C. Sallusti Crispi De Bello Catilinario Et Jugurthino

Two thousand years ago, a Roman politician who had seen corruption from the inside sat down to write history. The result is this: an eyewitness account of the conspiracy that nearly brought down the Republic, and a gripping narrative of Rome's brutal war in North Africa. Sallust gives us Catiline himself, a figure of terrifying ambition, rallying the dispossessed and the desperate in a plot to seize power by force. We see the Senate scrambling to respond, Cicero delivering his famous speeches, and the final bloody reckoning at the Battle of Pistoria. Then the Jugurthine War: a story of foreign war that exposed the rot at the heart of Roman politics, where generals were bought and sold, and justice was measured in gold. Sallust wrote with the urgency of a man who believed Rome was disappearing before his eyes. He was probably right. These are the surviving fragments of how Romans first understood their own crisis, and they read like something written yesterday.