by David Grant
… Yet he fell in Babylon and Parthia feared him.
Shame on us! That they dreaded more the sarissa
Of Macedon than they do now the Roman javelin.91
As Bosworth points out, the Pharsalia also mentioned the frequent shipwrecking activities of the Nasamonians, detail Curtius also included in his geographical digression of Africa, and which may further point to a relevant terminus post quem.92
Nero’s Parthian campaign was eventually successful, but it is possible that at the time Curtius was writing, the ‘fates’ still waited for Nero to subjugate the East, and Curtius’ repeated references to Parthian power were magnifying the task facing his young emperor; he was potentially comparing his novum sidus to a young Alexander as a result. To cement Roman influence in the East, Tiridates was invited to Rome and crowned (client) king of Armenia by Nero in 66 CE. A Zoroastrian priest and founder of the Arsacid dynasty, Tiridates arrived with a grand entourage and much fanfare; it was a huge propaganda success and he too publicly worshiped Nero as the Sun – thus as Apollo or Helius.93
But despite the public obeisance, Tiridates was reportedly disgusted at seeing Nero playing the lyre when entering the city; Nero was, as Cassius Dio stated, ‘ushering in his own career of disgrace’.94 There are again clear overtones of Alexander’s Eastern victories here, and Nero was just as attached to the heroic imagery of the past as Alexander had been: his thespian activities reinforced Homeric themes, and his paean to Troy as Rome burned, whether true or invented, was equally emblematic of that. Indeed, Virgil’s Aeneid had vividly set the scene with his references to the ‘last night’ of Troy that saw Priam’s city burned.95
The comparison with the Macedonian did not end there. The Epistles and Suasoria of Seneca and Lucan that followed the happier years of Nero’s rule, as well as being badly veiled assaults on their present emperor, were also hostile to Alexander. Curtius’ explicit correction of allegations that Alexander had caged Lysimachus with a lion, appears a further link to Seneca, for the allegation appeared most vividly in his de Ira and, once again, his de Clementia.96 Many of Curtius’ moral reflections, which permeated his book, also have parallels in Cicero’s epistulae as well as Seneca’s declamations, for these were topoi almost impossible to avoid when Alexander’s imperial excesses begged all the rhetorical devices of the day. Motifs were recycled and declamatory exercises rolled out, re-treading the familiar literary Via Appia with a vocabulary that standardised biographical themes in Roman monographs. This is presumably why few scholars have associated Nero with the subject of Curtius’ basilikos logos.
But if we are correct in the imperial association, and contemplating how precarious was his own fate in the wake of Nero’s court-demanded suicides, Curtius’ encomium was conspicuously reconstructed with due imperial care. He knew any implied comparison with Macedonian ‘great’ had to be conspicuously Nero-friendly, with any criticism directed at behaviour Nero did not adopt: Alexander’s orientalisation, for example, and his massacres in the upper satrapy and in India, when, in contrast, Nero was developing friendly client-king relations in the East. So where Seneca and Lucan saw the Macedonian taking ‘weapons all over the world’ and ‘plunging his sword through all peoples’, in Curtius’ account it was the ‘best of Alexander’ that Nero was supposed to see in himself. It was an exercise that anticipated Dio Chrysostom’s dissections of Philip and Alexander in his Kingship Orations for his emperor, Trajan.97
Any unavoidable behavioural overlaps were defended in the character post-mortem Curtius provided Alexander a few pages before the imperial encomium, for much of its content and direction would have been equally valid for the young Nero whose mental energy could not be denied. Curtius philosophically wrote of the Macedonian conqueror, ‘And, by Heaven! To those who judge the king fairly it is clear that his good qualities were natural, his faults due to his fortune or to his youth.’98
Curtius followed with a further apologia that pardoned Alexander for his lust for glory by taking into account his ‘youth and achievements’. As virtues: his devotion to his parents, his mental energy, ingenuity and magnanimity ‘barely possible at his age’. Notably, he also praised Alexander’s sexual restraint. Fortuna is blamed for his assumption of divine honours and for Alexander giving credence to oracles. He interlaced Alexander’s irascundia and cupido vini – irascibility and a love of wine – with his clementia, benevolentia and consilium par magnitudini,99 where the faults were again credited to youth alone. The obituary ended with: ‘… the fates waited for him to complete the subjugation of the East and reach the Ocean, achieving everything of which a mortal was capable.’100
Nero had become emperor when he was just seventeen, and he was only twenty-two when he murdered Agrippina. Everyone, including Curtius, would have known of Nero’s attachment to, and emulation of, Alexander, who also played the cithara, and though Trajan’s admiration of the conqueror is often cited as the turning point in the reception Alexander’s memory received in Rome, it appears it was earlier, at the imperial level at least.101 For Nero formed a bodyguard he named The Phalanx of Alexander (which became the 1st Italica legion) and so the obituary in Curtius’ final chapter could have fed that nostalgia. We should further recall that an Alexander of Aegae was allegedly employed as one of Nero’s tutors.102 Curtius may even have written his Historiae specifically as a gift to an emperor so enamoured.
