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Free Spirits: Sallust and the Citation of Catiline
- American Journal of Philology
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 134, Number 1 (Whole Number 533), Spring 2013
- pp. 49-66
- 10.1353/ajp.2013.0013
- Article
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Sallust’s account of Catiline’s first speech contains a verbal echo of Cicero’s First Catilinarian (BC 20.9 ~ Cat. 1.1). By raising the question of whether Catiline or Cicero counts as the author of the phrase, Sallust invites attention to the double nature of historiography as at once a literary representation of reality and a part of the historical processes it documents. Hearing Catiline as author points up the historicity of texts: the phrase itself changes meaning and significance as it is appropriated by a sequence of authors. An awareness of Cicero as source recalls the textuality of history: the struggles to control the meaning of actions and language staged through intertextuality overlap with actual political conflicts.