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Updated: June 13, 2025
"It cannot be," exclaimed Barere, "that men really attached to liberty will imitate the most frightful excesses of despotism!" He proved to the Convention, after his fashion, out of Sallust, that such arbitrary courts may indeed, for a time, be severe only on real criminals, but must inevitably degenerate into instruments of private cupidity and revenge.
'Good gods! noble Sallust! what have we done not to attend to this before? Hear me read! "Nydia, the slave, to Sallust, the friend of Glaucus! I am a prisoner in the house of Arbaces. Hasten to the praetor! procure my release, and we shall yet save Glaucus from the lion.
When the punishment is severe, men will remember the severity rather than the crime." He argues all this extremely well. The speech is one of great ingenuity, whether the words be the words of Sallust or of Cæsar.
Arbaces! and at this hour! Accept this cup. 'Nay, gentle Sallust; it is on business, not pleasure, that I venture to disturb thee. How doth thy charge? they say in the town that he has recovered sense.
Yet Cæsar did resist, and triumphed; and, judging from their after-lives, we should say that the Young Pompeys would have had small hesitation in raising their sticks against their august governor, had he proved too disobedient. A few years earlier, according to Sallust, a Roman, one Fulvius, had caused his son to be put to death, because he had sought to join Catiline.
Sallust alludes, it is true, to the fact of the speech he puts into the mouth of the tribune Memmius being essentially genuine, but the speeches given in the senate on the occasion of the Catilinarian conspiracy are very different from the same orations as they appear in Cicero. Livy makes his ancient Romans wrangle and chop logic with all the subtlety of a Hortensius or a Scaevola.
The slaves, in the interim, were constantly kept upon the alert by the vigilant Sallust, who chased one cup by another with a celerity which seemed as if he were resolved upon exhausting those capacious cellars which the reader may yet see beneath the house of Diomed. The worthy merchant began to repent his choice, as amphora after amphora was pierced and emptied.
The Tacitus, thus universally proclaimed, and for nearly a dozen generations, not to be a competent master of his own tongue, is not the Tacitus of the History, it is the "Tacitus" of the Annals; and when hereafter I point out who this "Tacitus" of the Annals was, an Italian "Grammaticus," or "Latin writer" of the fifteenth century, the reader will not be at all surprised that he every now and then slips and trips in Latin; on the contrary, the reader would be amazed if it were not so; because he would regard it as a thing more than phenomenal, as a matter partaking of the miraculous; he must consider himself as coming in contact with a being altogether superhuman; if the "Tacitus" of the fifteenth century, who, as a Florentine, may have been a complete master of the choicest Tuscan, had written with the correctness of the Tacitus of the first century, who, as befitted a "civis Romanus" of consular rank, was perfectly skilled in his native tongue; aye, quite as much so as Livy, Sallust, or any other accomplished man of letters of ancient Rome.
Jupiter's temple wants reforming sadly, said Lepidus, who was a great reformer for all but himself. 'They say that Arbaces the Egyptian has imparted some most solemn mysteries to the priests of Isis, observed Sallust. 'He boasts his descent from the race of Rameses, and declares that in his family the secrets of remotest antiquity are treasured.
The dispassionate judgment of the Western emperor could clearly perceive, and accurately pursue, his own and the public interest; and the sovereign of the East, who imitated with equal docility the various examples which he received from his elder brother, was sometimes guided by the wisdom and virtue of the præfect Sallust.
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