Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

BIOGRAPHY
concerned with anti-Christian polemic. Indeed it is probably too frivolous a
work to have any serious political or religious message.
The style is in general simple and unrhetorical, recalling that of Suetonius.
It lacks the strident, declamatory tone of much fourth-century Latin prose, to
which the author(s) rise(s) only in some of the prefaces.
Probably written by a practical joker for entertainment rather than information
and aiming to titillate and satisfy the interest of readers preoccupied with
details of the private life of the great and powerful, the Historia Augusta is also,
unfortunately, the principal Latin source for a century of Roman history. The
historian must make use of it, but only with extreme circumspection and
caution. Other readers are drawn to this extraordinary work by curiosity
rather than by a taste for literary excellence. Those whose taste inclines towards
speculation on the psychology of the impostor will find in the Historia
Augusta much food for thought.
To the category of v/e romancde belongs the Alexander-Romance of pseudo-
Callisthenes, a strange amalgam of history, fantasy and dead political pamphleteering.
First put together in Greek, perhaps in the third century A.D., the
original text has been translated, modified and supplemented many times
through the centuries, and versions in the vernacular are known from places
as far apart as Iceland and Java. The earliest Latin version was written in
the closing decades of the third or the opening decades of the fourth century
by one Julius Valerius (Alexander Polemius). He has been tentatively identified
with Flavius Polemius, one of the consuls of 338; but it would be safer to
admit that we really know nothing of his person. His text is a translation of a
Greek version akin to but not identical with Version A. 1 He writes with some
pretension to elegance of style. But his Latin is full of strange words like
anguina ( = anguis), equitium ( = equites), extuberasco, furatrina (elsewhere only
in Apuleius), inconspectus, intranatabilis, lubentia, supplicialis, and of unclassical
constructions like the genitive of comparison {tui sollertiorem), habere + infin.,
impendere + accus., laudare aliquem alicuius rei, prae + accus. This suggests the
work of a provincial rhetorician, perhaps more at home in Greek than in Latin,
rather than of a scholar or a member of a learned senatorial circle.
Julius Valerius' text was used by the unknown author of an Itinerarium
Alexandri dedicated to Constantine. This is a very rough summary of Alexander's
campaigns, based partly on Arrian and partly on Julius Valerius, and
without any pretension to literary merit.
The Metz Alexander Epitome represents the disiecta membra of another
Latin version of the Alexander-story. In its present form it tells the story of
Alexander's life from just after the death of Darius to the Indian campaign,
and then goes on to recount the plot to poison the king, his death, and the
' Ed. Kroll (1916).
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