Sallust and Jean Bodin

Abstract

One of the most recognizable thinkers of the 16th century France, Jean Bodin, wrote what is perhaps the first methodological treatise of instructions and guidelines on how to not only read and write but also understand history. With his universal interest in all things human, Bodin predated Marc Bloch’s postulate that historians should ideally be interested in all forms of life if they were to perform their task as dutifully as possible. In 1566 Bodin published one of the most frequently reprinted works, the Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem – “The Method for the Easy Understanding of History”. Although he expressed keen interest and good knowledge of a score of ancient historians, listing them in the fourth chapter of his work (De historicorum delectu – “On the Choice of Historians”), one of them was particularly close to his heart. The Roman historian Gaius Sallustius Crispus who is, according to Bodin, “a most honest author [who] possessed experience of important affairs”, provided Bodin and many of his colleagues with a model (stasis) narrative for discussing a changing world in turmoil – something Bodin was no stranger to in the time of the French religious wars. However, the explanation that it was the rhetorically efficient model narrative that inspired Bodin to copy Sallust’s argument seems unsatisfactory and biographically superficial. Instead, this paper closely analyses the Sallustian chapters that purportedly motivated Bodin’s thinking and proposes that there are little grounds in Sallust for Bodin’s legal and historical framing of absolutist sovereignty.