Sallust is a historian who has been continuously studied since the late nineteenth century, with increasing interest, especially in his famous digressions, in recent years. However, Shaw’s monograph edited by Brill is certainly not lacking in originality. Shaw’s choice to focus on digressions in order to extract Sallust’s literary and political standpoint has proved a very fruitful one. What is indeed original and – I would dare to say – ground-breaking in Shaw’s approach to digressions is not only their analysis as integral parts of the whole narrative but also – and more importantly – their association with contemporary intellectual debates and historiographical trends.
This new contribution of the book is described in the “Introduction” (pp. 1–41). Shaw recontextualises the intellectual life between Republic and Principate. Roman authors of the era tend to contribute via various genres and approaches to a shared set of discourses, especially on the state of Rome and on Roman identity. Shaw argues that Sallust uses historiography to contribute to those wider debates of his era and distinguishes three ways in which the historian sets himself apart from the historiographical mainstream: his choice and particular realisation of monographic form, his untypical prefaces and his strong reliance on digressions and direct speeches as important parts of his analysis on contemporary debates. Shaw generally views digressions as a special opportunity for Sallust to engage with his intellectual milieu.
Starting from the idea that digressions carry much of the argumentative weight of the whole, the aim of Chapter 1 (“Digression and Historical argument”, pp. 42–116) is to focus more heavily than earlier scholarship on the thematic relationships between the digressions and the texts within which they are embedded, as well as on the relationship manifested in the digressions between the historian and his wider context. Based on the analysis of digressions in classical rhetorical textbooks and demonstrating that Sallust’s practice of dispositio is manifest in his manipulation of chronology and time on specific occasions and in the inclusion of additional elements in his narrative, Shaw suggests a new definition of historiographical digression following narratological criteria: digressions are defined as all those passages which distort or interrupt historical chronology, including manipulations of order (anachronies) and speed (pauses). By then considering the digressive practice of Sallust’s predecessors, he shows that digression in historiography admits of considerable variation.
Shaw then establishes the body of material that will be investigated in the rest of the book in a table, drawing some preliminary conclusions regarding the digressive practice of Sallust: a) Sallust tends to introduce or conclude digressions more explicitly, when and where the immediate relevance of the material is less clear. b) The material included in the digressions is in nearly all cases thematically close to Sallust’s subject-matter. c) However, their wide variation in terms of subject-matter and approach is one of their notable characteristics, thus allowing Sallust to participate in a wider set of contemporary intellectual discourses.
In the next chapter (Chapter 2: Setting the Scene: Rome and Africa, pp. 117–195), Shaw firstly turns his attention to the analysis of two programmatic digressions. In the famous archeologia (Cat. 6–13), Sallust’s idiosyncratic perspective on Roman history is highlighted by important references to the tropes of ethnography in the digression. The enrichment of his historiographical narrative with the generic norms of ethnography (a subject of increasing interest to a Roman audience) provides an opportunity for consideration of Roman values from an outside perspective and serves to distinguish Sallust’s approach from conventional treatments of Roman history. Without challenging Shaw’s illuminating analysis on ethnographic elements of the digression, I think that he tends to underestimate Sallust’s intention to provide a clear chronological framework for the trajectory of Rome’s decline (cf. p. 148 sq.): Sallust’s discussion of the vices which affected Rome after 146 B.C. is – admittedly – confused, but a careful reading of the passage shows that Sallust does indeed provide a specific historical reference point for the introduction and development of each vice (cf. Georgios Vassiliades, La res publica et sa décadence: de Salluste à Tite-Live, Bordeaux 2020, pp. 69–81).
The author then discusses the implications and the purpose of the distinctive ethnographic/outside perspective offered in the archeologia. According to Shaw, the destruction of Carthage is not invested with the causal role it receives in later works, where it is linked to the subsequent removal of metus hostilis, but appears as just one stage in the list of Roman military successes; Rome’s decline is instead analysed by Sallust, who adopts an outsider’s perspective here, as an inevitable evolution in the context of the universalist idea of translatio imperii. This could explain the central role of fortuna in Sallust’s theory. Whereas Shaw’s points on the absence of the theory of metus hostilis in the Bellum Catilinae and on the ethnographic model pervading the digression are well-argued, I think that he goes too far when he attributes to Sallust a deterministic view, according to which Rome’s trajectory to decline was the work of an immutable fortuna and thus inevitable in the context of translatio imperii. (cf. Vassiliades, op. cit., pp. 290–300).
The second case study in Chapter 2 is the African digression in Jug. 17–19, in which two aspects are considered: the first is the way in which the three parts of the digression situate the continent in relation to different ways of thinking about the world, by alluding to and showing familiarity with different kinds of sources. The second aspect is related to the ways in which Sallust deviates from the existing tradition within the digression. Sallust’s deviations stress the distinctiveness of his project and tend to heighten the apparent significance and relevance (for contemporary Rome) of the Jugurthine war.
Chapter 3 (Politics, Expediency and Thucydides’ Theorem) (pp. 196–285) sets out to stress how Sallust contributes in his own distinctive way to contemporary political positions through the digressions on the state of the Roman people at the time of Catiline’s conspiracy (Cat. 36.4–39.5) and on the mos partium et factionum (Jug. 41–42). According to Shaw, Sallust should not be viewed as a devoted Caesarean; it would be more productive to see his work as political, in the sense that it promotes the observations of a politically astute, but no longer personally invested observer. Digressions are there to substantiate the thematic claims regarding the novelty of Catiline’s crime (Cat. 4.3–4) and the importance of the civil strife for which the Jugurthine war provided the first spark (Jug. 5.1–2).
