New Approaches to Classics Lecture: Professor Victoria Pagán

Topic: Sallust and the Open Society/ Abstract: When read through the lens of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae becomes a unified meditation on the nature of change, the conditions of leadership, and ultimately the difference between tyranny and democracy. But of course, it is also the prototype of conspiracy narratives in Roman literature, and Popper’s formulation of the “conspiracy theory of society” sheds light on both the form and the content of Sallust’s monograph.