Octavian, his power thus increased, enters Rome…

35 BCE

Octavian, his power thus increased, enters Rome in triumph.

Agrippa receives the unprecedented honor of a naval crown decorated with the beaks of ships; as Dio remarks, this was "a decoration given to nobody before or since".

With the help of Agrippa, Octavian also lavishes large sums on the adornment of Rome.

When Octavian foments public clamor against Antony's territorial gifts to Cleopatra, it is clear that a clash between the two men is imminent.

Gaius Sallustius Crispus, generally known simply as Sallust, had entered public life after an ill-spent youth and won election as one of the tribunes of the people in 52 BCE, the year in which the followers of Milo had killed Clodius in a street brawl.

Sallust had opposed Milo, Pompey's party and the old aristocracy of Rome.

From the beginning of his public career, Sallust had operated as a decided partisan of Caesar, to whom he owed such political advancement as he attained.

In 50, the censor Appius Claudius Pulcher had removed him from the Senate on the grounds of gross immorality (probably really because of his friendship for Caesar).

In the following year, no doubt through Caesar's influence, he had been reinstated and appointed quaestor.

In 46 he had served as a praetor and accompanied Caesar in his African campaign, which had ended in the decisive defeat of the remains of the Pompeian war party at Thapsus.

As a reward for his services, Sallust gained appointment as governor of the province of Africa Nova, the newly conquered Numidia, in which capacity he had committed such oppression and extortion that only the influence of Caesar enabled him to escape condemnation.

On his return to Rome he had purchased and begun laying out in great splendor the famous gardens on the Quirinal known as the Horti Sallustiani or Gardens of Sallust.

Retiring from public life, he has since devoted himself to historical literature, and further developing his Gardens of Sallust, upon which he has spent much of his accumulated wealth.

He recounts in his first work, Conspiracy of Catiline, the suppression of Catiline's 63 plot to seize power against the background of political and moral decline in Rome.

A master of political invective, Sallust attacks the corruption, greed, and degeneration of the Roman ruling class.

Sallust employs his powerful, somewhat archaic style in his War of Jugurtha, published in 40, assailing the incompetence and venality of the Roman aristocracy between 111 and 105, during the war against the Numidian king.

His final work, the “Histories” (which survives only in fragments, some discovered in 1886) sketches the history of Rome from 78 to 67.

Historians regret the loss of the work, as it must have thrown much light on a very eventful period, embracing the war against Sertorius (died 72 BCE), the campaigns of Lucullus against Mithridates VI of Pontus (75 - 66 BCE), and the victories of Pompey in the East (66 - 62 BCE).

Sallust struck out for himself practically a new line in literature, his predecessors having functioned as little better than mere chroniclers, whereas he has endeavored to explain the connection and meaning of events and successfully delineated character.

He dies in 34 at around fifty-two.

The gardens will eventually be acquired by the emperor Tiberius and maintained for several centuries by the Roman Emperors as a public amenity.

The Emperor Nerva will die of a fever in a villa in the gardens in 98, and they willl remain an imperial resort until their sack by the Goths in 410.

In the early seventeenth century, Ludovico Cardinal Ludovisi, nephew of Pope Gregory XV, will purchase the site and constructs the Villa Ludovisi, in the course of which several important Roman sculptures will be rediscovered.

Much of the area occupied by the gardens will be divided into building lots and filled following the breakup of Villa Ludovisi after 1894, as Rome expanded as the capital city of Italy after the unification of Italy.