disregard of dramatic probability[1]. Sallust has higher merit in this department. The war of Jugurtha and the conspiracy of Catiline were, when Sallust wrote, events of recent memory, and each had been illustrated by striking contrasts of character. According to Plutarch, the employment of shorthand writers[2] to report debates in the Roman Senate began in 63 B.C.; it was certainly well established in the closing years of the Republic. Sallust had some advantages for the presentation of character in a manner at once dramatic and historical, and he seems to have used them well. There is no reason to doubt that Caesar's speech in the debate on the punishment of the conspirators was substantially such as Sallust reports[3]; and his way of introducing a discourse of Memmius in the Jugurthine War implies that it is true not only to
- ↑ E.g. Liv. ii. 40; xxiii. 8, 9. Livy seems sometimes to have taken hints from Polybius or Thucydides; cp. xxx. 30 with Polyb. xv. 6, and vii. 30 with Thuc. i. 32.
- ↑ Plut. (Cat. min. 23) says that the speech of Cato in the debate on the conspiracy of Catiline is believed to be the only one of his preserved—Cicero having taught some of the most rapid writers the use of a shorthand (σημεῖα προδιδάξαντος ἐν μικροῖς καὶ βραχέσι τύποις πολλῶν γραμμάτων ἔχοντα δύναμιν), and having distributed these writers through the Senate-house. For the Romans, Plutarch adds, did not yet possess τοὺς καλουμένους σημειογράφους: this was the beginning of it. Suetonius mentions a speech of Julius Caesar which, Augustus thought, must have been imperfectly taken down by the actuarii (Caes. 55). The usual Roman word was notarius. Martial has an epigram on a shorthand writer, xiv. 208.
- ↑ Sallust, Catil. 51, 52.
