Sallust Quotes
A small state increases by concord; the greatest falls gradually to ruin by dissension.
Sallust. The Works of Sallust. Translated by Arthur Murphy, Carpenter and Son, 1807, p. 25.
“Factions” was the word for Political Parties then. Henry, George Washington and other founding fathers were opposed to political parties, while Madison and others thought they needed to controlled. Jefferson thought parties to be important. So there was no uniform consensus among the Founding Fathers. This has his last public speech before his death.
Compare Mark 3:25, above, and Abraham Lincoln's use of the phrase in one of his most famous speeches.
The debate had come to an impasse over the issue of voting and taxation by state equally or proportional to the population. Witherspoon warned of the consequence of there being no agreement on some form of unity.
Gaius Sallustius Crispus, usually anglicised as Sallust (/ˈsæləst/; 86 – c. 35 BC), was a Roman historian and politician from an Italian plebeian family. Sallust was born at Amiternum in the country of the Sabines and was a popularis, an opponent of the old Roman aristocracy, throughout his career, and later a partisan of Julius Caesar. Sallust is the earliest known Latin-language Roman historian with surviving works to his name, of which Catiline's War (about the conspiracy in 63 BC of L. Sergius Catilina), The Jugurthine War (about Rome's war against the Numidian King Jugurtha from 111 to 105 BC), and the Histories (of which only fragments survive) are still extant. Sallust was primarily influenced by the Greek historian Thucydides and amassed great (and ill-gotten) wealth from his governorship of Africa.
