Daily Inspiration Quote by Sallust

Sallust writes like a man filing a report on human vanity. The sentence has the clean snap of a moral law: health, fortune, power, even entire regimes arrive with a birth certificate and leave with a death certificate. That symmetry is the point. By pairing "beginning" with "end", and then tightening the screw with the rhythm of "rises... fall" and "increases... decay", he makes decline feel less like tragedy and more like physics.

The intent is not consoling; it's corrective. Sallust is warning his Roman audience against the intoxicating belief that success is self-justifying or self-perpetuating. In a republic sliding into civil conflict, "health and fortune" are not private blessings. They're civic conditions: stability, prosperity, military prestige, the illusion that Rome's ascent is permanent. His subtext is that Rome's elites, fattened by conquest and wealth, have started treating empire like destiny rather than a temporary arrangement upheld by discipline and restraint.

As a historian, Sallust isn't merely describing the arc of events; he's staging a critique of character. His Rome decays because people do. The line quietly assigns blame while pretending to be neutral: decay is inevitable, yes, but the speed and ugliness of that decay are choices. It's a fatalistic thought that doubles as a moral weapon, the kind of maxim that lets a writer indict his present while sounding like he's talking about time itself.