Gathered here are two monographs and the remains of a longer work by a Roman senator turned historian, whose own career shapes the disenchantment of the writing: expulsion from the senate, service under Caesar, a governorship in Africa, and charges of extortion on his return.

The first monograph treats the conspiracy of 63 BCE, a subject Cicero had already worked hard to keep before the public. Sallust offers another vantage, presenting Catiline as the sharpest symptom of a republic corroded by luxury, greed and ambition, and tracing that decay back well beyond the plot itself. The second turns to the war fought in Numidia late in the second century, where the king begins as a young man of promise and is spoilt by contact with a Rome in which everything had its price, and where the arrogance of the nobility meets its first real challenge.

The Histories, covering the years between, survive only in fragments, speeches and letters.