Sallust

Born around 86 BC in Sabine country, Gaius Sallustius Crispus came from plebeian stock and rose through Roman politics as a partisan of Julius Caesar in the 50s BC. He governed Africa and walked away rich, the money famously dirty. But his second career outlasted the first: writing history in a Latin prose sharpened by the Greek example of Thucydides, he produced the earliest Roman historical works to survive intact. The Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jugurthine War captured the republic's crises in prose that cut clean. His Histories, now only fragments, followed. He died around 35 BC, leaving a body of work that made him the first Latin historian whose voice we can still hear.