Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

SALLUST
Many asyndeta do not effect brevity as such, but rather an impression of jerkiness
and spontaneity. The words seem to pour out uncontrolled, and often an
afterthought will be loosely appended. These aspects of brevity are closely
allied with the abruptness of sentence-ending and switch of construction which
still astonishes those who are habituated to smoothly articulated and inevitably
rounded periods. Sallust clearly liked to surprise his readers and keep them
wide awake: his staccato phraseology, highly conducive to point and epigram,
was ideally suited for the purpose. And so too was his aversion from balanced
phrases and clauses and his distaste for certain conventional terms, which he
paraphrases, varies, or turns back to front. The results of his tortuous manipulations
of word and phrase must have jarred horribly, as he intended, on many
contemporary ears.
That Sallust should be an innovator as well as an archaizer is perfectly
explicable: he claims the same freedom to develop and experiment with his
medium as was exercised by the early writers. Hence he coins words, extends
usage, and assimilates unfamiliar idiom. In his mixture of archaism and novelty
he may be compared with Lucretius. But, while Lucretius is often compelled
to experiment by his subject matter and metre, Sallust's innovations are largely
a matter of free choice. He was anti-suggestible in the extreme and spurned
convention. Hence his aggressive and tetchy style reflects the very nature of
the man.
Sallust's outspokenness and self-will commanded the attention of contemporaries
and posterity. He puts over his personality, real or assumed, very
forcefully: witness the violent opening words of the lugurtha. A man who
writes in so striking a manner is not readily ignored, and Sallust was being
blunt and provocative at a time when most people were beginning to temper
their words. Again his language and style, being pointedly, indeed contemptuously,
opposed to the main fashion of his age, could not fail to be exciting.
He was hated by some, enthusiastically imitated by others (see Sen. Epist.
114.17—18). And he posed an embarrassing problem for teachers, like
Qyintilian, who could neither pass him by nor easily reconcile his writing with
the ideals of style they tried to inculcate. Quintilian finds a convenient way out
by commending Sallust for advanced pupils, but not beginners (Jnst. 2.5.19).
Most of the critical comment on Sallust which survives from antiquity relates
to his expression, not his thought. But some writers, and those the weightiest,
believed that he had much to say of moment. Tacitus adopted his sceptical and
disenchanted view of Roman political life, and Augustine found in his observations
on the nature and causes of Rome's decadence congenial material to
employ in argument over the reasons for the city's final collapse. Again,
Sallust has largely contributed to determining the way in which the history of
the later Republic is conceived of in modern times.
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