What According to Sallust Brought About the Collapse of the Roman Republic? Essay

Gaius Sallustius Crispus, a Roman historian commonly known as Sallust after being driven from public life, expressed his disappointment and anger into history to examine the political pathology of the final death throes of the Roman Republic. Sallust in his early age migrated to the capital in order to seek a career in politics, to which his later success evidences that he pursued it with tenacity and skill. However, he had to pay a price for that success in the form of a turbulent life which brought him the disorder which he described in his picture of political activity in the late Republic. Later he realized that it was held possible through the ‘selfish deeds’ of Roman Republic that Sallust claimed that the ‘weakness of youth’ allowed him to become corrupted by politicians. While going through the literature proposed by Sallust, one can easily analyse that for the collapse of the Roman Republic, he blamed political corruption within Rome as the major factor.

This is also evident from his life incidences where at the age of thirty, he experienced a violent year of thuggery and gang warfare, in which the consular candidate Milo was brought to trial for having killed the popular leader Claudius in street fighting. A few years later Sallust was expelled from the Senate for unspecified offenses, in Roman politics (Mellor, 1999, p. 31). During the reign of Caesar, Sallust obeyed Caesar and saw in him the only possible salvation for the Republic, but after Caesar’s assassination Sallust retreated to his lavish estate, later called ‘Gardens of Sallust’ on the northern hills of the city near the modern Via Veneto.

In his last decade when Sallust turned from politics to history, he considered the political corruption to be one of the major reasons of the collapse of the Roman Republic. Sallust developed his argument that Rome’s decline was due to the venal and bungling aristocracy which he preferred to present and emphasize as the aristocratic corruption.

If we see the reason for the decline of the Rome’s fall from the perspective of Sallust, it was corruption which initiated with the decrease of morality. Every Roman writer right from Sallust to Cicero evidenced the lack of morals and virtue that preceded with the loss of liberty (Bonta, 2005). The important point is that the same set of factors exists in today’s American society where America was formed while looking to Rome as the primary inspiration in learning the lessons of Roman legacy and failure. Despite learning lessons from striking historical downfalls of Rome, modern American politicians are equipped with the same features of ‘political corruption’ that once has remained the foundation for Roman downfall.

America today possesses the same political corruption while separating and limiting the powers of government as was practiced in Rome. Today’s modern America just like Rome enjoys on a destructive program of foreign military adventurism that could add to her international prestige while extracting all her strength and resources. America follows Rome when teaches her citizens to follow the welfare state, and promote the notion that dividing into factions is good in fighting over the spoils of the public treasury and to depend on government for their material well-being. Sallust mentioned in his writings that Rome saw the rise of subversive movements that attacked her free constitution and underwent a dizzying cultural and moral decline, which, eventually destroyed Rome’s capacity for self-government. The same thing is going on in America.

There is no significant difference between the level of corruption adopted by Roman Empires and American politicians as according to Holland (2003) “the Romans confined every regional power that might pose a threat to their interests, and refused to shoulder the burden of direct administration, while leaving the field clear for the emergence of terrorist states” (Holland, 2003), and this is what American Government is following.

Work Cited

Bonta Steve, (2005) “Lessons of Rome: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic Provides Lessons That Hint at Flaws in Modern Political Policies” In: The New American. Volume: 21. Issue: 4.

Holland Tom, (2003) “What Bush Can Learn from the Romans: A Republic Founded on High Ideals of Liberty Becomes a Great World Power and Then Drifts into Empire.

Sounds Familiar? It All Happened 2,000 Years Ago” In: New Statesman. Volume: 132. Issue: 4652.

Mellor Ronald, (1999) The Roman Historians: Routledge: London.