On his Greek tour in 67 CE, Nero visited the Pythia at Delphi to request information on his fate, just as Alexander once had, and Suetonius claimed he was warned to ‘beware the seventy-third year’; Nero, then aged thirty, rejoiced at forty-three more years of imperium and rewarded her with 400,000 sestertii. Less benign though unverifiable traditions exist, the darkest of which claimed he ‘abolished the oracle, after slaying some people and throwing them into the fissure from which the sacred vapour arose’, either because the god made ‘unpleasant predictions’, or because the Pythia had reproached him for his matricide. Pausanias more credibly reported that Nero couldn’t resist ferrying 500 bronze statues from the sacred precinct back to Rome to grace his Golden House.103 Prophetically, two years later, Galba, then in his seventy-third year, attained the emperorship.
The Torches of Nero by Henryk Siemiradzki, 1876. To the right of the painting the guilty culprits, the Christians, are depicted being torched as their punishment for starting the great fire that commenced on 18th or 19th of July 64 CE, based on the claims in Tacitus’ Annals 15.42-45. Gallery of Polish Art at Sukiennice.
‘FAST GRIPPED BY PURPLE DEATH AND FORCEFUL FATE’104
Curtius made a vexatious fourth-chapter reference to the city of Tyre and its tranquillity under Roman rule in his day. The city was definitely on Nero’s list of banks to loot, as its lucrative murex industry provided the purple dye associated with Roman imperial dress. Nero took to wearing exclusively purple robes to reinforce his status, decreeing that any other doing so would be executed. If the comparison of Tyrian resurgence after its destruction by Alexander in 332 BCE was the underlying political message, the sentiment might even be traced back to Cleitarchus, as the city’s trade was rekindled by the new harbour and naval requirements of the Diadokhoi in the decades following Alexander’s siege; by 315 BCE Tyre was even able to sustain the fifteen-month siege of Antigonus Monophthalmos.
But the allusion to its more recent regained prosperity on the back of that, as well as its ‘protection’ by Rome, could have applied to any time period after Pompey’s conquest of Judaea and its occupation in 63 BCE, and certainly the Syrian-born Ammianus Marcellinus referred to a flourishing Tyre when Pompey annexed the Levant.105 Nero minted a new portrait coin, the Neronian Sela, at Antioch and possibly at Tyre as well. The currency was most likely forced upon the population, which, until that time, had used the Tyrian shekel. If the move proved unpopular, then Curtius’ intimation that the city enjoyed new prosperity was indeed more antique spin to smother a financial controversy. Inland from Tyre, the lush settlement of Caesarea Philippi was cer
tainly named ‘Neronia’ in honour of the emperor by Agrippa II, the Rome-supported king of the region who commenced new palace construction, so the allusion to prosperity is explicable.106 Judaea did, nevertheless, rebel in 66 CE expelling the Roman legions, whereafter the Jewish population minted their own silver currency until Vespasian and his son, Titus, quelled the uprising. Following that the Roman emperors adorned the obverse of the new coins, though familiar Tyrian motifs of Melquart and the Eagle of Egypt were still stamped on the reverse to partially appease the Phoenician population.
