Sallust's Moral History Of The Ancient Roman Republic

What's up and welcome back to Moan Inc. If you guys are new here, then hello. My name is Erica and it is a pleasure to have you joining me today on the channel. Because for today's video, as you can see from the title, we are going to be chatting about all things Sallust context. Now before we can get into that, please don't forget to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon so that you know every single time I post in the future. And now that you've so kindly joined this nerdy little corner of the internet, let's get into it. Sallust was born in 86 BC or BCE and he dies around 35 BC or BCE. Now it is very important for me to just highlight those dates. That is really right at the end of Sulla doing his whole Sulla thing. I'm not going to explain Sulla, we can do a whole video about Sulla, but if you guys are familiar with these names, just that we can conceptualize when Sallust is existing. Sulla's on one end and 35 is about, was that nine years after Julius Caesar is assassinated and four years before the battle of Actium. So that's when he's existing. He's existing at this incredible time of Roman history. He is known as a novus homo. So in Latin, that means a new man. That's the same status that we get when it comes to Cicero, as I've already discussed, but I don't think I included that Latin note. So there you go. Sallust is a really interesting case because he is not from the city of Rome. So he is from here on a map. I'm not even going to attempt to say any of these words because I've tried about eight times on camera and I can't pronounce any of them. So I'm just going to leave you guys with the image. That's where he's from. So remember how I said that there's no such thing as a rags to riches story. Sallust and Cicero technically come from, they have the same title. So it does mean that they have to rise above people looking down on them, shall we just say? But at the same time, they are not like just below the poverty line. So it was harder for him in the same way it was harder for Cicero. To become the first member of their family in the Senate and to try and open up that door for them was a lot more difficult than a lot of other people. And so when I say it's like a rags to riches story, it is not a rags to riches story in how we understand rags to riches story. It's the closest that we're going to get though. So he's a new Roman man and he ends up being elected as a Tribune of the Plebs. This happens in 52 BCE. Again, like I said, this is an incredible feat and he should have been incredibly proud of himself. And he tells us in a number of his works, specifically in Bellum Catalinae, why it is that he wants to be elected and to become a senator in the first place. And he said, this is the long and short of it, this is not an exact quote, but he basically says that he wanted to go in and to help, to rule, to kind of, you know, see how this is working and to kind of, you know, be a part of this mechanism, thinking that he was going to walk into a Senate of people that were really gunning to help Rome and to uphold it and all of that kind of stuff. And instead he walked into a Senate of dishonesty, of distrust, and just a horrible place to be. Now, Stallus faces this very quickly and something that I quite enjoy reading when you kind of like try and figure out who he is. And also you get his voice in his writing, but you can tell that he just does not take it from anyone. And pretty much the second he gets into the Senate, he realizes all these people are liars, all these people are just power hungry, which is another thing that he says about them. And he refuses to let them all say anything else that they think, you know, oh, well, if I say this, I'm going to come across better and like, I believe in this and blah, blah. Stallus is in the corner of all of these speeches being like, no, you don't, don't lie to me. All you want is this, all you want is that, or you just want this person because they're backing this person up, but you're all horrible people. In particular, he really, really does not like Cicero, really doesn't like Cicero. And this is pretty much what scholars and what ancient historians, what modern historians have kind of pinpointed as probably the thing that ends up getting Stallus expelled from the Senate in 50 BCE. Now around this time, there are a number of trials happening, but most particular, there is the trial of Clodius Polka. Well, not the trial of Clodius Polka, but the trial that involved Clodius Polka, because we hear about this in Cicero's speeches and Cicero, there's like this whole thing where it's not really that important, but basically as this defense is happening, Stallus is not taking it. He doesn't want to hear it. He doesn't like Cicero and he reprimands the out of him. I always say that he's just yelling all the time. That's really how I picture Stallus and that ends up getting him expelled from the Roman Senate. Now, luckily for him, he is very good friends with Julius Caesar. So when this happens in 50 BCE, I feel like I have to say this all the time, BCE or BC, those are just different clarifications of the years. One implies religion, one doesn't. For people who always comment and they want to know the differences, one is just either you say BC, which is before Christ, or you say BCE, which is before Common Era. That's it. But regardless of that, when this happens in 50, then Julius Caesar comes to his aid and Julius Caesar gets him back into the Senate. He ends up being back where he should be. Everything seems to be going okay for a very small period of time before he is, again, Stallus is back to his own shit. And so therefore, he is actually given a legion. Now a legion, if you guys don't know, a legion is 5,000 men. It is a group of the army, right? So when you say you have one legion or two legions or whatever it is, it's just telling us the size of your army. And one legion is 5,000 men. And so Stallus is given a legion and he is told, hey, go and do this military thing because people are not happy with you. And he is unsuccessful in effectively commanding the legion in 49. But this is not the only time he's given a legion. And then this happens again in 47 because they want him to dispel a mutiny that's happening. So they tell him again, go give this another go. And in 47, he's unsuccessful again. However, in 46, his military bad luck, shall we call it, his non-military-esque brain actually has a success. He ends up going with Caesar to North Africa, where Caesar is going off and pushing down and having his own battles and all that kind of stuff there. And when they end up going through Africa, really Caesar is successful, but Stallus is a part of that. And so therefore that's in 46. And Caesar actually leaves him there as the governor of what they call Africa Nova, which is just new Africa. However, you would think this would all be brilliant in 46 when this is happening. And what actually happens is that the Romans see that Stallus is doing this. They come back and they're like, we got to charge you, mate, because you are not acting correctly out here. Turns out they have been tipped off to him committing malpractice. Can you say that? But he's not acting correctly in North Africa. And specifically, they want to put him on trial for, I had to write this down, extortion and plundering is