Abstract
Gaius Sallustius Crispus wrote a simpler, easier Latin than Tacitus, but his themes were much the same, and Tacitus considered him Rome’s ‘most brilliant’ historian.1 Sallust became the most popular Roman historian of the Middle Ages,2 and he remained in the grammar-school curriculum throughout the Western world, which would have made him familiar to most educated Americans.3 John Adams echoed Tacitus in 1781, calling Sallust ‘one of the most polished and perfect of the Roman Historians, every Period of whom, and I had almost said every Syllable and every Letter is worth Studying’.4 Even so, ‘the splendid authority of Sallust’ took place behind Cicero and Tacitus in Adams’s Defence, 5 and this reflected his relative popularity among American revolutionaries generally6
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See B. Smalley, ‘Sallust in the Middle Ages’ in R. R. Bolgar (ed.), Classical Influences on European Culture A.D. 500–1500 (Cambridge, 1971), 165–75; Meyer Reinhold, The Classick Pages: Classical Reading of Eighteenth Century Americans (University Park, Penn., 1975), 99.
See e.g., Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783 (New York, 1970), 175; Cf. supra, p. 21.
John Adams to John Quincy Adams, in L. H. Butterfield, (ed.), Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), IV:117.
On Sallust in America, see Meyer Reinhold, The Classick Pages: Classical Reading of Eighteenth-Century Americans (University Park, Pa., 1975), 99–106; Cf. idem, Classica, 96,153. On Sallust generally, see Ronald Syme, Sallust (Berkeley, Cal., 1964); Uto Paananen, Sallust’s Politico-Social Terminology, Its Use and Biographical Significance (Helsinki, 1972); Viktor Pöschl (ed.), Grundwerke romischer Staatsgesin-nung in den Geschichtswerken des Sallust (Berlin, 1940) (reissued 1967).
Quincy, Memoir, 350, cited in Meyer Reinhold, The Classick Pages: Classical Reading of Eighteenth-Century Americans (University Park, Penn., 1975).
On Sallust’s intentions and political ideas, see Donald C. Earl, The Political Thought of Sallust (Cambridge, England, 1961); George M. Paul, A Historical Commentary on Sallust’s Bellum Jugurthinum (Liverpool, England, 1984); Thomas Francis Scanlon, Spes Frustrata: A Reading of Sallust (Heidelberg, 1987); Ronald Syme, Sallust (Berkeley, 1964); Étienne Tiffou, Essai sur la pensée morale de Salluste à la lumière de ses prologues (Paris, 1973).
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© 1994 M. N. S. Sellers
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Sellers, M.N.S. (1994). Sallust and Corruption. In: American Republicanism. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13347-5_16
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