7. Second Sight: Enargeia between Reception and Reality in Sallust’s Jugurtha

1This paper combines two aspects of my interest in enargeia in classical historiography. First is a desire to rethink the relationship between vision and historiographic narrative inspired by the works of Ruth Webb and Adriana Zangara, both of whom have revealed the distance between the images produced through enargeia and real events. Our modern application of the rhetorical term euidentia to the realm of forensic proof encourages the idea that seeing provides an unmediated access to what really happened. And, of course, ancient historians traditionally describe sight as a more reliable witness than rumor or report.1 But Plutarch’s claim (De glor. Ath. 347a) that the best historian makes his narrative like a painting has less to do with enabling an audience to perceive the past directly than with inspiring an emotional experience that can become an obstacle to different kinds of understanding historiography claims to provide of the truth of experience. Polybius’ attack on Phyl