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He has cast in his lot with that gang of knavish Cæsarians centring around Marcus Antonius, Cælius, and that Caius Sallustius whom our excellent censors have just ejected from the Senate, because of his evil living and Cæsarian tendencies. Do I need to say more of him? A worthless, abandoned, shameless profligate!" Sallust, the well-known historian.
I failed to restore Sallustius to his old place in his affections, and yet he was on the spot. I tell you this because the latter used to find fault with me in regard to you. Well, he has found by personal experience that he is not so easy to pacify, and that on my part no zeal has been lacking either on his or your behalf. I have betrothed Tulliola to C. Piso Frugi, son of Lucius.
The treatise is this work of Sallustius. The Christian fathers from Minucius Felix onward have shown us what was the most vulnerable point of Paganism: the traditional mythology. Sallustius deals with it at once. The Akroâtês, or pupil, he says in Section 1, needs some preliminary training.
But when you return, ... if you succeed in reading the Empedoclea of Sallustius, I shall regard you as a hero, yet scarcely human. "has been beheaded with the axe of Tenes," mythical founder and legislator of Tenedos, whose laws were of Draconian severity. I have translated the reading multæ tamen artis, which has been changed by some to multæ etiam artis.
He charges Mark Antony with insanity, writing rather to make men stare, than to be understood; and by way of sarcasm upon his depraved and fickle taste in the choice of words, he writes to him thus: "And are you yet in doubt, whether Cimber Annius or Veranius Flaccus be more proper for your imitation? Whether you will adopt words which Sallustius Crispus has borrowed from the 'Origines' of Cato?
It little matters who suggested, and who agreed to the suggestion; his thoughts, and any credit that came from the thoughts, are his friend's as much as his own. Sallustius then may be taken to represent in the most authoritative way the Pagan reaction of Julian's time, in its final struggle against Christianity.
He has lost his 'comrade in the ranks', and now is 'Odysseus left alone'. So he writes, quoting the Iliad; Sallustius has been carried by God outside the spears and arrows: 'which malignant men were always aiming at you, or rather at me, trying to wound me through you, and believing that the only way to beat me down was by depriving me of the fellowship of my true friend and fellow-soldier, the comrade who never flinched from sharing my dangers.
And yet I, who encourage you, cannot encourage myself. I have sent that faithful fellow Clodius Philhetærus home, because he was hampered with weakness of the eyes. Sallustius seems likely to outdo everybody in his attentions. Pescennius is exceedingly kind to me; and I have hopes that he will always be attentive to you. Sica had said that he would accompany me; but he has left Brundisium.
The fact of Pompeius wintering among the Vaccæi is perhaps in favour of a north-west Segontia; but still I think that Saguntum was the battle-field. The letter of Pompeius to the Senate is in the third book of the Fragments of the Roman History of Sallustius.
The book which I have ventured to call a Creed or Catechism is the work of Sallustius About the Gods and the World, a book, I should say, about the length of the Scottish Shorter Catechism. It is printed in the third volume of Mullach's Fragmenta Philosophorum; apart from that, the only edition generally accessible and that is rare is a duodecimo published by Allatius in 1539.
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