himself to historical study. The largest and most important of his works,
the five books of _Historiae_, covering a period of about ten years from
the death of Sulla, is only extant in inconsiderable fragments; but his
two monographs on the Jugurthine war and the Catilinarian conspiracy,
which have been preserved, place him beyond doubt in the first rank of
Roman historians.

Sallust took Thucydides as his principal literary model. His reputation
has no doubt suffered by the comparison which this choice makes
inevitable; and though Quintilian did not hesitate to claim for him a
substantial equality with the great Athenian, no one would now press the
parallel, except in so far as Sallust's formal treatment of his subject
affords interesting likenesses or contrasts with the Thucydidean manner.
In his prefatory remarks, his elaborately conceived and executed
speeches, his reflections on character, and his terse method of
narration, Sallust closely follows the manner of his master. He even
copies his faults in a sort of dryness of style and an excessive use of
antithesis. But we cannot feel, in reading the _Catiline_ or the
_Jugurtha_, that it is the work of a writer of the very first
intellectual power. Yet the two historians have this in common, which is
not borrowed by the later from the earlier,--that they approach and
handle their subject with the mature mind, the insight and common sense
of the grown man, where their predecessors had been comparatively like
children. Both are totally free from superstition; neither allows his own
political views to obscure his vision of facts, of men as they were and
events as they happened. The respect for truth, which is the first virtue
of the historian, is stronger in Sallust than in any of his more
brilliant successors. His ideal in the matter of research and documentary
evidence was, for that age, singularly high. In the _Catiline_ he writes
very largely from direct personal knowledge of men and events; but the