After the Past
"The most important modern treatment of the 'revolution' that ended the last Roman Republic concludes as follows: 'For power he [sc. Augustus] had sacrificed everything; he had achieved the height of all mortal ambition and in his ambition he had saved and regenerated the Roman People,' (Syme 1939, 524). Sallust, the Roman historian whose first experiment in the genre zeroes in on a representative moment in that crisis, stands clearly in the background. The protagonist of Sallust's work, Catiline, an aristocrat who unsuccessfully tried to seize power in 63 BCE, was equally driven on by ambition. Indeed, Sallust identifies such ambition as, with avarice, the cause of revolution, moral and political. But the idea that individual ambition could be a salvific force for the Roman People is unimaginable in his writing, and so the recollection of his contemporary perspective highlights the profound historical irony of the story that Syme has told. There is an obvious reason why Sallust would have been shocked that ambition could end in social regeneration: he died, most likely, in 35 BCE, when the victory that was finally to give Syme's improbable hero unrivalled power in the Roman world was still unforeseeable, not to speak of the victor's subsequent 45 years as sole ruler. But my interest lies not so much in the difference between the two historians' understandings of ambition and revolution as in how Syme positions his historical analysis in relation both to events themselves and to his Roman sources"--
