The History of Mind and the Philosophy of History in Sallust's Bellum Catilinae

Abstract

With the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 BCE, the political fortunes of one of Caesar's lesser political partisans began to wane. Gaius Sallustius Crispus, a minor political figure, formerly involved in scandal and now left without a backer, retired from politics and began to write history. His first project was an account of a failedcoup d'étatfrom some decades before. Sallust recorded the efforts of a thwarted candidate for Rome's highest office named Lucius Sergius Catilina to raise an army of disaffected Romans and foreigners and to install himself and his partisans at Rome. In the end, though, nothing much came of the plot: some were arrested and killed; some fought and died; others who had not been caught in too manifest support of Catiline were suddenly expressing their enmity for the monster.