After the Past. Andrew Feldherr. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Andrew Feldherr
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: История
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781119076728
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understandings of ambition and revolution as in how Syme positions his historical analysis in relation both to events themselves and to his Roman sources. The pluperfect tenses of his conclusion reinforce the double ending point of his story: not only are Augustus’ accomplishments at an end, but they were complete at the point that Syme draws his own conclusions about them. The paradox that Augustus remained very much a creature of Sallust’s world and yet, while staying “true” to those original motivations, nevertheless saved the Roman state becomes all the more striking when Syme summons up a Roman perception of revolution to contrast with the way things would appear to those writing two millennia after the event. As longevity differentiates an Augustus from a Catiline, so the superiority of Syme’s historical judgment over Sallust’s derives from his temporal distance from the events he narrates.

      Consider by contrast the last sentence of Sallust’s Catiline, describing the battlefield after the final defeat of Catiline’s forces: “and so throughout the whole army, variously, happiness, sorrow, mourning, and rejoicing were being enacted” (ita varie per omnem exercitum laetitia maeror, luctus atque gaudia agitabantur, Cat. 61.9). Here we find a very different kind of complexity, one that results not from the synthesis of apparently contradictory elements through the alchemy of time (ambition proving salvific) but from the simultaneous cacophony of opposed reactions to the same event (mourning and exaltation). If Syme’s verbs portray the trajectory of events as completed before they are viewed, Sallust’s use of the imperfect leaves us immersed in the description of an action in process. Where Syme drives home the virtual incomprehensibility of his analysis to those who witnessed events, Sallust’s position in relation to those contemporary witnesses remains more uncertain. He too of course had the benefit of hindsight and would have known that the emotions he represents foreshadow and may actually cause the more prolonged and devastating conflicts to come. Moreover, those future conflicts may have been so obvious to anyone in Sallust’s audience that the authorial judgment condemning partisanship would be no less clear for being left unsaid.

      The contrast between Syme and Sallust that this comparison illustrates cannot therefore simply be boiled down to privileging the surety that comes from viewing events as complete over participating in the uncertainty of direct experience. Rather it is a question of the visibility of these alternatives and the level of scrutiny directed towards the narrative methods of the historian himself. The Sallustian view of ambition arises simply as a foil to the truth revealed by Syme, while the voices of the past combatants at the end of the Catiline demand more strongly to be heard. Sallust in 43 bce may indeed understand Catiline’s defeat better than the spectators at the time, but, for all that, the relationship between these perspectives is left more open if only because the effect of the temporal contrast is made so much more explicit. And this in turn creates an awareness of the historicity of history, of the temporal situatedness of the historian in relation to events, that I will argue fundamentally structures Sallust’s representation of the past.

      The advantage of hindsight upon which modern historians like Syme rely was of course widely recognized by ancient historians as well.2 One of the genre’s founding practitioners, Herodotus, practically begins his narrative with the Greek sage Solon advising a barbarian king not to judge human affairs before they reach their ends (1.32). Three centuries later Polybius would claim for his universal history an ability to depict events in their entirety, temporal as well as spatial (1.4). But the seemingly self-evident superiority of hindsight for understanding history has been challenged on several fronts. The distant perspective necessary to explain why things happened can, perversely, put effects before causes, and construct patterns in actions that were as meaningless and unknowable to those who witnessed or even participated in them as the prospect of salvation through ambition was to Augustus or to Sallust.3

      I will also move beyond Grethlein’s interest in narrative form per se to ask how the choices with which these strategies confront the reader make sense in relation to the intellectual and political crises of the time when Sallust wrote. The perspectives constructed respectively by teleological and experiential understandings of events position the historian, his text, and his readers “after the past” in two contradictory senses. The assimilation of contemporary experience draws its audience closer to events and highlights also the continuities between actions and representations. The audience is “after the past” because they perceive how their present connects with that past, as for instance in perceiving the passions aroused by Catiline’s defeat as still driving civic discord. Audiences looking back at Sallust’s narratives as though completed can translate the analytic distance necessary to make judgments about the past into a separation from the political life of the state that forms history’s subject. To select another example from the Catiline, Sallust’s discussion of the crucial ethical term virtus goes together with the recognition that the two figures whose actions make virtus visible have passed from the scene (Cat. 53.6).