INTRODUCTION
style, pretends to be answering an attack made upon him in the senate by Cicero, and selects as the time of this event the year 54 B.C. The oration must have been published after Sallust's death. Quintilian looked upon it as genuine, and quotes from it several times.[1]
That Sallust was not the author of the two suasoriae is clear from internal evidence; the extensive use of archaic forms suggests the period of Fronto and his school. Although the two pleas have much in common, both in language and in subject matter, they were probably not the work of the same writer. The Invective against Sallnst,[2] although it purports to be a reply to the attack upon Cicero, does not observe the same time limits but covers the entire life of Sallust. It is probably an exercise from the schools of rhetoric, composed by a writer of small ability and inferior Latinity[3] at a late period which cannot be determined with certainty.
The Manuscripts
The number of manuscripts of the Catiline and Jugurtha is very great, but comparatively few are of
- ↑ 4. 1. 68; 9. 3. 89.
- ↑ For a summary of the views as to the date and authorship of the Invectives, see Kurfess in Mnemosyne, xl. (1912), pp. 364 ff.
- ↑ Angusti et pusilli rhetoris posterioris aetatis, Kurfess, l.c.; for examples of his impurus sermo, see ibid. p. 377. Kurfess also shows that the author of the second Invective was a servile imitator of the writer of the first one.
