Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/239

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S A L S A L 219 the royal palace of Clarendon, Milford Hill and Fisherton are two of the richest fields in the country for palaeolithic implements. In the Blackmore Museum Salisbury possesses one of the finest collections of prehistoric antiquities in England ; its splendid gathering of objects from the mounds in the New World is pro- bably unsurpassed. The fortress of Old Sarum (Searobyrig, i.e., Sear-borough, probably "the dry city"; Sarisberic in Domesday) is of very early date, and was undoubtedly held by the Belgae before it became an important fortress of the Romans (Sorbiodunum). It occupied a conical mound rising abruptly from the valley, and its fossne and ramparts, which still remain, are about a mile in circum- ference. Various Roman roads branched out from it in different directions. Near it Cynric won a great victory over the Britons in 552. It was burned and sacked by Swend in 1003. In the great plain beneath William the Conqueror in 1070 reviewed his army after his victories ; and it was here that he took the oath of fealty from all English landholders on the completion of Domesday in 1086. Old Sarum continued to have the privilege of returning two members to parliament until 1832, although latterly not a single house remained within its limits. New Sarum grew up round the new cathedral founded in the 13th century. In 1227 it received from Henry III. a charter conferring on it the same freedom and liberties as Winchester. The duke of Buckingham was executed at Salisbury in 1484. During the Civil War it was held alternately by both parties. Salisbury first sent members to parliament in 1295, and various parliaments have been held there. The Redistribution Act of 1885 deprived it of one of its two representatives. See Description of Salisbury Cathedral, 1719 and 1787 ; Rawlin, Salisbury, 1718 ; M. E. Walcott, Memorials of Salisbury, 1865 ; W. Henry Jones, Fasti Ec- clesise Sarisberiensis, 1879 ; W. Henry Jones, Diocesan History of Salisbury, 1880. SALISBURY, ROBERT, EARL OF. See CECIL. SALIVA, SALIVARY GLANDS. See NUTRITION. SALLEE. See RABAT. SALLUST (86-34 B.C.). Sallust is the generally accepted modern form of the name of the Roman his- torian Caius Sallustius Crispus. 86 B.C. was the year of his birth, and the old Sabine town of Amiternum at the foot of the Apennines was his birthplace. He came of a good plebeian family, and entered public life at a comparatively early age, obtaining first the quaestorship, and then being elected tribune of the people in 52 B.C., that year of political turbulence in which Clodius was killed by Milo. Sallust was opposed to Milo and to Pompey's party and to the old aristocracy of Rome. From the first he was a decided partisan of Caesar's, and to Caesar he owed such political advancement as he attained. Unless he was the victim of violent party misrepresentation, he seems to have been morally worth- less. In 50 B.C. the censors exercised their power of removing him from the senate on the ground of gross immorality. A few years afterwards, however, no doubt through Caesar's influence, he was restored to his position, and in 46, in which year Caesar was for the third time consul, he was praetor, and was with Caesar in his African campaign, which ended in the decisive victory of Thapsus over the remains of the Pompeian party and in the suicide of Cato. Sallust remained for a time in Africa as governor of the province of Numidia, which, it would seem, Caesar gave him as a reward for good service. It was said that he enriched himself at the expense of the provincials, but the charge, as far as we know, was never substantiated, though it was rendered highly probable by the fact that he returned to Rome the following year a very rich man, able to purchase and lay out in great splendour those famous gardens on the Quirinal known as the " horti Sallustiani," which became subsequently an imperial residence. He now retired from public life and devoted his leisure to letters, for which he had always had a taste, and certainly considerable ability. The fruits of his industry have come down to us in the shape of a history of the famous Catiline conspiracy, of an account of the war with Jugurtha, and of some fragments of a larger work " histories," as the Romans called them, " memoirs," as we should style them. His history of the Catiline conspiracy was his first published work ; it is the history of the memorable year 63, when Cicero as consul baffled and confounded Catiline by making all men believe that he was an arch-conspirator against the liberties of his country, who, under specious pretexts of relieving poverty and distress, was really aiming at making himself a tyrant and a despot. Sallust adopts the view which was no doubt the usually accepted one, and he writes accordingly as a political partisan, without giving us a clear insight into the causes and circumstances which gave Catiline a consider- able following, and led many to think that his schemes were more respectable than those of a mere wild revolu- tionist. He does not explain to us at all adequately what Catiline's plans and views were, but simply paints the man as the deliberate foe of all law, order, and morality. Catiline, it must be remembered, had been of Sulla's party, to which Sallust was opposed. There may be truth in Mommsen's suggestion that he was particularly anxious to clear his patron Caesar of all complicity in the conspiracy. Anyhow, the subject was quite one to his taste, as it gave him the opportunity of showing off his rhetoric at the expense of the old Roman aristocracy, whose degeneracy he delighted to paint in the blackest colours. His history, again, of the war with Jugurtha, though a valuable and interesting monograph, is not a satisfactory performance. We may assume that he had collected materials and put together notes for it during his governorship of Numidia. Here too we find him dwelling on the feebleness of the senate and of the aristocracy, and dropping too often into a tiresome moralizing and philosophizing vein, his besetting weakness, but altogether failing us in those really im- portant details of geography and even chronology which we naturally look for in the historians of military opera- tions and campaigns. In all this Sallust is no better than Livy. Of his Histories, said to have been in five books, and to have commenced with the year 78 B.C. (the year of Sulla's death), and to have concluded with the year 66, we have but fragments, which are, however, enough to show the political partisan, who took a keen pleasure in describ- ing the reaction which followed on the dictator's death against his policy and legislation. It is unfortunate that the work has not come down to us entire, as it must have thrown much light on a very eventful period, embracing the war against Sertorius, the campaigns of Lucullus against Mithradates of Pontus, and the victories of the great Pompey in the East. A few fragments of his works were published for the first time from a manuscript in the Vatican early in the present century. We have also two letters (Duae epistolae de RepuUica ordinanda) addressed to Caesar, letters of political counsel and advice, which have been commonly attributed to Sallust, but as to the authenticity of which we must suspend our judgment. The verdict of antiquity was on the whole favourable to Sallust as an historian and as a man of letters. In certain quarters he was decried ; his brevity was said to be obscurity, and his fondness for old words and phrases, in which he is said to have imitated his contemporary Cato, was ridiculed as an affectation. Tacitus, however, speaks highly of him (Ann., iii. 30) ; and, to do him justice, we must remember that he struck out for himself almost a new line in literature, as up to his time nothing of much value had been done for Roman history, and his predecessors had been little better than chroniclers and annalists of the " dry-as-dust " type. Sallust aimed at being something like a Roman Thucydides, and, though he falls far short of the great Greek historian, and drifts now and again into mere rhetoric and pedantry, we may at least congratulate ourselves on the possession of his Catiline and Jugurtha, and we must feel that fortune has been unkind in depriving us of his larger work, his Histories. SALMASIUS, CLAUDIUS (1588-1653), in the verna- cular SAUMAISE, the most distinguished classical scholar of his day, was born at Semur-en-Auxois in Burgundy, April 15, 1588. His father, a counsellor of the parle- ment of Dijon, gave him an excellent education, and sent