Abstract
Despite his serious pursuit in writing history coming from his concern for the wellbeing of the Roman republic, Sallust is often criticized for his literary style as a historian, arguably more than he deserves. This paper defends Sallust as a Roman intellectual for he stressed the need to address mos maiorum in history. The central theme of Sallust’s historical examination is the morality of the Roman people. He tends to focus particularly on the change of Roman morality from the past to the present, along with his account of the past, which he evaluates to be significant and memorable. Sallust shows a strong tendency to make moral judgments of what he perceived to be good and bad conducts and, based on what he saw and heard, who had them. In respect to virtus, the morality of his contemporaries is always subject to negative comparison to that of Roman ancestors, but Sallust does not make clear links between past and present as to sufficiently explain the context of his overall narrative of Catilinarian Conspiracy. This paper contextualizes Sallust’s historical narrative of Bellum Catilinae in respect to morality as to illuminate how the concept of mos maiorum shaped Sallust’s view of his own society in political and moral contexts of the late Republic, in his literary style, and in his narrative of Catilinarian Conspiracy in Bellum Catilinae.