a continually changing pattern of references suggests how Sallust’s text as text possesses two temporal dimensions. Whatever virtue comes to mean in the represented past or in the discourse itself, it abides as an unchanging sign, perhaps as an eternal memorial of instances of individual virtue in the world. But the shifting meanings of virtue portray the linear flow of the text as a mimesis of the transience of experience, as the different meanings of virtue brings the text closer to the historical struggles it reproduces.

This way of relating Sallust’s language to the thematic dialectic between mortal experience and eternity, through the contrast between form and meaning, can be replicated yet again even at the level of their form alone. Cato’s interest in specifically vera vocabula turns his phrase into a virtual translation of a branch of language study that was central to several intellectual projects of the late republic, etymology. Varro’s treatise on the Latin language, the first third of which is devoted to etymology, appeared at virtually the same moment as Sallust began his career as a historian. Varro’s use of the term, as de Melo helpfully makes clear, is very different from Cato’s because he is not interested in semantics (de Melo 2019, 41–3), in how the meaning of words change, but rather in how their form has been altered over time from when it was originally imposed on its referents.³⁵ This consciousness of words’ forms themselves as shaped by history forms a complement to the use, not least by Varro himself in his antiquarian works, of etymology as evidence for recovering the Roman past, and it suggests how the forms of words alone can be indices of change.

Not only does the abundance of archaism in Sallust’s diction and orthography give temporal depth to his diction, but he can exploit formal similarities and etymology to amplify the power of words to signify the processes of history. An example comes at a crucial moment in Rome’s moral history that also has profound semantic consequences, the advent of ambitio:

Sed primo magis ambitio quam avaritia animos hominum exercebat, quod tamen vitium propius virtutem erat; nam gloriam honorem imperium bonus et ignavos aeque sibi exoptant, sed ille vera via nititur, huic quia bonae artes desunt, dolis atque fallaciis contendit. (Cat. 11.1–2)

But at first ambition troubled the souls of men more than avarice because ambition was a vice nearer virtue. For glory, honor, and power are desired equally by the good man and the base, but the first strives by the true road, while the latter, because he lacks good skills, struggles by means of guile and falsehood.

As I will discuss further in the next chapter, both the twin vices Sallust portrays as inverting the moral climate in Rome after the defeat of Carthage complicate social communication, here explicitly by forcing the ambitious themselves to use deception. Yet Sallust’s language on its own reproduces that moral confusion in several ways. First, the claim that vice is nearer virtue is expressed in a phrase that, by bringing the words themselves into proximity, highlights the similarity of their forms (trisyllabic words beginning with vi- and ending with -m). Within the next sentence, that repeated assonance points the connection between virtus and the true path (vera via) of the good man, as though Sallust is trying to combat ambition’s capacity to make vice look like virtue by insisting on the true difference.³⁶ The distinction between ambition and virtue is also expressed negatively: the base man contrasts with the good because of the lack of good arts. And the suggestion of tautology that results from the repetition of bonus also becomes meaningful thanks to an etymological play embedded in bonae artes. For a common etymology of the word ars connects it to arete, the Greek word translated by virtus.³⁷ The good man manifests virtue because he uses good arts which themselves point back to virtue. The redundancy of this argument might be legitimately taken to show the poverty and weakness of a definition of virtue that perhaps goes some way to explaining how it can be confused with ambition. On the other hand, this “virtuous circle” reveals how the language itself constructs the self-sufficiency of virtus and above all its sameness and historical consistency both as a word, echoing the beginnings of Sallust’s texts,³⁸ and as a universal idea which can be expressed in Greek as well as in Latin. The pattern that insists that virtue is always itself again suggests similarity and difference to ambitio, whose transparent etymology describes candidates “going around” to influence votes.³⁹

The description of virtue’s path as true allows for a final consideration of what this passage reveals about the historiographic voice in relation to time. On the one hand, Sallust’s language reproduces the confusions that arise at the specific moment when ambition produces its confusing alternatives to virtue. The fact that those driven by ambition themselves use deliberate falsehoods constructs them within the texts as rivals to the historian’s true voice. Sallust’s language, then, is at once mimetic of a place in time, and distanced from it. To apply Grethlein’s terms, it is equally teleological and experiential. Ambition’s deceit arises in part from the voices of figures in history, who no doubt claimed virtus for themselves, but it also emerges from Sallust’s retrospective, philosophically inflected view of their behavior as virtue by other means. The morphological and etymological wordplay on the text’s surface at once reproduces the confusion that allows a vitium to masquerade as virtus and points to continuities within the text and within history that take virtus out of time. Sallust is at once revealing the truth of how it was, and of how it (always) is.⁴⁰

