Sallust Quotes
Small communities grow great through harmony, great ones fall to pieces through discord.
Sallust. The Jugurthine War; The Conspiracy of Catiline. Translated by S. A. Handford, Penguin Books, 1963, p. 45.
He works were banned and he was banished by both the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese during the Vietnam War where he tried to be a mediator and was present at the Paris Peace Talks. As late as 2007 he was still not allowed into Vietnam.
Compare Mark 3:25, above, and Abraham Lincoln's use of the phrase in one of his most famous speeches.
The Vietnam War was raging and the country was polarized by it. The real issue of the time, as we were in the war, was whether we could better obtain peace by winning victories in the field causing the enemy to want to negotiate or to withdraw and produce peace unilaterally. In the end we tried a little of both reflecting the division in the nation. We succeeded at neither strategy and the polarization continued for many decades.
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.
