Page:Sallust - tr. Rolfe (Loeb 116).djvu/19

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INTRODUCTION

unfitness to be entrusted with the rule of the state.

The greater part of the Historiae has perished. Four complete speeches and two letters are preserved in a collection made apparently in the second century for use in the schools of rhetoric. The work was frequently cited by grammarians and other ancient writers, and from this source numerous small fragments have been recovered. Three longer passages are transmitted in a more or less mutilated form in manuscript. These are the fragmentum Vaticanum, of two leaves containing eight columns and belonging to the Third Book; the fragmentum Berolinense, of one leaf containing a bit of the Second Book; and the fragmentum Aurelianense, two pieces of a palimpsest, one consisting of two leaves and the other of eight complete and two mutilated columns, discovered by Hauler in Codex Orleanensis, 169. The former of these supplements the frag. Berolinense, and with it gives an account of the consulship of Lucius Octavius and Gains Aurelius Cotta,[1] while the latter is of varied contents. Still other brief extracts from the Histories have been recovered from the account of the First Civil War written by Julius Exsuperantius in the latter part of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth centuries, and based upon Sallust.

The proper arrangement of the fragments and{{center block|

  1. 75 B.C.


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