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ABSTRACT: The fragments and speeches of Sallust's Histories offer a late republican window into the events of the 70s and insight into immediately post-Sullan political life. Although Sallust wrote the speeches for a triumviral audience, he also preserved aspects of earlier political debate, and the speeches may be used with caution to understand politics in the politically charged environment of the 70s. In this environment, even those seeking to uphold Sullan policies hesitated to defend the dictator himself, and political figures of all loyalties manipulated public hatred of Sulla, deep divisions within the senate, and universal fear of renewed civil war.
Keywords: Sallust - Social Memory - Sulla - Republican Politics - Historiography
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In determining the shape of political discourse in the late Republic and the influence of Sulla, the 70s remain a dark spot. Scholars have made various arguments about immediate reactions to the dictator and the construction of his legacy in the later Republic, ranging from the position that Sulla was remembered with regret-tinged sympathy to the idea that he was viewed as a tyrant almost immediately.1 These arguments are necessarily based on the works of Cicero and Sallust, and conclusions depend on interpretation of these sources. While the interpretation of Cicero presents plenty of challenges of its own, his works at least provide securely dated and plentiful examples of how Sulla was treated by (some) public figures in the 60s and 50s. For the politics of the 70s, though, Ciceronian material is sparse, and we must turn chiefly to Sallust and the fragments of his Histories. There the interpretive problems multiply. As a triumviral author, Sallust was separated chronologically and politically from the events he describes;2 to complicate matters further, the bulk of the surviving material consists of speeches and letters that suffer not only from this chronological gap between event and narration but also from the usual processes of speechwriting by ancient historians and from our almost complete ignorance of their original context within the work.
Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that scholarly opinions of the historical value of Sallust's speeches and letters vary widely. While some have seen the speeches as stylized but ultimately faithful adaptations of original content, others argue...