Sallustius

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A short Greek treatise of perhaps a few thousand words, divided into twenty-one brisk chapters, carries the whole architecture of late-antique Hellenic religion in the space a longer author would spend on a single argument. It opens not with a god but with a list of qualifications: anyone who would learn about the divine must first have been well brought up, must not have been fed false notions in childhood, and must be by nature intelligent and good. Only then does it name its subject. The book is On the Gods and the Cosmos — in Greek Peri theōn kai kosmou, sometimes given as On the Gods and the World — and its author signs nothing. He is known, by a convention of scholarship and a notice in the ninth-century reading-notes of the patriarch Photios, simply as Sallustius.

Coin of the emperor Julian (RIC VIII 108), whose pagan revival of 361–363 the treatise served; the philosopher’s beard was a deliberate revival of classical custom — Classical Numismatic Group, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

The man behind the name

Who he was is genuinely undecided, and the uncertainty is not a footnote but the first fact about him. Two men of the emperor Julian’s inner circle bore versions of the name, and the treatise has been assigned to each. The leading candidate is Saturninius Secundus Salutius, a cultivated pagan of Gaulish origin whom Julian raised to praetorian prefect of the Orient late in 361 and kept at his right hand through the brief, intense reign — the senior civilian officer of the eastern empire, dedicatee of Julian’s own Consolation when the two were briefly parted. The rival is Flavius Sallustius, Julian’s praetorian prefect of Gaul and consul in 363. Photios, recording the work centuries later, calls its author Sallustios; the official inscriptions of the prefect of the Orient give his name as Secundus Salutius. The two names blur in the manuscripts and in modern ears alike, and the identification has been argued both ways without a decisive settlement — the most careful recent treatment leans toward Salutius the prefect of the Orient, but the case rests on inference, not on a colophon.

A marble statue of a priest of Sarapis (Louvre, Ma 1121), long displayed and reproduced as a portrait of the emperor Julian before being reidentified — an emblem of the same uncertainties of name and image that surround the treatise’s author — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

What can be said of Salutius the prefect makes the attribution attractive. He was old, learned, and trusted across a regime change: when Julian died of a spear wound in the Persian campaign on 26 June 363, the army on the following day offered him the purple, and he declined it on grounds of age, clearing the way for Jovian. He served again under Valens. He was, in other words, exactly the sort of senior pagan layman for whom a compact statement of the faith — neither a school treatise nor a liturgy, but a creed a magistrate could hold in his head — would be the natural thing to compose or to commission. The book belongs to the short window of Julian’s attempt, in 361–363, to restore the worship of the old gods against a Christianity already three generations established as the imperial religion; it reads as that movement’s catechism, and whichever Sallustius wrote it, it speaks for the same project.

A catechism of the late schools

The treatise distills, into a form a beginner could finish in an afternoon, the mature Neoplatonism of the fourth century. Its intellectual genealogy is precise. Behind it stand Plato read as a theologian; the metaphysics of Plotinus, with its descent of all things from a first principle; the exegetical labor of Porphyry; and, above all, the ritual-positive synthesis of Iamblichus, who had bound Platonic metaphysics to theurgy — the sacred work by which the gods themselves draw the soul upward — and to the Chaldean Oracles, the hexameter revelation that the Iamblichean school treated as scripture. Sallustius writes from inside the same circle that produced Julian’s own theological orations — the Hymn to King Helios and the Hymn to the Mother of the Gods, the latter composed at Pessinus in 362 on the march to Persia — and that would, two generations later, be carried to its full systematic height by Proclus. The doctrine is recognizably this pagan Platonic theology: a graded order of divinity descending from a first principle, the world held in being by that descent, the soul fallen and recallable. What distinguishes the little book is not originality of doctrine — it claims none — but compression and purpose. It was written for Julian’s revival, when a reasoned account of the gods had to travel and be taught, and it reads accordingly: the system stripped to its load-bearing members, the long metaphysical scaffolding left off, the whole pared to a creed a magistrate or a soldier could carry in his head — a catechism for a paganism that had suddenly come to need one.

