Hostile Politics: Sallust and the Rhetoric of Popular Champions in the Late Republic

Abstract

Morstein-Marx’s thesis (2004) of “ideological monotony” in contional rhetoric in the late Roman republic has become the dominant paradigm in analyses of Roman oratory and the Roman people, with far-reaching implications for our understanding of the power of the elite in Roman politics. This article challenges his thesis. I argue that Sallust’s evidence allows us to reconstruct a distinctive popular ideology of “hostile politics”—politics constructed as an engagement of two enemy powers, where one is conquered, enslaved, and despoiled, and fear is the only effective political weapon which remains.

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