Bellum Iugurthinum (The War with Jugurtha)

Sallust's second historical monograph covers Rome's drawn-out war against the Numidian king Jugurtha at the end of the second century BC, using the conflict's early mismanagement, senators repeatedly bribed into inaction, to indict the nobility's corruption and to credit the war's eventual success to new men outside the traditional aristocracy, above all Marius, whose rise to the consulship the history treats with open sympathy. As in the Bellum Catilinae, the narrative frames a specific episode as a case study in a larger thesis about factional decay, and its portrait of Marius as a self-made outsider reflects Sallust's own populist political sympathies.