SOURCE: Ahleid, F. “Oratorical Strategy in Sallust's ‘Letter of Mithridates’ Reconsidered.” Mnemosyne 41, no. 1-2 (1988): 67-92.

In the following essay, Ahleid discusses the “Letter of Mithridates” from the Historiae as a work of deliberative oratory.

In his recent monograph on Mithridates VI Eupator, McGing describes the propaganda with which the king of Pontus tried to obtain support in his wars against Rome¹. Among the texts discussed by McGing, Sallust Hist. [Historiae] 4,69 Maurenbrecher figures as “potentially one of the most important sources for Mithridates' propaganda, as it purports to be a personal letter of the king himself” (154,178). On the other hand, it is probably not based on an authentic document and encompasses several ideas of a “general rhetorical nature”, which Sallust easily could have thought out without any knowledge of Greek and Mithridatic anti-Roman propaganda, by just putting himself in Mithridates' situation. (McGing 154-160). We think it probable that the...