The Blackwell-Bristol Lectures 2014 were sponsored by Wiley-Blackwell and organised by the Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition.

Andrew Feldherr is Professor of Classics at the University of Princeton.  His interests include republican and early imperial Latin language, literature and historiography. 
 The historian Sallust passed his life in an era of violent political conflict. His surviving works consist of two treatises on crucial moments of this conflict, the conspiracy of Catiline in 63 BCE to kill the elected consuls and take power and the contentious war against the Numidian king Jugurtha fifty years before. While the accidents of transmission have made these the oldest extant examples of historical writing in Latin, Sallust’s notorious emphasis on moral decline make him seem as though he imagined himself instead as Rome’s last historian. Both works focus on figures, ambiguous in their combination of virtues and vices, who attain power through propagating confusion and deception. And the historian puts the contested responses to the events he narrates at the beginning of new cycles of violence and social conflict.
 
The aim of these lectures will be to connect the histories Sallust tells with the history he writes. How do the models and anti-models for representing events offered within his narratives allow us to imagine the place of his own writing in the history of his times? There is a tendency to think of the past as naturally authoritative and efficacious in Roman culture. By contrast this project starts from the premise that the competition for power promoted competing versions of the Roman past; and that such histories revealed the potential divergence between history’s claim to represent the truth and its political agency.  Professor Feldherr will argue for a political reading of Sallust founded upon a contemporary audience’s uncertainty about the functions of historiography.  Sallust imagines his work as at once an intervention in the present course of Roman history and from the perspective of a notional future after its fall.  Choosing between these two temporal positions provokes readers to evaluate anew the value of history, the uniqueness of Rome, and where both author and audience stand in relation to the moral transformations of their times.

Life and Times: Perspectives on Sallust by Andrew Feldherr

As part of the Blackwell-Bristol lectures 2014, Professor Shane Butler responds to Professor Andrew Feldherr on 'Life and Times: Perspectives on Sallust'

Bristol IGRCT