Full of sagacious observation and descriptive power, Tacitus engages the most serious attention of the reader by the gravity of his condensed and comprehensive style, as he does by the wisdom and dignity of his reflections. Living amidst the influences of a corrupt age, he was uncontaminated. By his virtue and integrity, and his chastened political liberality, he commands our admiration as a man, while his love of truth is reflected in his character as a historian. In his style, the form is always subordinate to the matter; his sentences are suggestive of far more than they express, and his brevity is enlivened by copiousness, variety, and poetry; his language is highly figurative; his descriptions of scenery and incidents are eminently picturesque, his characters dramatic, and the expression of his own sentiments almost lyrical.
Suetonius was born about 69 A.D. His principal extant works are the "Lives of the Twelve Caesars," "Notices of Illustrious Grammarians and Rhetoricians," and the Lives of the Poets Terence, Horace, Persius, Lucan, and Juvenal. The use which he makes of historical documents proves that he was a man of diligent research, and, as a biographer, industrious and careful. He indulges neither in ornament of style nor in romantic exaggeration. The pictures which he draws of some of the Caesars are indeed terrible, but they are fully supported by the contemporary authority of Juvenal and Tacitus. As a historian, Suetonius had not that comprehensive and philosophical mind which would qualify him for taking an enlarged view of his subject; he has no definite plan or method, and wanders at will from one subject to another just as the idea seizes him.
Curtius is considered by some writers as belonging to the Silver Age, and by others to a later period. His biography of Alexander the Great is deeply interesting. It is a romance rather than a history. He never loses an opportunity, by the coloring which he gives to historical facts, of elevating the Macedonian conqueror to a super-human standard. His florid and ornamented style is suitable to the imaginary orations which are introduced in the narrative, and which constitute the most striking portions of the work.