The last of the Ciceronians, Sallust is also in a sense the first of the imperial prose-writers. His style, compressed, rhetorical, and very highly polished, is in strong contrast to the graceful and fluid periods which were then, and for some time later continued to be, the predominant fashion, and foreshadows the manner of Seneca or Tacitus. His archaism in the use of pure Latin, and, alongside of it, his free adoption of Grecisms, are the first open sign of two movements which profoundly affected the prose of the earlier and later empire. The acrid critic of the Augustan age, Asinius Pollio, accused him of having had collections of obsolete words and phrases made for his use out of Cato and the older Roman writers. For a short time he was eclipsed by the glowing and opulent style of Livy; but Livy formed no school, and Sallust on the whole remained in the first place. The line of Martial, _primus Romana Crispus in historia_, expresses the settled opinion held of him down to the final decay of letters; and even in the Middle Ages he remained widely read and highly esteemed.
Contemporary with Sallust in this period of transition between the Ciceronian and the Augustan age is Cornelius Nepos (_circ_. 99-24 B.C.). In earlier life he was one of the circle of Catullus, and after Cicero's death was one of the chief friends of Atticus, of whom a brief biography, which he wrote after Atticus' death, is still extant. Unlike Sallust, Nepos never took part in public affairs, but carried on throughout a long life the part of a man of letters, honest and kindly, but without any striking originality or ability. In him we are on the outer fringe of pure literature; and it is no doubt purposely that Quintilian wholly omits him from the list of Roman historians. Of his numerous writings on history, chronology, and grammar, we only possess a fragment of one, his collection of Roman and foreign biographies, entitled _De Viris Illustribus_. Of this work there is extant one complete section, _De Excellentibus Ducibus Exterarum Gentium_, and two lives from another section, those of Atticus and the younger Cato. The accident of their convenient length and the simplicity of their language has made them for generations a common school-book for beginners in Latin; were it not for this, there can be little doubt that Nepos, like the later epitomators, Eutropius or Aurelius Victor, would be hardly known except to professional scholars, and perhaps only to be read in the pages of some _Corpus Sciptorum Romanorum_. The style of these little biographies is unpretentious, and the language fairly pure, though without any great command of phrase. A theory was once held that what we possess is merely a later epitome from the lost original. But for this there is no rational support. The language and treatment, such as they are (and they do not sink to the level of the histories of the African and Spanish wars), are of this, and not of a later age, and quite consonant with the good- natured contempt which Nepos met at the hands of later Roman critics. The chief interest of the work is perhaps the clearness with which it enforces the truth we are too apt to forget, that the great writers were in their own age, as now, unique, and that there is no such thing as a widely diffused level of high literary excellence.