The Catiline and Jugurtha of Sallust Author:Sallust Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION TO THE ,JUGURTHINE WAR. Sallust has himself informed us of the reasons which induced him to write the history of a period so painful in many res... more »pects to a patriotic Roman as that of the war with Jugurtha. It attracted him, he tells us, in the first place, "as a great and severe contest waged with varying success;" and, in the second, as " the occasion of resistance being for the first time made to the pride of the nobility," which resistance he regards as the prelude to all the civil wars which afterwards exhausted Italy and the whole Roman world. The interest of his narration is, therefore, twofold, both military and political, and his success in bringing it home to his readers is by no means equal in the different parts of his work. In its military aspect the war with Jugurtha is really of little importance. Some hundred and twenty or thirty years later, in the reign of Tiberius, another Numidian arose, who gave the Romans almost as much trouble as Jugurtha. Tacfarinas, like Jugurtha, had become acquainted with the Roman discipline; like him, he was always (with one trifling exception) defeated in pitched battles; like him, by surprises and petty skirmishes he wore out the enemy whom he couldnot meet with success in the field. Two Roman generals triumphed for bringing the war to a supposed conclusion, but each time, after an interval, Tacfarinas renewed it with as much and as little success as before; and, as in the case of Jugurtha, it was only brought to a final end by his death, after the contest had been carried on for seven years (a.d. 17-24). Tacitus gives us the history of this war in some seven chapters (Annals ii. 52 ; iii. 21, 73, 74 ; iv. 23-25), and it may fairly be said that the knowledge we receive from these is quite as satisfactory as that which ...« less