De Bello Catilinario et Jurgthino | Page 2

time, was capable of restoring order and tranquillity. The position of a tribune of the people was a difficult one for Sallust: he was to some extent opposed to Milo, and consequently also to Cicero, who pleaded for Milo; but there exists a statement that he gave up his opposition; and he himself, in the introduction to his 'Catiline,' intimates that his honest endeavours for the good of the state drew upon him only ill-will and hatred. Two years later (B.C. 50), he was ejected from the senate by the censor Appius Claudius, one of the most zealous among the optimates. The other censor, L. Piso, did not protect either Sallust, or any of the others who shared the same fate with him, against this act of partiality. Rome was at that time governed by the most oppressive oligarchy, which was then mainly directed against Julius Caesar, who, as a reward for his brilliant achievements in extending the Roman dominion in Gaul, desired to be allowed to offer himself in his absence as a candidate for his second consulship--a desire which the people were willing to comply with, as it was based upon a law which had been passed some years before in favour of Caesar; but the optimates endeavoured in every way to oppose him, and drawing Pompey over to their side, they brought about a rupture between him and Caesar. Sallust was looked upon in the senate as a partisan of the latter, and this was the principal reason why he was deprived of his seat in the great council of the republic; and L. Piso, the father-in-law of Caesar, is said not to have opposed the partiality of his colleague in the censorship, in order to increase the number of Caesar's partisans. When, in B. C. 49, Caesar established his right by force of arms, Sallust went over to him, and was restored not only to his seat in the senate, but was advanced to the praetorship in the year B. C. 47. Sallust served, both before and during his year of office, in the capacity of a lieutenant in Caesar's armies. He also accompanied him to Africa in the war against the Pompeian party there, and after its successful termination, was left behind as proconsul of Numidia, which was made a Roman province. In the discharge of his duties, he is said to have indulged in extorting money from the new subjects of Rome. He was accused, but acquitted. This is the historical statement of Dion Cassius; but a hostile writer of doubtful authority mentions that, by paying 12,000 pieces of gold to Caesar (perhaps as damages for the injury done), he purchased his acquittal.
Hereupon Sallust withdrew from public life, to devote his leisure to literature, and the composition of works on the history of his native country; for, as after the murder of Caesar, in B. C. 44, the republic was again delivered over to a state of military despotism, peaceful advice was deprived of its influence. It need hardly be mentioned that Sallust, as he had qualified himself for the highest political career, and the great offices of the republic, must have been possessed of an independent property; but the statement, that he afterwards gave himself up to a life of luxury--that he purchased a villa at Tibur, which had formerly belonged to Caesar--and that he possessed a splendid mansion, with a garden laid out with elegant plantations and appropriate buildings, at Rome, near the Colline gate--is founded on the equivocal authority of a writer of a late period, who was hostile to him. It is indeed certain that there existed at Rome horti Sallustiani, in which Augustus frequently resided, and which were afterwards in the possession of the Roman emperors; but it is doubtful as to whether they had been acquired and laid out by our historian, or by his nephew, a Roman eques, and particular favourite of Augustus. The statement that Sallust married Terentia, the divorced wife of Cicero, is still more doubtful, and probably altogether fictitious.[1] There is, however, a statement of a contemporary, the learned friend of Cicero, M. Varro, which cannot be doubted--that in his earlier years Sallust, in the midst of the party-strife at Rome, kept up an illicit intercourse with the wife of Milo; but how much the hostility of party may have had to do with such a report, cannot be decided. In his writings, Sallust expresses a strong disgust of the luxurious mode of life, and the avarice and prodigality, of his contemporaries; and there can be no doubt that these repeated expressions of a stern morality excited both his contemporaries and subsequent writers to hunt up and divulge any moral foibles in his life and character, especially as in his compositions he struck into