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Updated: June 26, 2025
And then, besides, Rome could not be a very delightful place to live in for a poor rhetoric master come there to better his fortune. Other strangers before him had complained of it. Always to be going up and down the flights of steps and the ascents, often very steep, of the city of the Seven Hills; to be rushing between the Aventine and Sallust's garden, and thence to the Esquiline and Janiculum!
'By Mercury! cried a pert little culinary disciple, scarce in his novitiate; 'whoever saw such antique sweetmeat shapes as these? It is impossible to do credit to one's art with such rude materials. Why, Sallust's commonest sweetmeat shape represents the whole siege of Troy; Hector and Paris, and Helen... with little Astyanax and the Wooden Horse into the bargain!
Neither of them takes Sallust's presentment of the character of Catiline as if it were gospel, but, while holding exact touch with the narrative, each contrives to add a native grandeur to the character of the arch-conspirator, such as his original detractors denied him. In both poems, Ben Jonson's and Ibsen's, Catiline is Armed with a glory high as his despair.
It is in the delineation of character that Sallust's penetration is unmistakably shown. Besides the instances already given, we may mention the admirable sketch of Sulla, and the no less admirable ones of Catiline and Iugurtha. His power of depicting the terrors of conscience is tremendous.
For he wisely confined himself to periods neither too remote for the testimony of eye-witnesses, nor too recent for the disentanglement of truth. As a friend of Caesar he was an enemy of Cicero, and two declamations are extant, the productions of the reign of Claudius, in which these two great men vituperate one another. But no vituperation is found in Sallust's works.
The observation of this political genius is one which must occur to all who read Sallust's book. How could Catiline have secured the support of the most brilliant men of Rome, among them of Julius Caesar, if his only plan and object had been to loot and burn Rome? It is not logical.
At last they came to Sallust's house, in one of the rooms of which was a fresco that hit the Englishman's fancy exceedingly. He immediately sat down, took a pencil and a blank book from his pocket, and began copying it. He had scarcely made a stroke, however, when the soldier and the lazzarone approached him. The former was going to speak, but the latter took the words out of his mouth.
After having gone through Aristotle's Politics, the excellent extract by Polybius of Republics is to be read; with the Harangues of Mecænas and Agrippa to Augustus, in Dion; and Sallust's Letter to Cæsar.
was less applicable, Sulla, on the other hand, did not allow his poverty when young or his years when old to hinder him in the pursuit of pleasure, but he enacted laws to regulate the marriages and morals of his countrymen, and indulged his own amorous propensities in spite of them, as we read in Sallust's history.
It was Sallust's picture more than Cicero's that absorbed Ibsen. Criticism likes to trace a predecessor behind every genius, a Perugino for Raffaelle, a Marlowe for Shakespeare. If we seek for the master-mind that started Ibsen, it is not to be found among the writers of his age or of his language. The real master of Ibsen was Sallust.
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