Latin Literature of the Empire Author:Alfred Gudeman Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Q. CVRTIVS RVFVS Nothing is known of the life of this historian, and his date was for a long time controversial, some placing it as early as Augustus, others ... more »as late as the fonrth century. Internal evidence however, and the all but certain indebtedness to him on the part of Seneca, can leave no reasonable donbt that his work was published in the reign of Claudius t41-54). This period also renders the identilicalion of the historian with a rhetorician of the same name ami time, mentioned by Suetonius, highly prohable. Of his work entitled Historiarum Alexandri Magni Hbri ?., the first two books have not come down to us, and there are occasional lacunae in the remaining narrative. Curtius makes no pretence to original research, but na,vely confesses piura transeribo quam credo, am uec adflrmare suslineo dc qui- bus dubito nee m,bducere quae accepi; and again, uicumque m,ni trndita incorrupta perfercmus, but what thcse sources were can ouly be approximately determined. The bulk of his material scems to have bcen derived, thongh ouly at second or third hand, from a contemporary biographer of Alexander, Clitarchus, of whom Quintilian e:iid, probatur ii,genium, jidm iufamatur. This work was supplemented subsequently by an unknown compiler by deta,ls probably taken chiefly from Timagenes (under Augnstus) and the trustworthy history of Alexander by Aristobulus (flonrished abont 'żi0 B.c.). Curtins's sole ambition undoubtedly was to furnish a fascinating narrative of the meteoric career of the great Macedonian, and this he has admirably succceded in doing. His style is of classic purity and largely influenced by that of Livy. Epigrammatic reflections, rhetorically elaborated spceches, and graphic descriptions, albeit fashioued upon a somewhat stereotype pattern, abonnd, and ...« less