The Iamblichean debt is the decisive one. From Iamblichus comes the conviction that the gods are reached not chiefly by the philosopher’s solitary thought but through sanctioned worship — that the rites are themselves a gift of the gods and not a human invention — and the treatise’s whole account of sacrifice and prayer assumes that frame even where it does not name it. The architecture of intermediary powers between the One and the world, the seriousness about the Chaldean revelation as a source on the soul and the divine orders, the harmonizing of Plato with cult: these are Iamblichus’s settlement, transmitted at one remove and made portable. Sallustius is the surest evidence we have of what that settlement looked like once it had become simply the educated pagan’s faith rather than a school’s hard-won position.

The opening chapters lay down what must be assumed before any theology can begin. The divine is unchanging, unbegotten, eternal, incorporeal, and present in no place; it neither comes to be nor passes away, and it is not divided across the many gods who proceed from it. To say a god is angered, or pleased, or moved by offerings is to speak in human terms of something that has no passions: the gods do not change toward us, we change toward them. Worship does not bend the divine will but tunes the worshipper to a goodness that was already pouring out unbroken. This is the standing Platonic axiom — that the source of all does not diminish in giving, and does not deliberate — set down as a rule of religious literacy.

The five kinds of myth

The treatise’s most influential pages are its theory of myth. The problem Sallustius confronts is the one that the whole tradition of allegorical exegesis had been working since the Stoics and since Plato’s own quarrel with the poets: why do the sacred stories say monstrous things of the gods — that Kronos devoured his children, that the goddesses stripped to be judged by a herdsman, that a god was castrated or dismembered? For a religion that held the divine to be unchanging, impassive, and good, the inherited tales were a scandal; the Christian polemicists of the age pressed exactly this point, that the pagans’ own poets convicted their gods of crimes. The literalist’s two options — to believe the stories as told, or to discard them as lies — Sallustius rejects together. His answer is that the offense is the point. Myths are divine because they imitate the gods, who reveal themselves and hide themselves at once; a story that openly stated its meaning would draw the contempt of the careless and would spare the worthy the labor of thought. The crude surface is a veil — not a failure of the tale but its method, designed to turn the foolish away and to compel the serious toward philosophy.

He then sorts myths into five kinds, a taxonomy that became a fixed reference point for later readers. Theological myths concern the very essences of the gods and use nothing bodily: the standard example is Kronos swallowing his offspring, which figures the wholly intellectual god whose every act of thought returns into itself, so that what is generated is taken back into its source. Physical myths speak of the gods’ activity in the world of nature. Psychic myths concern the workings of soul. Material myths — the lowest, and the kind the ignorant mistake for the whole — take the gods to be the physical things themselves, calling the earth Isis or fire Hephaestus, and Sallustius warns that this literalism is the error to be cured. The fifth and richest kind, mixed myths, weave the others together and belong to the mystery rites; his instances are the festival of the Mother of the Gods with Attis, and the Judgement of Paris. The golden apple thrown by Discord into the banquet of the gods is the cosmos, made of opposites; Paris, the soul living by sense alone, sees in the world only beauty and so awards the apple to Aphrodite — a small fable read as a verdict on the soul that mistakes the visible for the whole. The famous formulation that the events of such myths never happened but always are belongs to this reading: the story is not a record of the past but a perpetual diagram of how things stand.

The Judgement of Paris, a Roman floor mosaic (115–150 CE) from Antioch on the Orontes, now in the Louvre; Sallustius reads the scene allegorically, with the golden apple as the cosmos of opposites and Paris as the soul that judges by sense alone — photograph by Carole Raddato, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Gods, the cosmos, providence

From myth the treatise climbs to first principles. Above the gods stands a single source, the First Cause, which must be one because unity governs every multitude; this is the Neoplatonic One, beyond being and beyond the gods who flow from it. Beneath it the gods are ranked in orders — those who make the world and those who govern within it, the framing intelligences and the powers diffused through the cosmos — a hierarchy that descends from the world-making Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus through ranks of mundane and supramundane divinities. The cosmos itself is eternal: it did not begin and will not end, for it is the unfailing image of an unfailing cause, held in being not by force but by the goodness that constitutes it. The gods are everywhere present and nowhere confined; the soul that turns to them finds them already there.