specifically what they are saying no at. But guess who comes in to save the day? Again. Yeah, Caesar. Caesar shows up and makes sure that our lovely Stallus does not have to go on trial for these things. And that is really when Stallus understands that he is not built for any kind of political military career, because to have a military career and to be a politician, we're very closely linked in the ancient world. And that's kind of when Stallus is like, I don't think that I'm cut out for this. I don't think that's really like the best thing for me. Now, remember how I said that he wanted to get into the Roman Senate in the first place? That really, when he starts writing, which is after this, he dedicates the rest of his life to writing. And when he explains in Bellum Catalina, which I'll go into in a hot second, why he wanted to get into it was not only the stuff that I was mentioning earlier, which is that he was expecting to find out his honesty and all this kind of stuff. But what's really interesting about his writing is that he uses this word animus to kind of say, like, my soul was really drawn to this area of life. Like my soul was pulling me towards this. But now I realize that my goal was not to actually be within the Senate, to not actually be part of the government, to not actually be a big military commander. My soul was dragging me towards this because it's my job to share what goes on in these rooms, to share what these people are like with the general public, which is what he ends up doing. Sallust has three works that he ended up publishing, which are the most famous. We have Bellum Catalinae, we have Bellum Jugurthinum, and then he has his histories. Bellum Catalinae was written between 43 and 42 BCE. Now this is important because it is right after Caesar is assassinated. And the book translates, like the title translates, in case you guys don't know Latin, to Catiline's War. And it doesn't specifically only talk about Catiline. I have mentioned Catiline in Cicero's video. No doubt we're going to talk about Catiline again and again and again because you can never get away from him when you're talking about the late stages of the Roman Republic. However, it doesn't specifically talk about Catiline himself. Catiline is mentioned, Catiline is discussed. However, the purpose of this text, which is without a doubt the most famous text, is to really look at the moral decline of Rome. Now, I'm not going to give you too many details because then we have nothing to talk about in all those videos. But when it comes to Bellum Catalinae, he really claims, Salus really claims, that the morality of Rome has been declining since the fall of Carthage. And that is really the tipping point that Salus says is where everything started to go really, really bad. And because of this moral decline, he's not really fussed with all of the details regarding movements of Rome, what they did during this period, how they end up expanding, et cetera, et cetera. He is more so focused on the morality of not only Rome itself, but the Roman people and the Roman government and how that ends up impacting the entire state. It's a really fascinating, fascinating take on history. He doesn't like anyone aside from, aside from Julius Caesar and Cato. He says that actually Julius Caesar and what's his name? Cato. I just said his name. How did I forget that? But Julius Caesar and Cato are really fabulous examples of heroes of Rome. And that's why he likes Julius Caesar so much, because they actually embody the original morality of what Rome was and not of like all of this deception, corruption that is currently poisoning the state itself. Bellum Jugurthanum, which is the second text, as I mentioned before, was written between 41 and 40 BC. And essentially what that is, is that it just talks about the power struggles that were happening within Rome when war broke out against the Numidian King, who's known as Jugurtha. So that's what that is all about, because the Numidian King, he rebels against Rome. The history is unfortunately only fragments remain. So there's not much that we can talk about with regards to that book. But that describes the history of Rome from 78 BC to at least 67 BC and supposedly did it on a year to year basis. So that's really sort of a general scope of Sallust. And he discusses all of them from a moral perspective. So he's not really looking at the movements necessarily. And that tends to be one of the biggest things against him that we see. People say that because he's so focused on the morality, rather than the accuracy of the movements of people and of the decisions of the government and all that kind of stuff, the Senate, I should say, that because of that, it's riddled with inaccuracies. That's the main thing against him. As I always say, when it comes to reading ancient history, you have to really be careful when it comes to reading these things and taking them at face value. So when we're discussing the morality of things, be aware that many people have pointed to Sallust and said, yeah, that's great, but that's actually not what happened. So welcome to being an ancient historian. It's lovely to have you. Sallust is really widely regarded for his moral perspective of history. In fact, he is one of those people that, you know, when we had this like boom of people really loving like the Roman Republic, when it came to like the American founding fathers, I know a bunch of you guys are based in the US. When we have all of these notes of these groups of people that start new governments or that try to overthrow an old government for a new government, they're constantly talking about the Roman Republic and they're constantly upholding the Roman Republic. And the references that we have from these people about the Roman Republic are specifically from Sallust and what he talks about, the morality, the values, all of that kind of stuff that Rome should have had in the time that he was existing, that he didn't end up seeing because those were like the heydays of the Roman Republic. And so it's that note from Sallust that really gets passed on when people talk about in modern times, idolizing the Roman Republic, which, you know, you can have your own views of that and whatever it is, I'm just trying to, you know, make Sallust seem more important because most people don't know who he is and they don't care. But he is absolutely fascinating. Such an important read, such an important read and definitely somebody that gets glossed over, I think, for people like Cicero, et cetera, et cetera. That though is everything that I have to say on Sallust. So thank you guys so much for tuning into this video. If you are curious and want to read ahead, you guys want to just jump right in after watching this video, you can find all of the links in the description below to some free online sources as well as getting, you know, a physical copy. Obviously, that's not for free, but all the links are in the description below. I feel like nobody looks at the description below. I keep getting questions in comment sections, people being like, what would you recommend? It's all down in the description below. Check the links. Please do not be shy because I don't include all the links down there for them to get ignored. But thank you guys so much for tuning in and I'll be seeing you next time with more videos here on Moan Inc. I'll see you guys then.