Finally, we have possible dating evidence in the undercurrent of Roman affairs that were expressed more generally through Curtius’ narrative.107 We have the aforementioned profiling of the halfwit king, Philip III, for example, a possible comparison with Claudius, and we have Perdiccas’ Assembly behaviour which amounted to a ‘Tiberian farce’.108 Tiberius’ laggard behaviour apparently justified the deathbed quip from Augustus: ‘Alas for the Roman people, to be ground by jaws that crunch so slowly!’109 And no doubt Tiberius’ behaviour was recounted in Nero’s day. In Curtius’ portrayal of the Philotas affair of 330 BCE, Craterus’ incrimination of the arraigned son of Parmenio displayed visible Roman themes, for the sham trial was depicted as a fait accompli, and this recalls the infamous trial of Asiaticus in 47 CE by Claudius and his ruthless wife, Messalina: clapped in chains without a Senate hearing, Asiaticus was essentially denied a defence.110
All this may provide a chronological triangulation of some relevance and with a terminus post quem positioned at the end of Claudius’ rule when the almost simultaneous comet and eclipse provided a uniquely exploitable portent. The Great Fire of 64 CE, a foiled plot in 65 CE, Halley’s Comet in 66 CE and perhaps allusions to the successful Parthian War (the ‘safety of Rome’ and a ‘tempest dispelled’) might all be found in Curtius’ encomium. Moreover, we have the manifest emulation of Alexander that cannot have gone unnoticed by historians attempting to please Nero.
If we were to attach Curtius’ encomium to Nero – and if the ‘sheathing of swords’ did not, in fact, allude to the new peace in the East – the book’s publishing would fall somewhere between the Pisonian plot of spring 65 CE and the brewing of the Vindex rebellion in late 67 or early 68 CE, which finished Nero off. The statement from Curtius that preceded his eulogy – ‘a throne is not be shared and several men were aspiring to it’ – would have captured Nero’s early suspicions of M Junius Silanus, Rubellius Plautus and Faustus Sulla, all of whom he was to eventually ‘remove’. The expression would have been equally relevant to Nero’s fear of those already supporting the causes of the four emperors that came to power in the year that followed his death.111 If this timing is correct, then Curtius clearly knew the intimacies of political affairs in Rome.
Of course, much of the chronology debate can be explained away as simple encomiastic plagiarism; the textual similarities between Seneca, Lucan and Curtius’ history of Alexander have been well explored.112 The histories of Tacitus and Pliny can be similarly connected as imperial ideograms were rehashed. Their careers, and those of Josephus, Pliny the Younger and Suetonius, followed on from one another in close succession and with significant thematic overlaps. Each was an accomplished rhetorician and each lived in, or immediately after, Nero’s emperorship.113
Here the allegation that a gradual concentration of political power (and we might add ‘politically backed’ literary power) resided within an ever-smaller group, appears justified.114 And somewhere in the middle most likely lay our Curtius Rufus; we recall Sir Ronald Syme concluded his style was sub-Livian and pre-Tacitan. Livy published in Augustus’ administration (27 BCE-14 CE) and Tacitus’ works appeared towards the end of the 1st century.115 It appears that much of Curtius’ style and imagery was adopted from Livy’s much admired Ab Urbe Condita Libri, with frequent use of the same modes of expression, with some reused almost verbatim, so that today ‘nobody doubts Curtius studied Livy’.116
An exemplum appears to be a direct Curtian extraction from a Livian text that pondered Rome’s ability to deal with the Macedonian sarissa. We recall that Livy mused that if Alexander had faced Rome ‘he would often have been tempted to wish that Persians and Indians and effeminate Asiatics were his foes’ instead. Curtius similarly described how, at his death, Alexander of Epirus (Alexander’s uncle and brother-in-law) reflected that where he had faced real soldiers in Italy, Alexander had fought women in Asia; this was a theme curiously reiterated by Arrian.117 Curtius’ contio was attached to the accusations emanating from Cleitus’ fatal speech, though this is hardly credible as an original utterance for such an occasion for it would have undermined Cleitus’ own argument that Alexander’s men (and father) were responsible for a great deal of his hard-fought success.118 The reading of Livy’s epic (and Virgil’s) was nevertheless sine qua non for anyone on the cursus honorum and so Curtius, showing due respect, followed their lead.119
But there may well be one final – and perhaps the most relevant – clue to a publication under Nero: Curtius’ noteworthy denial of Alexander’s Will: ‘… some have believed that the provinces were distributed by Alexander in his Will, but I (or ‘we’) have ascertained that this report, though handed down by some authorities, was false.’120 Curtius was attempting to suppress any further debate on the matter with his emphatic wording, and the relevance of this stems from the lingering rumour that Nero had poisoned Claudius, with Agrippina dispensing with the Will that would have publicly reconfirmed as his successor the fourteen-year-old Britannicus, Claudius’ son by his former wife, Messalina.121 Moreover, as Milns points out: ‘Both Alexander and Nero had domineering mothers, both of whom were suspected of complicity in the deaths of the two fathers and accessions of the sons.’122 Curtius’ idiomatic Will denial seems aggressively penned in the context of distant Alexander, when he could have simply stated he knew of the tradition, just as Arrian had dismissively referenced the Pamphlet conspiracy. But Curtius’ emphatic and clearly targeted forensic denial would have resonated loudly as a rumour-buster, or a suppressant at least, for allegations still pointing at Nero. And if it did not, it would still have earned Curtius imperial points.
