SALLTIST, CAMS CRISPUS, a Roman historian, was b. 86 B.C., at Amiternum, in the Saltine country. Though of a plebeian family, he rose to official distinction. first as quxstor about 59, and afterward as tribune of the people in when he joined the popular party against Milo, who in that year had killed Clodius. His reputation for morality was never high; and his illicit conneCtion with Milo's wife is assigned as the cause of his being expelled in 50 from the senate, although his attachment to Caesar's party is a more plausible reason of his expulsion. In the civil war he joined the camp of Caesar; and in 47, when Cwsar's fortune was in the ascendant, he was made prmtor elect. and was consequently restored to his former rank. When in Campania, at the head of some of Dem.'s troops, who were about to be thence transshipped to Africa. he nearly lost his life in a mutiny. In 46, however, we find hint engaged in Cmsar's African cam paign, at tire close of which he was left as governor of Numidia. His administration was sullied by various acts of oppression, particularly by his enriching himself at the expense of the people. Ile was, for these offenses, accused before Cwsar, but seems to have escaped being brought to trial. His immense fortune, so accumulated, enabled him to lay out those magnificent grounds, still known as the gardens of Sallust, on the Quirinal, to retire from the prevailing civil commotion into private life, and to devote his remaining years to those historical works on which his reputation rests. Be died 34 B.c., four years before the battle of Actium. His histories. which seem to have been begun after his return from Numidia. are: 1st, The Gatilina or Baum Catilinarium, descriptive of Catiline's conspiracy in 63. during the consulship of Cicero; 2d, The
Jugurtlat, or Bellum eragurthinum, commemorating the five years' war between the Romans and Jugurtha, the king of Numidia. These, the only genuine works of Sallust which have reached us entire, are of great but unequal merit. The quasi-philosophical reflections which are prefixed to them are of no value, but the histories themselves are powerful and animated, and contain effective speeches of his own composition. which he puts into the mouths of his chief characters. With its literary excellence, however, the value of the Jugurtha stops, as in military, geographical, and even chronological details, it is very inexact. His now lost work, Historiaruie Libri Quingue, is believed to have described the events occuring between Sulla's death, 78 D.C., and the year of Cicero's. prmtorship, 66. The Dine Epistole de Republica Ordinanda and the Deciamatio in Cicero nem are of doubtful authenticity.
Apart f....om his literary qualities, which are rather those of an artificial than a natural writer, and which are not enhanced by his affectation of brevity, and his love of archaic expressions, Sanest has the merit of having been the first Roman w.lio wrote what we now understand by "history." In official public life, he was more of a politician than a statesman, and the views which he supported were liberal, not so much because he loved the people, as because he hated the nobility. The best editions of his literary remains are those of Corte (Leip. 1724), Gerlach (Basel, 1823-31), Kritz (1828-34), Fab'''. (1831), Dietsch (1842), and the German critical edition of 1859.