Jugurthine Silence

Abstract

This article argues that silence is a central theme in Sallust’s Bellum Jugurthinum. It explores the ways Sallust’s Jugurtha is characterised by his silences, the ways that Sallust silences Jugurtha within the narrative, and the ways that silence dominates Sallust’s understanding of what history is. The article links this motif of silence with Sallust’s triumviral context and with republican thought—both ancient and modern—on the role of language. It shows that Sallust’s Jugurtha offers a response to Ciceronian accounts of silence, which have deep similarities with Philip Pettit’s argument about ‘enfranchised silence’. Jugurtha models a defiant form of silence which disrupts republican discourse and demonstrates his power: what I call ‘Jugurthine silence’. It is this kind of defiant silence which Sallust is especially interested in, and—as becomes clearest in his descriptions of Bocchus’ deliberations and the imagines—which informs his understanding of how the Roman, republican past relates to his triumviral present.