The semantic doubling of Sallust’s language shows simultaneously how his moral terminology has been transformed by time and how it transcends time. And I conclude this discussion of Sallustian hermeneutics with the suggestion that this quality of his language extends forward to generate a split in the contemporary scholarly interpretation of his writings between those who on the one hand tend to privilege the ideational content of his work and look beyond the textual surface to Sallust’s political thought, and those who oppose such an approach by stressing the patterns of contradictions that emerge from the play of signs themselves. It should be clear by now that, rather than endorsing one of these seemingly incompatible approaches to reading Sallust, and without ignoring how each way of reading has its own intellectual genealogy in contemporary scholarship (the one grounded in positivism, the other, often but not inevitably, in deconstruction), my aim is to suggest that both strategies of analysis also take their cue from Sallust’s enabling his readers to follow either path. I do this by juxtaposing two other recent treatments of the term whose (non)definition we have been considering, virtus. This comparison will also suggest a final way in which different conceptions of the place of historiography in history, of the temporal relationship between representation and its referent, affirm divergent strategies of reading.

In his 2006 book, Myles McDonnell makes Sallust’s use of the term the culmination of his argument about the word’s significance in Roman culture. McDonnell essentially opposes two definitions of virtus, one a traditional Roman signification for military accomplishments, the other a more abstract ethical term for excellence rooted in the Greek philosophical tradition. His understanding of “ethical” brings his interpretation very close to mine because it implicitly depends on the element of time. McDonnell reads Sallust’s text as staging the confrontation between the two definitions of virtus. In the prefaces, in authorial interjections, and sometimes in the speeches, virtus means absolute excellence, but in the narrative it has its traditional Roman sense of “manly courage.” Ultimately Sallust’s narrative reveals how the traditional understanding of virtus leads to civil war while the philosophical virtus of the prefaces becomes a “[call] for a different, more ethical kind of Roman manliness.”⁴¹ McDonnell’s analysis therefore not only itself proposes a noncontingent meaning of virtue but presumes that the text can substitute its own definition for the one the audience knows from their own experience of the world, their place in time.

Although he does not explicitly engage with McDonnell’s argument, William Batstone’s approach to Sallustian virtus, in a number of important articles, offers a striking methodological contrast. Not only does Batstone present Sallust’s moral language as inevitably affected by the kind of slippage Cato describes, while recognizing the tendentiousness of Cato’s claim to truth, but he regards such problems as fundamental to the nature of language itself rather than being the result of any civic crisis. Influenced by post-structuralist theories of language, Batstone offers an understanding of words as always contextually defined by their use in discourse.⁴² Where McDonnell’s argument treats language as fundamentally referential, signifying or denoting some thing, Batstone breaks that connection and puts the word first. Words’ meanings are always contested and do not exist prior to the synchronic discourse in which they appear.

The idea that virtus is only ever the product of discourse can hardly itself be challenged in language, since that challenge would only be subsumed into the agon that is verbal communication. And the conclusion we may want to draw from this is that any claim as to words’ “true meanings” can and should be challenged and deconstructed, that neither Sallust nor his readers are ever above the fray. But, on the other hand, the motion from the particular to the general, the reading of Sallust as operating at a more distant level of description than Cato, raises an alternative interpretation by at least gesturing towards a trajectory that distinguishes words from things. Sallust’s account of virtue may suggest its existence as well as pointing out how it is obscured in the very instant of its representation. The challenges of linguistic representation that begin when ideas move into time do not necessarily deny the existence or reality behind these representations. Batstone, pointing to a number of subtly observed contradictions in the Catiline’s opening paragraph, describes the reader’s impression of knowing what Sallust must be saying, even as his language never clearly says it.⁴³ I would put equal emphasis on the knowing what it must mean and balance a focus on the incapacities of speech with an awareness of the persistence of meaning, despite language.

But for the clearest evidence of the contemporary importance of the question precisely of whether virtus was a thing in itself or merely a word whose meaning depends on context, we must appropriately turn from Brutus the author to Brutus as a historical figure, observed and defined by others. Cassius Dio reports that as he prepared for suicide after the defeat at Philippi, Brutus quoted a couplet from the speech of a tragic Heracles.

(Dio 47.49.2=trag. adesp. 374 Nauck=TrGF 1 88 F3)

Oh shameless virtue, so you were a word after all. I worshipped you as a thing, but you were a slave to chance.

