After the Past

Provides a unique and accessible understanding of Sallust and his influence on writing the history of Rome

Gaius Sallustius Crispus (‘Sallust’, 86-35 BCE) is the earliest Roman historian from whom any works survive. His two extant writings focus on crucial moments of a political, ­social, and ethical revolution with profound consequences for his own life and those of his readers: Catiline’s famous rebellion in 63 BCE, and the war waged against the North African king Jugurtha fifty years earlier. This book examines what it meant to write the history of these contentious events while their effects were still so vividly felt.

One of the first book-length treatments in English of the author in over fifty years, After the Past: Sallust on History and Writing History offers a comprehensive reading of Sallust’s works using the tools of narratology and intertextual analysis to reveal the changing functions of historiography at the end of the Roman Republic. Andrew Feldherr explores many of the most interesting and significant aspects of the historian’s accomplishment, including his interrogation of the relationship between history and rhetoric, his representation of space, his interest in the emotions, and his consciousness of his work as a written artifact. These investigations form the basis of a unified and distinctive analysis of how Sallust confronted the challenge of writing his society’s history of discord and violence.

After the Past: Sallust on History and Writing History is an accessible and valuable resource for students of Latin literature and Roman history from the advanced undergraduate through professional levels, and for all those with an interest in historiography as a genre in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the literary history of the late Republic and triumviral period.