In Cat. 36.4–39.5, Sallust draws from established opinions on the role of the plebs and the tribunate, but what is distinctive in his analysis is that he also stresses the culpability of the established members of the Senate, by introducing historical distortions in his account. The model of the malum publicum of cyclical partisan strife and the stress on the dominance of expediency over the public good is central to Sallust’s contribution, which supplements contemporary discourses by drawing them together by reference to the Thucydidean schema in his digression on stasis (Thuc. 3.82–84).
The digression on the mos partium et factionum not only articulates the wider political framework of his monograph’s main topic; it also divides the monograph in two parts, both illustrating the destructive nature of factional politics which led to the uastitas Italiae (Jug. 5.1–2), but with a significant change of emphasis between them. In the first part (Jug. 5–40), Sallust’s focus is on the auaritia of the nobiles which led to the growth of inuidia, culminating in the quaestio Mamiliana. At this point, Sallust inserts – as a kind of gloss – his famous digression in which the historian explains the historical background of partisan strife between the nobiles and the plebs. The quaestio Mamiliana marks a shift in the balance of power in favour of the plebs, which is reflected in the second half of the monograph (Jug. 43–114), where Sallust no longer targets the nobiles but the plebs. Accordingly, following Shaw’s analysis, the characterisation of Metellus and Sulla is favourable, whereas Marius is the person who embodies partisan strife in this phase of the monograph.
This is indeed an innovative and convincing reading of the overall structure of the monograph, but I must express my reservations concerning Shaw’s reading of the characterisation of the three main heroes, who would better be read not as black or white, but rather as more complex, evolving figures (cf. Vassiliades, op.cit., pp. 435–453).
In Chapter 4 (“Windows on the Soul: Psychology, Philosophy and Sallut’s Portraiture”, pp. 286–363), Shaw focuses on Sallust’s treatment of specific individuals in passages which he considers digressive and explores the ways in which the portraits of Catiline (Cat. 5, 14–16.3), Sempronia (Cat. 25) and Jugurtha (Jug. 57–9.3) reflect: a) the interaction between those individuals and large-scale moral trends in Roman society, b) the perversion of their initial motives, and c) the existence and implicit depiction for each of them of a counterfactual, side-shadowed good version, which might have prevailed had they not been perverted.
This latter innovative aspect is considered against Sallust’s philosophical theory in the prefaces. The ambiguity of gloria in Sallust’s prefaces is analysed as his contribution to a contemporary debate, with reference to Cicero’s De officiis, where Cicero suggests that politicians’ excessive pursuit of gloria destabilised the State through civil wars and that gloria should thus be recalibrated. Shaw then provides, as an example of Sallust’s engagement with Cicero’s theory, a very illuminating and original reading of the much-debated synkrisis between Caesar and Cato (Cat. 54). The qualities ascribed to each of the two men are then read in the light of their analysis in De officiis. Therefore, Shaw interestingly suggests that Caesar’s qualities appear good, but may equally be motivated by self-interest and expediency, whereas Cato’s qualities are less mutable and ambivalent.
In Chapter 5 (“Imperial History in the Historiae”, pp. 364–424), Shaw turns his attention to the geographical digressions of Sallust’s last work. For methodological reasons, the corpus under examination is then narrowed down to the canonical five geographical passages. Shaw outlines for each the narrative “pivots” that may link them to the narrative. The scholar argues that the inclusion of geographical digressions should not be explained just as a feature of the historiographical genre or an opportunity for providing amusement to the reader, since Sallust’s deployment of geographical material is innovative in many respects. Shaw suggests that the geographical digressions should be viewed as Sallust’s contribution to the general tendency of mediation of the Greek intellectual tradition for Roman audiences. Furthermore, Shaw demonstrates that these digressions serve a similar argumentative role to those in Sallust’s earlier works. The two pieces of text which are addressed as contextualising the digressions are Hist. 1.9R, stressing the close relationship between the expansion of the Roman empire and its subsequent moral decline, and the appearance of the Isles of the Blest in Book 1 (Hist. 1.87–90R), where reference is made to Sertorius’ project of retiring to those isolated islands. The utopian tone of this story reflects contemporary utopian thinking related to the possibility of escape from civil war. The geographical digressions articulate and exemplify these themes.
In the “Conclusion” (pp. 425–442), the major arguments advanced in this book are briefly but thoroughly outlined, with a special focus on the importance of dispositio, Sallust’s close engagement with his intellectual context and his deployment of a coherent and idiosyncratic political model in the digressions of his works. Furthermore, Shaw briefly considers the legacy of Sallust’s work, which supports his reading of Sallust as a distinctive and important Late Republican voice.
The volume concludes with a rich and multilingual bibliography, a helpful Index locorum and a General Index. Despite some reservations on some specific lines of interpretation explained above, this book deserves close reading by any scholar dealing with Sallust’s work and especially with his digressions. Scholars will ultimately profit from Shaw’s innovative and ground-breaking conclusions.