One of the most difficult experiences I’ve had in studying Classics was delivering Caesar’s speech to the Senate from Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae. It’s a powerful moment in the text – Julius Caesar rising to argue against the execution of the Catilinarian conspirators, defending due process and Roman law in the face of fear and vengeance. On the surface, it’s a window into Caesar’s political cunning and moral posture. But the deeper I went into it – especially through the lens of my research – the stranger it became.

Because, of course, it’s not really Caesar’s speech. It’s Sallust’s version of Caesar – his voice, his rhythm, his moral world, ventriloquizing the historical Caesar for his own literary and political purpose. Standing there, speaking it from memory, I found myself caught in this layered act of performance. I wasn’t reenacting a historical event; I was embodying a historian’s interpretation of a statesman – and even Sallust himself was performing, writing decades later, shaping memory into meaning.

It made me realise how complicated authenticity is in Roman literature. The Romans were obsessed with rhetoric and moral posture — with what a speech could do rather than whether it was a factual record. Sallust’s Caesar isn’t a transcript; he’s an idea. He’s reason personified in the face of Cicero’s self-righteous fury. He’s the cool political thinker opposing moral panic. But he’s also a literary construct — an invention meant to showcase Sallust’s own stoic cynicism about the Republic’s decay.

Delivering that speech felt oddly anachronistic – as if I were standing in the middle of a hall of mirrors. I was quoting a version of Caesar that never existed, written by a man who didn’t trust his subjects, in a style that blurred history and art. The words flowed beautifully, persuasive and grave, yet I couldn’t shake the sense that they belonged to nobody and everybody at once.

It was also a reminder that in Roman historiography, personality is never just personality — it’s a tool. Sallust writes Caesar’s speech not to preserve his thoughts but to reveal the moral fault lines of his time: justice versus expediency, rhetoric versus truth, the state versus the individual. By performing it aloud, I felt that tension come alive — the seduction of reasoned argument shadowed by the inevitability of corruption.

Reciting those words, I wasn’t channeling Caesar’s conviction or Sallust’s cynicism — I was caught between them. And maybe that’s the genius of Sallust: he doesn’t let you know whose side he’s on. The result is a text that refuses to stay still — part history, part theatre, part moral puzzle. Performing it was less about acting Caesar than confronting the instability of voice itself — how easily rhetoric blurs into authorship, and how even memory becomes performance.