Sallust's 'Jugurtha': Concord, Discord, and the Digressions

50 SALLUST'S JUGURTIHA: CONCORD, DISCORD, AND DIGRESSIONS
and represented his interests? (There is nothing surprising about Sallust's
joining Caesar in 49 B.c.; like others who had been excluded from political
advancement, he saw that a Caesarian victory was a precondition for any
further role in public life.)5
Whatever our view of the historical Sallust's political affiliation, the
passage explicitly advises the reader that the monograph he is about to read
discusses the beginning of the sequence of events that led to the
devastation of Italy: the civil wars between Sulla and the 'Marians' in the
80s, but for Sallust's contemporaries perhaps more immediately those of
the 40s B.C. The external and internal conflicts are tightly connected, and
Sallust links the two around the polarity of concord or co-operation versus
discord and envy (there are of course other moral issues whose consideration
binds his text together). That conceptual polarity is vividly brought to
the fore by the deathbed advice given by Micipsa to his sons: 'small things
grow as a result of concord, but the greatest things will waste away as a
result of discord.'6
The three digressions separate off and introduce phases of the war under
various Roman commanders who represent different ethical states. A: the
catastrophic Roman failures under the command of the nobles Bestia and
Albinus, who notwithstanding their hereditary claim to virtus suffer from
the vices of avaritia and imperitia. B: the second phase, in which the
aristocratic general Metellus is indeed competent, but fails to make the best
use of his subordinate Marius because of his arrogance. Finally C, the last
phase of the war, in which Marius is successful, but not on his own. The
final surrender of Jugurtha to the Romans by the Mauretanian king
Bocchus is brought about by Marius' quaestor Sulla, to whom Sallust
devotes a detailed and ambiguously positive character-sketch (ch. 95). The
reader cannot ignore the moral: the best noble commander cannot succeed
if he ignores the talent of a novus homo; but a talented novus homo can only
succeed in co-operation with a talented aristocrat. Marius and Sulla
together brought success for Roman arms against the external threat;
contrast the 'bellum atque vastitas Italiae' later brought about by their
discord, which 'I am not sure whether I would be more ashamed or more
disgusted to narrate' (incertum habeopudeat anpigeat magis disserere, 95.4).
Sallust's other themes are secondary to this emphasis on co-operation.
He has subordinated his selection of narrative material to this moral theme
to the extent that geographical or chronological precision, as commentators
constantly remind us, are of little interest to him. Thus he fails to
make explicit reference to the winters that separated the campaigning
seasons of 108, 107, and 106 B.C. (Syme, Sallust, p. 145; Paul, p. 198;