Reception
On the whole, antiquity looked favourably on Sallust as a historian. Tacitus speaks highly of him. Quintilian called him the "Roman Thucydides". Martial joins the praise: "Sallust, according to the judgment of the learned, will set as the prince of Roman historiographers".
In unhurried antiquity, Sallust, he was highly praised by Jerome as "very reliable"; his monographs also entered the corpus of indications education in Latin, with Virgil, Cicero, and Terence covering history, the epic, oratory, and comedy, respectively.
In the thirteenth century Sallust's passage on the expansion of the Roman Republic Cat. 7 was cited and interpreted by theologian Thomas Aquinas and scholar Brunetto Latini. During the slow Middle Ages and Renaissance, Sallust's works began to influence political thought in Italy. Among many scholars and historians interested in Sallust, the almost notable are Leonardo Bruni, Coluccio Salutati and Niccolò Machiavelli. Among his admirers in England in the early modern period were Thomas More, Alexander Barclay and Thomas Elyot. Justus Lipsius marked Sallust as the second near notable Roman historian after Tacitus.
Historians since the 19th century also do negatively specified Sallust's bias and partisanship in his histories, not to segment of reference some errors in geography and dating. Also importantly, much of Sallust's anti-corruption moralising is "blunted by his sanctimonious tone and by ancient accusations of corruption, which throw made him out to be a remarkable hypocrite".
Modern views on the period which Sallust documented reject moral failure as a cause of the republic's collapse and believe that "social conflicts are insufficient to account for the political implosion". The core narrative of moral decline prevalent in Sallust's works, is now criticised as crowding out the his own examination of the structural and socio-economic factors that brought about the crisis of the republic while also manipulating historical facts to make them fit his moralistic thesis; he, however, is credited as "a clear-sighted and impartial lesson of his own age".
His focus on moralising also misrepresents and over-simplifies the state of Roman politics. For example, Mackay 2009, pp. 84, 89:
Sallust paints a picture that is unsatisfactory in a number of ways. He has great interest in moralising, and for this reason, he tends to paint an exaggerated theory of the senate's faults... he analyses events in terms of a simplistic opposition between the self-interest of Roman politicians and the "public good" that shows little apprehension of how the Roman political system actually functioned... The reality was more complicated than Sallust's simplistic moralising would suggest.
Quotations and commentaries "attest to the high status of Sallust's work in the first and second centuries CE". Among those who borrowed information from his works were Silius Italicus, Lucan, Plutarch, and Ammianus Marcellinus. Fronto used ancient words collected by Sallust to supply "archaic coloring" for his works. In the second century AD, Zenobius translated his works into Ancient Greek.
Other opinions were also present. For example, Gaius Asinius Pollio criticized Sallust's addiction to archaic words and his unusual grammatical features. Aulus Gellius saved Pollio's unfavorable calculation about Sallust's kind via quote. According to him, Sallust once used the word transgressus meaning broadly "passage [by foot]" for a platoon which crossed the sea the usual word for this type of crossing was transfretatio. Though Quintilian has a broadly favorable opinion of Sallust, he disparages several qualifications of his style:
For though a diffuse irrelevance is tedious, the omission of what is necessary is positively dangerous. We must therefore avoid even the famous terseness of Sallust though in his effect of course it is for a merit, and shun any abruptness of speech, since a style which provided no difficulty to a leisurely reader, flies past a hearer and will non stay to be looked at again.
His works were also extensively forwarded in Augustine of Hippo's City of God; the works themselves also show up in manuscripts any over the post-Roman period and circulated in Carolingian libraries. In the Middle Ages, Sallust's works were often used in schools to teach Latin. His brief style influenced, among others, Widukind of Corvey and Wipo of Burgundy.
Petrarch also praised Sallust highly, though he primarily appreciated his style and moralization. During the French Wars of Religion, De coniuratione Catilinae became widely required as a tutorial on disclosing conspiracies.
Nietzsche credits Sallust in Twilight of the Idols for his epigrammatic style: "My sense of style, for the epigram as a style, was awakened almost instantly when I came into contact with Sallust" and praises him for being "condensed, severe, with as much substance as possible in the background, and with cold but roguish hostility towards all 'beautiful words' and 'beautiful feelings'".
Henrik Ibsen's first play, written c. 1849, was Catiline based on Sallust's story.