Laudator Temporis Acti

Ronald Syme (1903-1989), Sallust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964 = Sather Classical Lectures, 33), pp. 16-17 (footnotes omitted):

The fashion persists of condemning and deploring the last epoch of the Roman Republic. It was turbulent, corrupt, immoral. And some speak of decadence. On the contrary, it was an era of liberty, vitality—and innovation. Political strife brought oratory to perfection; and the master of eloquence, in seasons of eclipse or disappointment, turned his abundant energies to refining the Latin language, which he converted into a suitable medium for theoretical disquisition. Other writers went in for verse, with new and splendid achievements of vigour or elegance.

Roman life was coming to feel to the full the liberating effects of empire and prosperity. In the aftermath of the Punic Wars, cult and ritual lapsed, and law was separated from religion (the process and agents are obscure). In various other ways good sense or chicanery were able to abate or circumvent the "antiquus rigor," the "duritia veterum." The quality of a civilisation can be estimated on various criteria. One of them is art and letters, which posterity tends to rate highly, for interested reasons. Another is the position of women in relation to husband and property. Ancient custom kept the woman in strict tutelage. Tutela was never abolished, only disregarded in practice; and women (at least of the better sort) acquired a large measure of liberty. That was not all. Divorce was easy and normal, the initiative not always coming from the husband. The classical law of marriage eschewed rigour or formality. It was perhaps the most imposing achievement of the Roman legal genius.

This liberal and humane evolution is seldom appraised as it deserves. Sallust himself is partly to blame. Not that he wasted words or regrets on the decay of religion. But he wrote in revulsion from his own time. He interpreted a process of economic change and political adjustment in terms of morals; and he fell an easy prey to conventional notions about old Roman virtue. The distortion was enhanced in the next epoch, eager to escape from the memory of recent freedom and turbulence, and complacent in its own type of felicity—that is, liberty but not licence, discipline but not despotism. Political fraud and Augustan romanticism conspired to embellish the venerable past—with unhappy consequences for historical study ever after.