Because of its putative debunking of the notion of arete, the fragment has been read as a Cynic riposte to the stoic idealization of virtus. Thus Moles (1983a, 778–9) would derive the passage from contemporary pro-Caesarean polemic, condemning Brutus, the expert on virtus, for succumbing at the end to a very “unstoic”⁴⁴ despair. Yet I think its meaning remains more open. Rather than suggesting that Brutus abandoned his principles just as he abandoned the actual “virtus” that might have led him to avoid suicide, it sympathetically shows him confronting an event that forces him—as many must have done in the course of the civil wars—to consider the basic premises for his actions. Whatever its source or interpretation, however, this version of Brutus’ last words has a threefold relevance for the interpretation of Sallustian virtus. Most importantly, it explicitly highlights the alternatives of a Batstone-style reading of virtus as a mere term of discourse, a logos, and the contrary assertion that virtus possesses some kind of objective reality outside of what people say about it. Second, the prompt to reevaluate virtus comes from an awareness of historical change. Within the quotation, virtus is made slave to the contingency that appears to govern the flow of events, to tyche, and of course it is the fact of a particular historical event, the battle of Philippi, that compels Brutus to doubt the reality of virtus.⁴⁵ Finally, Brutus’ dramatic disillusionment with a philosophical ideal comes when he is presented with the most direct and terrible manifestation of his own subjection to temporality, the prospect of death.

I began with the image of two corpses, and it is appropriate that I end as well with dead bodies, for that is also what Sallust does. The historian’s final focus on the corpse of the protagonist stands as a stark alternative to the temporal and conceptual breadth of the opening, what all men always do. For Brutus too, as he was himself imagined in some historical narrative, the confrontation with death provokes his own tortured matching of general principles with undeniable events. It is the moment when words become things, when Brutus’ stoic preparation for death can or cannot be actualized, and when, in the case of Catiline, the wounds on his body take the place of the words he has spoken as a way of declaring that he was motivated by an inherited Roman morality, virtus, rather than the new avaritia and ambitio.

But death is equally the passage from events and things back to the words that are spoken about them, to virtus as an attribute dependent on others’ judgment rather than as something to be held, habetur (Cat. 1.4). In Brutus’ case, his own deliberation about the dependence of virtus on fortune shifts to the audience for the historical narrative who must now decide whether Brutus’ act of speaking reveals his cowardice or virtus. Their decision can realize previous political alliances, or they can be emphatically set apart from politics: even an opponent may pity Brutus as a man. The perspective of the Catiline’s opening, with its view of omnis homines, thus merges with the small view of Catiline as an individual in that both exclude the collective judgments of the state, of history as determined by the consensus of a group.

And so the focus in Sallust’s description begins with the Catilinarians’ bodies as semantic substitutes for their living presences—“for the very position which each while alive had fought to hold, his corpse was occupying even after death (amissa anima).” Notice how bodies here explicitly take the place of souls—unlike the philosophical ideal that connects them with eternity, in the real world the bodies are what we see, and the souls we can only conjecture. Yet in that moment of replacement a new perspective emerges, that of the audience whose identification of the corpses seems perhaps entirely contingent: some found a friend; others an enemy. This final demonstration of the dissolution of a collective response seems to make Catiline’s death a paradoxical victory for the small view. The partisanship he represents will be perpetuated by spectators who can only see from the perspective of their own relation to the corpse. For later readers, the moment in Senecan drama where Thyestes, who has similarly come to watch and consume, cries out to the king who has fed him his own children, “I recognize a brother” (Th. 1006), may prompt a newly theatrical response to the scene where “gladness,” “grief,” “mourning,” and “joys” are “performed” variously through the army. This vantage point, admittedly way after the past, strongly intensifies the sense of revulsion that would make the audience retreat from the position of the internal spectator. But when Thyestes says he recognizes Atreus as a brother it also implies something about himself. As Atreus’ ruthless ambition reveals a kindred desire, so the recognition that Catiline’s troops were acting out desires common to all, especially to those who come for gain and gaze at forms, becomes a model for perceiving identity rather than difference.⁴⁶ And perhaps those spectators’ recognition of cognati among the corpses even reflects a process of learning that changes their own assumptions about who the dead were. They have discovered public enemies (hostes) as relatives, or, looking with the eyes of the Roman community, they have recognized even relatives as personal enemies because they fought against the res publica. Or maybe people really are not like that at all.⁴⁷