Quotes About Sallust

Experience has shown that to be true which Appius says in his verses, that every man is the architect of his own fortune.

For men who had easily endured hardship, danger and difficult uncertainty, leisure and riches, though in some ways desirable, proved burdensome and a source of grief.

The glory that goes with wealth is fleeting and fragile virtue is a possession glorious and eternal.

He was indeed, what is peculiarly difficult, both brave in action, and wise in counsel; qualities, of which the one, from forethought, generally produces fear, and the other, from confidence, rashness.

Sallust was particularly eloquent on the theme. In his other surviving essay, on a war against the North African king Jugurtha at the end of the second century BCE, he reflects on the dire consequences of the destruction of Carthage: from the greed of all sections of Roman society ('every man for himself'), through the breakdown of consensus between rich and poor, to the concentration of power in the hands of a very few men. These all pointed to the end of the Republican system.