No theme could have been more singularly well fitted to fire the
enthusiasm of Ibsen. At no time of his life a linguist, or much
interested in history, it is probable that the difficulty of
concentrating his attention on a Latin text would have been
insurmountable had the subject been less intimately sympathetic to him.
But he tells us that he had no sooner perceived the character of the man
against whom these diatribes are directed than he devoured them greedily
(_jeg slugte disse skrifter_). The opening words of Sallust, which every
schoolboy has to read--we can imagine with what an extraordinary force
they would strike upon the resounding emotion of such a youth as Ibsen.
_Lucius Catilina nobili genere natus, magna vi et animi et corporis, sed
ingenio malo pravoque_--how does this at once bring up an image of the
arch-rebel, of Satan himself, as the poets have conceived him, how does
it attract, with its effects of energy, intelligence and pride, the
curiosity of one whose way of life, as Keats would say, is still
undecided, his ambition still thick-sighted!

It was Sallust's picture more than Cicero's that absorbed Ibsen.
Criticism likes to trace a predecessor behind every genius, a Perugino
for Raffaelle, a Marlowe for Shakespeare. If we seek for the master-mind
that started Ibsen, it is not to be found among the writers of his age
or of his language. The real master of Ibsen was Sallust. There can be
no doubt that the cold and bitter strength of Sallust; his unflinching
method of building up his edifice of invective, stone by stone; his
close, unidealistic, dry penetration into character; his clinical
attitude, unmoved at the death-bed of a reputation; that all these
qualities were directly operative on the mind and intellectual character
of Ibsen, and went a long way to mould it while moulding was still
possible.