What it is
The Bellum Iugurthinum — the Jugurthine War — is Sallust's second surviving monograph, longer than the Catilina, and almost certainly written soon after it. Its subject is the war Rome fought between 112 and 105 BCE against Jugurtha, the Numidian king who had seized the throne of his adoptive grandfather Masinissa's kingdom in 117 BCE and survived for more than a decade by combining military skill with what Sallust treats as the systematic corruption of Roman senatorial commanders. The work gives us our fullest ancient portrait of Gaius Marius and our clearest contemporary statement of the late Republic's growing contempt for its own ruling class.
Historical context
Sallust had served as a Caesarian governor in Numidia after Thapsus (46 BCE); he knew the country and the materials at first hand. The monograph was written in the same retirement that produced the Catilina, in the years 41–40 BCE, when the Roman political class that had lived through Marius and Sulla and Pompey and Caesar was watching the second civil war run to its conclusion under Antony and Octavian. The choice of subject is editorial: Sallust treats the Jugurthine War as the moment when the senatorial nobility visibly broke as a political class, and when the conditions for the careers of Marius, Sulla, and ultimately Caesar were created.
What it argues
The proem (Jug. 1–4) extends the argument Sallust made in the Catilina: virtue is the proper foundation of human distinction, and the loss of civic virtue is what destroys a people. Within the narrative, the central argument is institutional. Roman commanders sent against Jugurtha across the first six years — Calpurnius Bestia, Spurius Albinus, his brother Aulus — were repeatedly defeated or bought off, and the Senate proved unable to discipline them. Jugurtha's reported remark on leaving Rome after a senatorial hearing — urbem venalem et mature perituram, si emptorem invenerit, "a city for sale, doomed to perish soon if it finds a buyer" (Jug. 35.10) — is Sallust's epigraph for the whole period.
The war turned only with Metellus' command in 109 BCE and was finished under Marius — Sallust's central character — who took the consulship of 107 against ferocious senatorial opposition, recruited the capite censi (the propertyless) into the legions for the first time, and brought the war to its conclusion through Sulla's diplomatic intervention in 105. Sallust treats Marius with respect but without illusion: the man who restored Roman military fortune in Africa was the same man whose army reforms began the transformation of Roman legions into instruments of their general's political will. The monograph's quiet implication is that the institutional decay was already terminal by the time Marius could even take command. The nobility had broken itself.
Why it has been read
The Jugurthine War is the locus classicus for the Marian army reforms and for the late-second-century crisis of the senatorial nobility. It is the principal source for the political dynamics that the careers of Sulla, Pompey and Caesar would build on. With the Catilina, it formed the moral history of the late Republic that the European reading tradition received: the diagnosis that ambitio and avaritia destroy a polity from within, and that external success without internal virtue is corrosive rather than restorative, runs from Augustine through the Renaissance into the political vocabulary of the early American republic.
Citing the Jugurthine War
Standard citation is by chapter and section (e.g. Sall. Jug. 35.10 for Jugurtha's remark on leaving Rome; Jug. 41–42 for Sallust's analytical excursus on the corruption of the nobility). The standard Latin text is Reynolds' Oxford Classical Texts edition; see our Sources page.