| Perhaps the greatest cliche of writing on historiography is that historians exercise selectivity in choosing the events to incorporate into their narratives. But it is rare for a work on an ancient historian to take that as its central concern. Sallust's famous concentration and notorious omissions make him an appropriate subject for such an exercise, and my dissertation is an attempt to develop an understanding of his historical selectivity, and the concept of historical significance that informs it, as it operates in one particular work: the Bellum lugurtlainum. The aim is not only to identify a model of Sallust's selectivity that can account for problematic features of the text, but to ground that model in his intellectual context. I draw especially on Dionysius of Halicarnassus' criticism of Sallust's model Thucydides. I explore the possible points of contact between Dionysius and Sallust, and apply Dionysius' perception of Thucydides' aims to the question of what might give a particular event a claim to inclusion by Sallust, with an eye both on relevant modern arguments about the Bellum lugurthinum and the broad context of ancient historiographical theory. This produces a model of historical significance for me to test against, and develop further on the basis of, the specific indications that the Bellum Iugurthinum gives as to the importance of the events it contains. Next, I show how the results can be used to inform our reading of specific instances of selectivity found in the Bellum lugurthinum. I focus especially on the question of definable factual omissions, examining a number of the most well-known and baffling omissions of the work, such as the death of Jugurtha. Finally, I indicate how the approach might be of interest to the ancient historian as well as the student of ancient historiography, by applying it to a particular historical problem, the role of Scaurus in the quaestio Mamilia. |
