Catiline’s War

Sallust’s short monograph on the conspiracy of Lucius Sergius Catilina to seize power in Rome in 63 BC — the plot Cicero exposed as consul. Written around 42–41 BC, after Sallust’s own political career had ended, it treats the conspiracy less as a criminal episode than as a symptom: the argument is that Rome’s moral character decayed once its rivals were destroyed and ambition had no external outlet. It survives in modern editions bundled with The Jugurthine War and the fragmentary Histories.

Why it’s on the list: Assigned in UATX’s “History, Historiography, and the Philosophy of History”, a course that runs from Sallust and Augustine through Collingwood, Becker, Marx, Nietzsche, Löwith, Strauss and Fukuyama — so Sallust is read as an early answer to the course’s actual question, which is what a historian thinks history is for.

Where I saw it: The University of Austin’s Fall 2025 reading list, 65 Texts Our Students Are Reading, published November 13 2025 and saved to Kyle’s “Books To Read” Apple Note. The full 65-text curriculum is transcribed on UATX Fall Reading List.

Connections

• UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this is assigned in.
• Sallust — already in the wiki, where the John Quincy Adams notes list him among the ancient historians forming “the curricular core” of an education for citizenship; UATX is doing the same thing two centuries later.
• Cicero — the consul who exposed the conspiracy this book narrates.
• Rome — the republic whose decline is the book’s real subject.
• Philosophy of History — the course’s organizing question.