Sallust's style is provocative and tendentious, but does his admitted moral tendentiousness carry over into a political or partisan tendentiousness? For centuries we have heard of Sallust the partisan, Sallust the propagandist, Sallustian bias. The history of this perceived bias began at least in the age of Augustus when the anonymous writer of the Invectio in Ciceronem set stylus to wax and began his fraud. Less than a century later (before 96 A.D.) Quintilian regarded the work as genuine Sallust (I.O. 4.1.68; 9.3.89). The deception had worked; and both the fraud itself and Quintilian's acquiescence indicate a perceived anti-Gceronian bias to Sallust's writing.
In the modern period, the history of perceived bias, already resisted by Voss, came to its climax in 1897 with an article by E. Schwartz which argued for a systematic and extreme anti-Ciceronian and pro-Caesarian bias and purpose to the Bellum Catilinae. The charges seemed to Schwartz necessary to explain (1) Sallust's chronology, (2) the significantly small role played by Cicero in Sallust's monograph, and (3) the report of certain rumours which implicated Cicero and Crassus and the denial of rumours which implicated Caesar. A systematic review of the arguments, however, gradually undermined or called into question the validity of most of Schwartz's points. By 1964 Syme could say that the main charges against Sallust had collapsed upon inspection. And they had; all but one.