After the Past. Andrew Feldherr

to end with a view of the spectators coming out to see and take spoils from these bodies, and with an effort to evoke the emotions that “were being enacted” among the survivors as before he had done with Catiline. There is a big difference between looking at the image of an image of a 2000-year-old corpse in a museum on another continent and finding the real thing on a battlefield. But by making the last event in his narrative also the first event in its reception, Sallust highlights the layers of temporal and narrative distance between his reader and the actual scene. These layers can suggest separation, the 20 years from what we call 63 BCE to 43 and the distinction between a book and a body, or they can point to the stages that connect times and audiences. And to imagine an original audience for Sommer’s photograph brings a more immediate connection for us as well. As the nineteenth-century viewer was likely more aware than we, photography was a physical process only possible in the direct presence of what it depicts. The man and woman in the image left a material trace of remarkable intimacy on the volcanic matter that killed them. The gesso mold can only be made by putting the plaster into contact with that substance. The photograph can only be made by a long exposure to the mold. And one important use of these images was as souvenirs, which travelers could take back with them from their visit to the site. From this perspective, these inescapably modern images seem less depictions of antiquity than direct traces of antiquity. So too in the case of the Sallustian narrative, the distance that makes historiographic representation possible competes with an impression that the narrative itself is produced by the events it describes. His history becomes a fragment of the past, not so much removed from time as embedded in a process of transformation that can be traced within time.

This final effect of Sallust’s narrative, where the past at once recedes from and approaches the historian’s audience through a recognition of the text’s participation in time, provides my own starting point for interpreting his work. It is also the point of my title, “After the Past,” which intends to capture the same tension between distance and contiguity linking now and then. The complexity of Sallust’s positioning his audience in time can be first described through the tools of narratology, as in Jonas Grethlein’s holistic interpretation of all ancient historiography, informed by the modern struggle between what he calls teleology and experience as goals for historiographic representation. Teleological narratives lay emphasis on the hindsight available to both author and reader. Such depictions fit events into a larger story whose ending point lies beyond what any of the figures in the narrative can know and so inevitably separate the perspective generated by the narrative and those of the actors within it. By foregoing an effort to explain events, however, historians can much more directly reproduce the experience of the past.⁴

Grethlein’s demonstration of how a historical narrative generates this division in points of view, for example, through effects like counterfactuals, which construct a future in the past different from how the reader knows things will always turn out eventually, leads him to quite surprising re-evaluations of the ancient historians. Yet while narratology offers an excellent and precise tool for describing these effects, it does not on its own suffice for explaining them. Narratology recognizes, indeed practically develops from the recognition, that descriptions of internal spectators or focalizers refract representations in the ways I have been discussing, but such descriptions also do something more. They draw attention to the very process of spectation and response and, by embedding it within their own narrative, interpret it. And so starting from this very up-to-date—I am tempted to say photographic—account of what Sallust does I want to ask more directly why he is doing it. How does his account of Roman history explain why it matters whether his work draws his reader closer to events or imposes distance? And what historical and cultural factors are likely to have made such choices meaningful for his contemporaries? In this chapter I suggest how three aspects of Sallust’s work can be connected through their mutual dependence upon a reader’s recognition of the narrative as a representation of the past or as a part of history. These aspects are, first, the larger temporal framework employed to locate events and to measure the distance between present and past; second, the consequences of such perceptions for the audience’s conception of their political present, whether they see themselves as part of the res publica or as outside, and after it. My final subject will be the historian’s own language and whether it can represent change or must be affected by it. Befitting my attempt to keep the historicity of Sallust’s writing before our eyes at the same time that we try to understand his own view of history, I will try to locate my interpretations within the time period in which Sallust wrote by making comparisons to the literary production of a precisely contemporary figure, Marcus Junius Brutus, born just one year after Sallust. And since his work is almost completely lost, no one will mistake my efforts at historicization as anything more than subjective prompts for reimagining the effects of Sallust’s writings.

      I begin with a couple of preliminary observations to confirm that the audience’s sense of where they stand in time is an issue that matters in Sallust. First, that partial viewpoint of an immediate audience in the final sentence of the Catiline gains yet further power by contrast with the work’s opening. Sallust begins the monograph with a description of omnis homines—all humans, not particular humans, nor even Romans—and treats them as objects of description more than as subjects: what men ought to do turns out to be very different from what they actually do. The verb of that sentence is also in the present tense, implying not so much that the claim he makes is true “now,” but that it is always true:

      Omnis homines qui sese student praestare ceteris animalibus summa ope niti decet, ne vitam silentio transeant, veluti pecora quae natura prona atque ventri oboedientia finxit. sed nostra omnis vis in animo et corpore sita est: animi imperio, corporis servitio magis utimur; alterum nobis cum dis, alterum cum beluis commune est. quo mihi rectius videtur ingeni quam virium opibus gloriam quaerere, et, quoniam vita ipsa qua fruimur brevis est, memoriam nostri quam maxume longam efficere. nam divitiarum et formae gloria fluxa atque fragilis est, virtus clara aeternaque habetur. (Cat. 1.1–4)

      All human beings who desire that they stand ahead of other living creatures ought to strive with the greatest effort not to pass through life in silence as the herds, which nature has formed as downward looking and subservient to their stomachs. All our power is placed in mind and body; we employ the ruling power of the mind, the slavery of the body. The one we share with the gods; the other with beasts. Therefore, it seems more upright to me to seek glory with the resources of talent than strength, and, since the life we enjoy is short, to make the remembrance of us as long lasting as possible. For the glory of wealth and beauty flows away and breaks; virtue is held (as) bright and eternal.

A glance back at the work’s beginnings from its ending makes clear how it has combined a focus on a specific point in time with the fragmentation of perspectives that lead from all humans to the partial and partisan view of the battlefield; as I will discuss more later, this process takes the reader into history, both as a genre and an awareness of how one’s place in time affects perception.

      My second point moves from narratology’s concern with point of view to the schemata the text creates simply for measuring and understanding time. In a narrative like Livy’s, structured around changing years marked by naming consuls, you always know where you stand.⁵ Even if consular dating provides a notoriously awkward system for relating events to one another, for visualizing the hundred years between the defeat of Hannibal and the defeat of Jugurtha, it creates a powerful sense of a shared experience of the past measured through Roman political institutions. Sallust too seems to mark this tradition by beginning the first action of the story of the conspiracy proper with a specific consular date, the Kalends of June when Caesar and Figulus were consuls (17.1). But as the notice that this is June 1, not January, may suggest, we are already in medias res. For Sallust has provided his own account of the first beginnings of the conspiracy and located them in two contrasting frames of reference for understanding time. First, these events which we could measure from the middle of the consulate of Caesar and Figulus become manifestations of causes better traced through the life story of Catiline, and Sallust similarly imposes a biographical structure to his narrative, by beginning the story of Catiline at his birth and ending with his death. These causes must also be explained by a longer digression on the development of the republic, one that does not emphasize its extent through the proliferation