The Roman historian Caius Crispus Sallust, who was born at Amiternum in 86 B.C., and died in 34 B.C., lived throughout the active career of Julius Cæsar, and died while Anthony and Octavian were still rivals for the supreme power. It might be supposed from his works that he was a person of eminent virtue, but this was merely a literary pose. He was probably driven into private life, in the first place, on account of the scandals with which he was associated. He became a partisan of Cæsar in the struggle with Pompey, and to this he owed the pro-consulship of Numidia, on the proceeds of which he retired into leisured ease. Sallust aspired with very limited success to assume the mantle of Thucydides, and the rôle of a philosophic historian. He displays considerable political acumen on occasion, but his assumption of stern impartiality is hardly less a pose than his pretense of elevated morality. His "Conspiracy of Catiline"--the first of his historical essays--was probably written, in part at least, with the object of dissociating Cæsar from it; the lurid colors in which he paints the conspirator are probably exaggerated. But whether true or false, the picture presented is a vivid one. This epitome is adapted specially from the Latin text. _I.--The Plotting_ I esteem the intellectual above the physical qualities of man; and the task of the historian has attracted me because it taxes the writer's abilities to the utmost Personal ambition had at first drawn me into public life, but the political atmosphere, full of degradation and corruption, was so uncongenial that I resolved to retire and devote myself to the production of a series of historical studies, for which I felt myself to be the better fitted by my freedom from the influences which bias the political partisan. For the first of these studies I have selected the conspiracy of Catiline. Lucius Catilina [commonly called Catiline] was of high birth, richly endowed both in mind and body, but of extreme depravity; with extraordinary powers of endurance, reckless, crafty, and versatile, a master in the arts of deception, at once grasping and lavish, unbridled in his passions, ready of speech, but with little true insight Of insatiable and inordinate ambitions, he was possessed, after Sulla's supremacy, with a craving to grasp the control of the state, utterly careless of the means, so the end were attained. Naturally headstrong, he was urged forward by his want of money, the consciousness of his crimes, and the degradation of morals in a society where luxury and greed ruled side by side.