The Fragments of the Histories

Donatus (both in his commentaries on Terence and in his grammar), Marius Victorinus, Rufinianus, Arusianus Messius, and Servius1) But I would not deny that he drew many, if not all, the passages he cites from Sallust from the commentaries of Asper, cf. Teuffel p. 1100.—perhaps we may concede that they saw the histories themselves. But that most, like the writers of arts Charisius and Diomedes, Claudius Donatus (the interpreter of Virgil), the author of the institutions falsely inscribed with the name of Probus, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and the authors of the scholia both on Statius's Thebaid and on the satires of Juvenal, took the cited words of Sallust from those grammarians of the first or second century to whom they owe almost all their knowledge, no one will dispute with me. If these things are so, it is self-evident that even the later grammarians, Cledonius, Pompeius, Consentius, Phocas, Philargyrius, Priscianus,2) Vogel has already demonstrated this sufficiently regarding Priscianus in act. sem. Erlang. II p. 429. Eutyches, the scholiasts, and the commentator on Lucan’s Pharsalia did not inspect the histories themselves. The most learned grammarian of the seventh century was Isidore, who very often cites Sallust’s words; but I would believe that he took most of those passages from Servius.3) Vogel rightly contends that neither Servius nor Isidore knew the histories themselves.

We learn, therefore, that even the 'hearts of learned men' in the fourth and early fifth centuries were almost entirely oblivious to the histories. Moreover, at that time, barbaric men entirely ceased to unroll the works of the writers themselves: and so, together with the histories of Sallust, most of the books of Livy, Varro, and others perished. — One codex of the histories, however, survived a little longer, written in the fourth or fifth century, as Hauler4) Stud. Vindob. VIII p. 321. P. Krüger proved that all the fragments of the histories that have survived are tatters of a single manuscript book in "Sall. op. ed. H. Jordan 3" (1887) p. 133/34 note. seems to me to have rightly concluded from the writing and orthographic nature of the fragments; but even this was torn apart in about the ninth century by some demented monk, and its individual leaves were rewritten. Several pieces of this book, although tattered, are of the greatest importance; some were discovered long ago (the fragments called the Berlin and Vatican fragments), and some were very recently extracted from the Orléans codex, and they have stirred in us a great desire to recover the entire Sallustian work.