The Fragments of the Histories

Aurelius Victor, Septimius, Sulpicius Severus, and even Ammianus Marcellinus,1) Regarding Sulpicius and Septimius cf. Pratje, regarding Aurelius Opitz and Wölfflin loc. cit.; regarding Ammianus read Hertz, "On the Sallustian studies of Ammianus Marcellinus" (progr. 1874) and Wirz in Philol. XXXVI p. 627. although he was a Greek, not only knew those minor books, but also diligently used the histories and plucked various flowers of speech from them. However, it can certainly be doubted whether Avienus2) Avien. de ora. marit. IV 32: "You asked, if you hold it, what the site of the Maeotic sea was: I knew Sallust had provided it, and I did not deny that his dicta were held to be of predetermined authority." read the entire bulk of the histories or just the 'Pontic Site' published separately, and then whether Jerome himself used Sallust or owed the passages cited from the histories to certain grammarians. As far as we know, the last person to read the entire histories of Sallust was Augustine, who presents longer fragments of the histories in his book 'On the City of God', published around the year 425. Perhaps to the same times should be attributed the 'little work on the civil war' by Julius Exuperantius, excerpted from Sallust's Jugurthine War and the first book of the histories.

Therefore, in the middle of the fifth century AD, although the histories seem to have clearly fallen from the care of learned men, many fragments of them still exist. We owe most of these to the study of Latin grammarians who observed Sallust’s style of speaking and Sallustian words, praised them, proposed them to contemporaries for imitation, or confirmed the usage of early Latin by citing examples from him. I have already mentioned above that Aemilius Asper and Valerius Probus were the first to deal learnedly with Sallust. Aulus Gellius, a man not unlearned, subsequently very often praises statements or words from the histories; later, in the third century, the grammarian Nonius Marcellus arose as a student of Sallust; besides him, Porphyrio, the interpreter of Horace, and Sacerdos have some things. In the fourth and fifth centuries AD, a great cohort of grammarians who cited the histories is available to us; among whom Aelius...