Explaining the decline of the Roman Republic, the historian Sallust made a famous claim about the importance of fear, a claim which has influenced writers from Augustine to Schmitt. Drawing on phenomenological apparatus, including Lear on the collapse of Native American society, this paper has two goals. First, to show that the standard reading of Sallust is incoherent. Second, to propose a new reading, on which the key question is not one of motivation nor of social order, but of the criterion by which virtue is to be measured. I close with some broader implications for how we think about social decay.