The History of Alexander

"That’s right. We don’t know for certain when Curtius wrote, or indeed who he was. There are two possibilities: either he wrote under the emperor Vespasian in the 70s or, possibly, he wrote earlier under Claudius in the first half of the first century AD. He wrote in Latin and he was probably a senator in Rome. The other problem we have with Curtius is that, unfortunately, the first two of the ten books of his history are missing. That’s a pity, because it means we don’t have his account of the early stages of Alexander the Great’s career. But, more significantly, it means we don’t have his introduction and we don’t have his conclusion either because there are also bits missing later on. In the beginning, in his prologue, he may well have said something about who his sources were and what his aims were in writing, but we’ve lost that. He’s using a different source from Arrian. Scholars generally believe, although Curtius never mentions it, that he is using the work of a man called Cleitarchus who was probably writing in Alexandria in Egypt, probably about the same time as Ptolemy. But Cleitarchus was someone who had not campaigned with Alexander. So Cleitarchus is getting all this information second-hand, and it’s generally thought that Cleitarchus is more interested in fantastic stories than Plutarch and Aristobulus. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s worth saying some of these descriptions of non-Greek activity seem to be more plausible and more likely to be accurate than the alternatives. It may well be, for example, that Cleitarchus understood more about Egyptian religious rituals. All the historians give a description of Alexander visiting an oracle in the Libyan desert. The process Curtius describes sounds much more like what actually happened in Egypt than, for example, the story Arrian relates, which we know is very close to what Callisthenes said, and which is probably also what Ptolemy said, which tends to present the oracle much more like a Greek oracle. So Cleitarchus is probably in some areas, particularly in relation to non-Greek practices, more reliable than the others. But the other thing to say is that Curtius is writing as a Roman, a Roman senator, in a period when Roman senators were still coming to terms with autocracy. And, if he’s writing under Claudius, he’s writing in the wake of Caligula’s reign and, if he’s writing under Vespasian, then in the wake of Nero’s reign. Either way, he’s writing soon after the reign of a particularly unpopular and unsuccessful emperor with a very bad reputation, and he seems to be presenting, in the book, some of the faults of Alexander the Great as the kind of faults Caligula and Nero were accused of—arrogance, autocracy, tyranny, lack of freedom, a lack of respect for the aristocracy. “The Macedonian monarchy was modelled, to some extent, on Persian practices or the practices of other monarchies that emulated Persia” It’s also worth saying that Curtius is very down on the Greeks. He makes a distinction between Macedonians and Greeks and on the whole the Macedonians are mostly okay, but the Greeks are the real trouble. The Macedonian soldiery come across as sort of proto-Romans and the Greeks come across as these very problematic, wily, untrustworthy figures. I think, for Curtius, the extent to which Alexander is more Greek, and therefore less Macedonian, lies at the root of what causes him to go wrong. Curtius’ book is not short on stories about Alexander and, whereas Arrian talks about Alexander the Great’s self-restraint, Curtius keeps on talking about how he loses control of his appetites. For example, after Alexander’s first battle against Darius at Issus, Alexander captures the Persian camp followers, including all the royal household, Darius’ wife and daughters, and also Darius’ harem of 365 concubines, which gave him a different person to sleep with every day of the year. Curtius implies in his book that Alexander the Great took the harem over but says that maybe Alexander didn’t use it as frequently as Darius. Arrian doesn’t mention this at all. He is also very keen to emphasise Alexander’s reliance on superstition, again in contrast to Arrian. Arrian has Alexander trusting a wise Greek soothsayer, called Aristander. When Alexander starts trusting the Babylonian astrologer/priests who are an important part of Babylonian royal and religious life, Curtius sees this as an indication that Alexander is succumbing to foreign superstition. He is keen to emphasise how often Alexander relies on these things and, because the Romans have a different approach to divination, Curtius is more scornful of all the divination Alexander uses and much more prepared to think that it is all trickery and fakery. Famously, the emperor Tiberius tried to ban astrologers from Rome, but had his own astrologer. There was Roman imperial hostility to astrologers in principle but the use of them in private. It was perceived to be a problem by senators like Curtius."