PROBLEMS WITH TACITUS’ CURTIUS RUFUS
If these parallels assist a dating, they also argue for a familiarity between the historian and his emperor; Curtius’ description of ‘the night that was almost our last’ could suggest more than observer status, and, potentially, to personal political involvement. To suppose that the senatorial Curtius Rufus identified by Tacitus might find himself in imperial company, is reasonable, but he appears to have died of old age in Africa late in Claudius’ rule, or very early in Nero’s. He becomes an even less adequate candidate when we consider that: ‘It has long been recognised that there are many verbal similarities between Tacitus and Quintus Curtius Rufus’;123 in 1887 Friedrich Walter identified some 600 examples that suggest one repeatedly borrowed from the other, and if widely held dating contentions are correct, Tacitus was obviously plagiarising Curtius.124 Walter saw further textual parallels between Curtius’ obituary to Alexander and Tacitus’ summation of Germanicus’ qualities, as well as similarities detailing the mourning following their respective deaths.125 This emulation of Curtius perhaps justifies Macaulay’s summary of Tacitus’ style: ‘He tells a fine story finely, but he cannot tell a plain story plainly.’126
As a recent study concluded, this provides no more than a terminus ante quem for Curtius’ publication, for Tacitus commenced his own literary career with the Life of Agricola and De origine et situ Germanorum in 98 CE, with the Histories and Annals following in 105 CE and 117 CE. But, at the same time, this would indicate that Tacitus held Curtius in high esteem, or at least worthy of emulation. If we can agree with Tarn’s opinion of Curtius – ‘he can make epigrams which might pass for Tacitus on a day when Tacitus was feeling not quite at his best’ – then Tacitus not only borrowed from Curtius, but, on the whole, he bettered him by far.127
Here we encounter the major p
roblem with the aforementioned Curtius Rufus, for the senator who died in Africa around 55 CE was rather vilified by Tacitus who afforded him the following: ‘As to the origin of Curtius Rufus, whom some have described as the son of a gladiator, I would not promulgate a falsehood and I am ashamed to investigate the truth.’128 In the previous paragraph Tacitus recounted the omen that foretold Curtius’ praetorship in Africa, his career under Tiberius, and his unsuccessful mining activities that led his men to secretly petition the emperor to grant advance triumphal distinctions ahead of their toil; this cast a shadow on Curtius’ overzealous activity in dangerous subterranean conditions. Tacitus summed up his career with:
Afterwards, long of life and sullenly cringing to his betters, arrogant to his inferiors, unaccommodating among his equals, he held consular office, the insignia of triumph, and finally Africa; and by dying there fulfilled the destiny foreshadowed.129
Reiterating the poignant observation in a parallel source autopsy, would a literary ‘mountain’ like Tacitus have been moved by a relative ‘molehill’, and one he seems to have afforded such little respect?130 Moreover, Tacitus’ narrative gave no hint of this Curtius Rufus having a literary career, and neither did the index to Suetonius’ De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus link the similarly named rhetorician to any historical monograph; he was listed as a ‘rhetores’ but not as a ‘grammatici’.