The Historians' History of the World 05 [The Roman Republic]

A Roman Urn

The example and criticism of Cicero lead to the conclusion that Roman oratory generally had a tendency to be redundant, if not wordy. This tendency may be ascribed to the prevailing mode in which the young orators of the day sought to acquire skill in speaking. The schools of the rhetorical teachers were thronged by them; and here they were taught to declaim fluently on any subject, without reference to passion or feeling or earnestness of purpose. The Romans of a former generation endeavoured to crush such schools; and it was not at Rome that the most celebrated teachers were to be found. Athens and Rhodes were the fashionable universities, as we may call them, to which the young Romans resorted, when they had finished their schooling at Rome. After learning grammar and reading Latin and Greek poets in their boyhood, they repaired to the more famous haunts of Grecian learning to study a little geometry and a little philosophy; but it was to rhetoric or the acquirement of a facile power of speaking on any given subject that the ambitious youth devoted their chief efforts.

Education in Greek literature led many persons in this period to compose Greek memoirs of the stirring scenes in which they had lived or acted. Examples of this kind had been set as early as the Second Punic War by Cincius and Fabius. It now became very common; but many began to employ the vernacular language. C. Fannius Strabo, who mounted the walls of Carthage by the side of Ti. Gracchus, and his contemporary L. Cælius Antipater, wrote Latin histories famous in their time. Both were thought worthy of abridgment by Brutus. The former is commended by Sallust, the latter was preferred to Sallust by the emperor Hadrian. Even Cicero commended Antipater as an improver of Latin composition; his follower Asellio, says the orator, returned to the meagre dullness of the ancient annalists. Then came L. Cornelius Sisenna, who witnessed the bloody scenes of the Social and First Civil wars and wrote their history. Cicero commends his style; Sallust speaks with praise of his diligence, but hints at his subserviency to Sulla and the senate. But the great men who made history at this epoch also took up the pen to write history. Q. Lutatius Catulus, the colleague of Marius, left an account of the Cimbrian War. The good Rutilius Rufus employed his leisure in penning an historical work. Sulla composed a memoir of his own political life, to which Plutarch often refers; but from the specimens which he gives the dictator seems not to have been scrupulously impartial in his narrative. Lucullus composed similar memoirs. Cicero drew up a Greek notice of his consulate with his own ready pen, and endeavoured to persuade L. Lucceius to undertake a similar task. Even the grim Marius wishes his deeds commemorated.

The Commentaries of Cæsar have been already quoted as illustrating one characteristic of the great dictator’s mind. His pen was taken up by several of his officers—A. Hirtius, who completed the narrative of the Gallic War, C. Oppius, to whom the memoirs of the dictator’s wars in Egypt, Africa, and Spain are often attributed, L. Cornelius Balbus, and others. But the most remarkable prose writer of the late republican era is C. Sallustius Crispus, familiarly known to us as Sallust. The two works that remain to us from the pen of this vigorous writer, the account of the Catilinarian conspiracy and the Jugurthine War, are rather to be styled political pamphlets than histories. Sallust was, as we have mentioned, an ardent partisan of the Marian and Cæsarian party. He had been expelled from the senate. Dislike of the reigning oligarchy appears at every turn, notwithstanding the semblance of impartiality assumed by a man who practised the profligacy which he indignantly denounces. But Sallust’s writings are valuable in a literary point of view, because they disclose the terse and concentrated energy of which the Latin language was capable, qualities little favoured by the oratorical tendencies of the day, but used with marvellous effect in a later age by Tacitus.