Sallust

Sallust was expelled from the Senate for immorality, governed a province with notable rapacity, and retired to write about moral decline. He was a novus homo from the Sabine country who entered politics as a partisan of the popular faction, was expelled in 50 BC by censors who were his political enemies, and was restored by Caesar - whose side he took in the civil war. Caesar gave him Africa Nova to govern in 46 BC. He came back rich enough to lay out the gardens on the Quirinal that bear his name, and charges of extortion were brought and did not proceed, which contemporaries attributed to Caesar's protection. After Caesar's murder he withdrew from public life and wrote. The Catiline and the Jugurtha are short, fast, and built on a single argument: that Rome had been held together by fear of Carthage, and that the destruction of Carthage in 146 removed the discipline and left ambition and greed with nothing to check them. He wrote the Catiline about twenty years after the conspiracy, as a case study rather than a chronicle, and his portrait of Catiline - talented, ruined, magnetic - is the one that survived. The prose is deliberate and unlike anyone else's. He wrote short, asymmetric sentences full of archaic words and abrupt endings, against the balanced Ciceronian period that was the standard of his own day - a style that reads as impatience and was meant to. The obvious objection was made in antiquity and has been made ever since: a man who took what he could from a province was an odd choice to diagnose the corruption of the republic. It did not stop the diagnosis becoming the standard one, and Tacitus learned his manner from it.

• Lived: 86 BCE – 35 BCE
• Nationality: Roman
• Roles: writer, politician