On providence the book is characteristically terse and characteristically firm. The gods’ care reaches all things, bodies and souls alike; what looks like fate is providence as it appears in the chain of bodily causes, where the linkage of cause to cause is most visible, and what looks like fortune is the same care meeting the contingencies of the lower world. Nothing falls outside it, and nothing in it is arbitrary. Evil is given no positive existence and no divine author: it is privation, a falling-short, a thing the soul does to itself by turning the wrong way, never a substance the gods made and never something with its own root in the order of things. This is the answer the tradition had built against the dualists who set a dark power opposite the good — there is no second principle, only the shadow that goodness casts where a soul withdraws from it. The good are not exempted from suffering in the body, because the body is not where the reckoning lies; outward fortune is no measure of a soul’s standing. Punishment and reward are matters of the soul, and they are exact, woven into the nature of things rather than imposed from without.

The soul’s descent and return

The treatise ends where Neoplatonism always ends: with the soul. The soul is immortal and akin to the divine; it descends into the body and, by the manner of its life there, determines what follows. A soul that has lived rationally is reborn into a rational creature; a soul that has sunk to the level of the beasts attends a beast’s body from outside, as a kind of guardian, rather than truly becoming it — Sallustius keeps the Platonic doctrine of transmigration while sparing the rational soul the indignity of literally animating an animal. The impious soul is not annihilated; it suffers, and its suffering is its own deformity, the natural consequence of having lived against its nature. The pious soul, purified, returns to the gods from whom it came.

The book closes on that ascent. Religion, on this account, is not a transaction with offended powers but a discipline of likeness: the worshipper who keeps the right conceptions of the divine, reads the myths for the truth they guard, and orders the soul toward the good is brought, by a goodness that never withheld itself, back to its source. The whole short treatise is built to deliver a reader to exactly that point — to hand them, in the smallest compass the doctrine allows, the map by which a soul finds the way home.

Text, editions, and scholarship

The treatise survives in Greek and is brief enough to print in a few pages; its twenty-one chapters move from the prerequisites of theology through myth, the gods, providence, evil, and the soul to the soul’s reward and punishment. It came to modern notice partly through the patriarch Photios, whose ninth-century Bibliotheca (cod. 252) records the work and names Sallustios as its author — the chief external witness to the attribution.

The first English translation was made by the Platonist Thomas Taylor, whose Sallust on the Gods and the World (London, 1793) bound the treatise together with the Pythagoric sentences of Demophilus and five hymns of Proclus; Taylor’s version, archaic but the only one for over a century, remains in the public domain. The standard critical edition and the one that fixed the modern study of the text is Arthur Darby Nock’s Sallustius: Concerning the Gods and the Universe (Cambridge University Press, 1926), with Greek text, facing translation, and a long prolegomena that set the work firmly within Julian’s revival and the Iamblichean tradition. Gilbert Murray printed his own readable translation as an appendix to Five Stages of Greek Religion (1925), where it has reached a wide general readership. The authorship question — Saturninius Secundus Salutius against Flavius Sallustius — continues to be weighed in the prosopographical literature, where the prefect of the Orient is cataloged in The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire and remains the front runner without being proven.

→ In the library: Iamblichus — On the Mysteries (Taylor, 1821) · The Chaldæan Oracles (Mead, 1908)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Iamblichus · Proclus · Plotinus · Porphyry · Theurgy · Chaldean Oracles Tradition · Pagan Platonic Theology · Allegorical Exegesis · Mythology · Divine Providence · Soul · The One · Demiurge · Plato · Maximus Of Tyre