SOURCE: Batstone, William W. “Incerta Pro Certis: An Interpretation of Sallust Bellum Catilinae 48.4-49.4.” Ramus 15, no. 2 (1986): 28-39.

In the following essay, Batstone offers a literary and rhetorical interpretation of Bellum Catilinae 48-4-49 to show that Sallust was exploring the uncertainties of the events and actors he describes and that his reporting is not merely propaganda.

Sallust's style is provocative and tendentious, but does his admitted moral tendentiousness carry over into a political or partisan tendentiousness? For centuries we have heard of Sallust the partisan, Sallust the propagandist, Sallustian bias. The history of this perceived bias began at least in the age of Augustus when the anonymous writer of the Invectio in Ciceronem set stylus to wax and began his fraud.¹ Less than a century later (before 96 A.D.) Quintilian regarded the work as genuine Sallust (I.O. 4.1.68; 9.3.89). The deception had worked; and both the fraud itself and...