Historiae
Rome · -35
S
Sallust
Sallust
c. 86 BCE–c. 35 BCE · Rome
Gaius Sallustius Crispus (c. 86 – c. 35 BCE), known as Sallust, was a Roman politician and historian born at Amiternum in the Sabine country and active chiefly in Rome. After a senatorial career aligned with Julius Caesar and a term as governor of Africa Nova, he withdrew from public life to write history. His surviving monographs, the Catilinae Coniuratio (on the conspiracy of Catiline) and the Bellum Iugurthinum, together with the fragmentary Historiae, are marked by a terse, archaizing, and moralizing style that influenced later Roman historiography. He is regarded as the earliest Roman historian whose works survive in substantial form.
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Stop 1 of 186 BCE–35 BCELived
RomeרומאItaly
What they did here
Roman historian of the late Republic.
Rome in this era
In the late Republic (2nd-1st centuries BCE) Rome was a city-state ruling a Mediterranean empire, governed by the Senate and annual magistrates amid growing civil wars. Educated Romans studied Greek philosophy and rhetoric, and Latin writers such as Lucretius and Cicero set out to carry Greek thought into Latin.
About Rome
Rome, on the Tiber in central Italy, grew from an Iron Age settlement into the capital of the Roman Republic and then of an empire that by the 1st century CE ruled the whole Mediterranean. Its Jewish community, attested from the 2nd century BCE, is among the oldest in Europe. Christian tradition holds that the apostles Peter and Paul died there, and the city became the seat of the popes. After the Western Empire ended in 476 it passed to Gothic kings, to Byzantium and then to papal rule as capital of the Papal States, until it became the capital of unified Italy in 1871. Vatican City, independent since 1929, lies within it.
In Rome at the same time
Posidonius of Apamea, Nepos, Cornelius, Cicero, Quintus Tullius Cicero, Lucretius, Parthenius of Nicaea
Across the traditions, in Rome at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Sallust’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Across the traditions
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Sallust’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.