Sallust's appeal

The Roman historian Sallust never ceases to fascinate.  His tale of the north African king Jugurtha, who makes war against Rome in the late second century BCE, the Bellum Jugurthinum, constantly strays from its own narrative line and undercuts the oppositions it sets up at the start.  He cuts off thoughts before they are fully articulated, jumps forward and backward in time, and makes a show out of silencing himself ("Now I return to my story," he says more than once).   

Contrast Sallust to Walter Benjamin’s ideal storyteller, who has the ability to recount the whole life, not only of another, but of himself: he is the man who, letting his life “be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story,” becomes a sage for the multitudes.  But Sallust, to borrow a phrase from Ronald Syme, is “cut short” both in his brief careers as politician and writer and in his choice of a startlingly choppy style.  

Perhaps the strangest story in the BJ is the digression prompted by Sallust's reference to the town of Lepcis, which finds itself caught between Rome and Numidia. "Now that we've reached this region, it seems not unworthy to recall the outstanding, amazing deed of two Carthaginians," he says by way of bare introduction.  

Once upon a time, back before the last Punic War, the powerful states of Carthage and Cyrene disagreed over the exact location of the boundary between them, which lay on a totally featureless sandy plain.  After a long struggle on land and sea, the two city-states finally agree to a settlement.  Each will send out envoys from their capitals, and the border will be established on the spot where the two groups meet.  Two Carthaginians and two Cyrenians are chosen and the date of their simultaneous departure is set.  The Carthaginians make excellent time, but the Cyrenians are delayed, whether by laziness or sandstorms, Sallust says, is impossible to say.  When they finally meet well into Cyrenian-claimed territory, the Cyrenians (terrified of returning home to explain their failure) accuse the Carthaginians of cheating by leaving their capital early.  Preferring to bargain rather than go home and start the war all over again (or maybe they're suffering from guilty consciences?), the two Carthaginians demand a new agreement, so long as it's fair ("tantum modo aequam").   The cunning Greeks -- Sallust suddenly starts referring to them at this point as "Graeci" rather than "Cyrenenses" -- devise an awful choice: either the border will be set on the spot where they met, but the two Carthaginians will be buried alive there; or the Carthaginians will allow the Cyrenians to advance the line as far as they wish, with the same capital condition applying to them.  The Carthaginians accept these terms as fair, and they are buried alive (79.2-10).  The city of Carthage sets up altars in their memory on the spot.  And that is it.  Nunc ad rem redeo, Sallust says: "now I return to my story."  

What's the point of this story that literally comes out of nowhere, geographically as well as narratologically?  It exposes the mortal investment men make in political conflict; it turns conflict into a game of sorts, where virtue contends with cunning; it asks us to balance the value of lived life against eternal memory and civic greatness.  It is typically Sallustian.