L. Cornelius Sisenna and the Early First Century B.C.

Abstract

The most important historical work in Latin that was actually written in the first half of the first century B C. was L. Cornelius Sisenna's history of the War of the Allies and the Civil Wars which followed it, up to Sulla's dictatorship or conceivably death-the most important one that was not written being of course Cicero's. Sallust praised Sisenna's work highly in theJugurtba, though complaining that it was not sufficiently frank about Sulla, and his own lost histories began, very probably, where Sisenna's left off. Varro's logistoricus on the writing of history, of which, alas, only a brief and unenlightening fragment remains, bore Sisenna's name.