AN INVECTIVE AGAINST SALLUST
Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86-ca. 35 BC) was a Roman politician who rose to become proconsular governor of the province of New Africa and then retired to devote himself to writing history.
Amongst works attributed to him but thought to be falsely so, was an attack on the eminent politician M. Tullius Cicero, the Invectiva or Declamatio in Ciceronem. The pederastic innuendo presented here is taken from Cicero’s alleged riposte to this, In Sallustium Crispum Oratio (An Invective against Sallust). The translation published in the Loeb Classical Library volume 116, London: William Heinemann, 1921, is by J. C. Rolfe, who wrote:
It is probably an exercise from the schools of rhetoric, composed by a writer of small ability and inferior Latinity at a late period which cannot be determined with certainty.
It is implicit from its content that the date at which the speech, made to the Senate, is supposed to have been made was 44 or 43 BC.
III 9
| As for the unheard of virulence of your attacks upon my wife and daughter (who, women though they are, have more successfully avoided the attentions of men than you have those of your own sex) in assailing them you showed both cleverness and cunning. | Nam quod ista inusitata rabie in uxorem et in filiam meam invasisti, quae facilius mulieres se a viris abstinuerunt quam tu vir a viris, satis docte ac perite fecisti. |
V 13
| Nor shall I inquire into any sins of your boyhood, lest I may seem to criticize your father, who had full control of you at that time, but how you spent your youth. For if this be shown, it will readily be understood how vicious was the childhood which led up to a manhood so shameless and lawless. When the profit derived from your vile body could no longer suffice for your bottomless gullet, and when you were too old to endure what another's passion prompted, you were incited by an unbounded desire of trying upon others what you had not considered disgraceful to your own person.[1] | neque tu si qua in pueritia peccasti exsequar, ne parentem tuum videar accusare, qui eo tempore summam tui potestatem habuit, sed qualem adolescentiam egeris; hac enim demonstrata facile intelligetur quam petulanti pueritia tam impudicus et procax adoleveris. Postea quam immensae gulae im-pudicissimi corporis quaestus sufficere non potuit et aetas tua iam ad ea patienda, quae alteri facere collibuisset, exoleverat, cupid-itatibus infinitis efferebaris, ut quae ipse corpori tuo turpia non duxisses in aliis experireris. |
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[1] “Accusations of the most outrageous kind were so freely bandied about in Roman political circles that one might naturally attribute many of those made against Sallust to malicious gossip, especially since we are informed that one Lenaeus, a freedman of Pompey the Great, assailed the historian in a bitter satire because of his criticisms of Pompey.” [Translator’s introduction, p. 9]
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