The Historians' History of the World 05

The Commentaries of Cæsar have been already quoted as illustrating one characteristic of the great dictator’s mind. His pen was taken up by several of his officers—A. Hirtius, who completed the narrative of the Gallic War, C. Oppius, to whom the memoirs of the dictator’s wars in Egypt, Africa, and Spain are often attributed, L. Cornelius Balbus, and others. But the most remarkable prose writer of the late republican era is C. Sallustius Crispus, familiarly known to us as Sallust. The two works that remain to us from the pen of this vigorous writer, the account of the Catilinarian conspiracy and the Jugurthine War, are rather to be styled political pamphlets than histories. Sallust was, as we have mentioned, an ardent partisan of the Marian and Cæsarian party. He had been expelled from the senate. Dislike of the reigning oligarchy appears at every turn, notwithstanding the semblance of impartiality assumed by a man who practised the profligacy which he indignantly denounces. But Sallust’s writings are valuable in a literary point of view, because they disclose the terse and concentrated energy of which the Latin language was capable, qualities little favoured by the oratorical tendencies of the day, but used with marvellous effect in a later age by Tacitus.

Other writers now first endeavoured to hand down in Latin a history of Rome from her foundation, or from early periods of her existence. Such were C. Licinius Macer, Q. Claudius Quadrigarius, and Q. Valerius Antias, all born about the beginning of the last century before the Christian era. The works of these and other annalists were used and swallowed up by the history of Livy, who was born, probably at Padua, in the year 59 B.C., and belongs to the imperial era of Augustus.

Some few writers in this same period began to cultivate grammatical and philological studies. The founder of these pursuits at Rome is reputed to be L. Ælius Stilo, the friend of Q. Metellus Numidicus and his companion in exile. He was closely followed by Aurelius Opilius, a freedman, who attended Rutilius Rufus into exile, as Stilo had attended Metellus. But the man whose name is in this department most conspicuous is M. Terentius Varro of Reate. He was born in 116 B.C., ten years later than Cicero, whose friendship he cultivated to the close of the great orator’s life. Varro was a laborious student, and earned by his successful pursuit of all kinds of knowledge a reputation not deserved by his public life. From the first he adhered to the cause of Pompey. After Pharsalia, Cæsar received him with the same clemency that he had shown to all his foes, and employed him in promoting the plans which he had formed of establishing a public library at Rome. After the death of Cæsar he retired to the country, and confined himself to literary pursuits; but this did not save him from being placed on the proscription list. He escaped, however, to be received into favour by Octavian, and continued his studies in grammar, philology, and agriculture, till he reached the great age of eighty-eight, when he died in peace. Of his great work on the Latin language, originally consisting of twenty-four books, six remain to attest the industry of the man and the infantine state of philological science at the time. His work on agriculture in three books, written when he was eighty years old, is still in our hands, and forms the most accurate account we possess from the Romans of the subject. Fragments of many other writers on all kinds of topics have been handed down to justify the title given to Varro—“the most learned of the Romans.”