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HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
sometimes under the rhetoric of his speeches, and explains various matters
(particularly Persian actions and motives) nowhere else explained. He can be
as shrewd as he is impish 1 and perverse, and, though not in Arrian's class,
remains indispensable. Again in a word, he intermittently troubled himself
about content as well as form.
Curtius writes volubly, almost precipitately, as if embarrassed by a surplus
of material, but he is never in real difficulties. Trite reflections and incisive
comments are invariably at his command; he can expand, abbreviate, vary
tone and mood, even discard his usual rhetoric, all with consummate ease;
if he is at times clumsy and repetitious in expression and inept in thought, it is
probably through negligence, not incompetence. Apart from his historical
sources, certain literary influences may be detected, notably epic poetry and
Livy, perhaps Herodotus, but no single writer known to us exercised a dominant
effect on him. His style is not so derivative or distinctly marked as to give
firm evidence of date, but his frequent sententiae, his sentence structure (he
readily uses short, abrupt sentences), some features of his syntax (e.g. very
free use of future participles), light poetic colouring, and absence of extravagant
archaizing all point to the beginning or middle of the first century A.D., and
this dating is confirmed by similarities in thought and expression to Seneca
and Calpurnius Siculus.
Why this accomplished dilettante chose to write about Alexander we
cannot know: perhaps he explained in his preface, if he condescended to
write one. But Alexander was a standard theme in the schools of rhetoric and
it was not difficult to see the rich opportunities which a full-scale treatment of
his life and deeds offered. If our tentative dating is right, the more general
revival of interest in Alexander prompted by Trajan is irrelevant. Curtius is
typical of much historiography of the first century A.D. : it •was stuff such as
his, showy and untrustworthy, but not devoid of substance, which Tacitus
used and superseded.
3. TACITUS
Tacitus never became a classic or school-book in antiquity, for he arrived
too late to enter a limited repertoire. 2 As a traditionalist in an age of declining
standards he was averse from outline history and scandalous biography, and
his brevity defied the tribe of excerptors and abbreviators. If he courted
popularity, he failed to win it. A few Christians know of him and in Ammian
he has a distinguished follower. Thereafter followed long neglect, precarious
and truncated survival, and late rediscovery. But, once rediscovered, Tacitus
1
' There are things in Curtius which look like pure impishness, designed to annoy serious readers',
Tarn (1948) 11 103.
2
Though, admittedly, a few comparatively late poets, such as Lucan and Juvenal, became classics
of a sort.
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