Date of Award

6-2009

Document Type

Union College Only

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Classics

First Advisor

Hans-Friehansdrich Mueller

Language

English

Keywords

history, roman, sallus, thucydides, bellum

Abstract

Sallust, a Roman historian of the first century BC, wrote the accounts of two of the wars of his times as well as a history of larger scope. We have his first two monographs, the Bellum Catilinae and the Bellum Jugurthinae; the last is mostly lost to us. These works were for Roman history novel in both form and style, representing innovation in literature and historiography in the Latin language. In creating this new style Sallust quite undisguisedly drew many things from Thucydides. The influence is apparent in the details of grammar, tone, and word choice as well as in the larger spheres of perspective, compositional form, and historiographical method. The Roman historian's conscious imitation of his Greek predecessor, despite some differences stemming from cultural divergences and the natures of the chronicled events, produced works with a great many analogous structures and smaller-scale similarities to Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. This thesis endeavors to catalogue and examine in detail these similarities in order to show the large debt owed to Thucydides by Sallust and therefore by all subsequent Latin historiographers. Attention is given to speeches, narrative, portrayal of individuals, and analyses of events, and therein to the details of language use as well as the overarching features of approaches and intentions. The correspondences are many in

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