Aging & Wisdom Quote by Sallust

Nation-building, in Sallust, is less a matter of size than of temperament. The line lands like a Roman proverb sharpened into a warning: cohesion is an engine of expansion, while internal fracture is a solvent that dissolves even the mightiest state. Coming from a historian who chronicled the late Republic’s political rot, it’s not neutral observation; it’s diagnosis with an implied verdict.

Sallust wrote amid the Republic’s long breakdown, when elite competition turned public office into a private marketplace and politics into a zero-sum blood sport. Read against that backdrop, “small” and “great” aren’t just measurements of territory. They’re moral categories. “Small communities” are disciplined, bound by shared norms, still capable of subordinating ego to common purpose. “Great ones” are complacent empires that mistake momentum for permanence, their success breeding luxury, resentment, and factionalism. The subtext is Roman and pointed: expansion didn’t make Rome strong; Rome’s earlier social compact did. Once that compact frayed, greatness became a liability, amplifying every conflict.

The craftsmanship is in the symmetry. Harmony grows; discord breaks. The verbs do the political theory. Growth is organic and cumulative, something you cultivate. Falling “to pieces” is mechanical failure, a structure cracking along stress lines. Sallust is also smuggling in a conservative ethic: power requires restraint, and the real threat is not the enemy at the gate but rivalries inside the walls. It’s history written as civic scolding, aimed at an audience that still thinks collapse is something that happens to other people.