Catiline’s War

Why it’s on the list: Sallust’s short monograph on Catiline’s conspiracy to seize power in Rome in 63 BC, read not as a crime story but as a symptom: once Rome’s rivals were destroyed, ambition had no external outlet and the republic’s character decayed.

Where I heard about it

• University of Austin — assigned in History, Historiography, and the Philosophy of History on its Fall 2025 reading list (November 2025), 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 what a historian thinks history is for. The full curriculum is on UATX Fall Reading List.

About this edition

Written around 42–41 BC, after Sallust’s own political career had ended, about the plot Cicero exposed as consul. It survives in modern editions bundled with The Jugurthine War and the fragmentary Histories.

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.