His account of Alexander’s Asiatic expedition was followed by a treatise on India called the _Indika_. The first part of this work, which gives a description of India and its people, was based chiefly on the _Indika_ of Megasthenes; and the second part, which narrates the famous voyage of Nearchos from the mouth of the Indus to the head of the Persian Gulf, was based on a journal kept by Nearchos himself. The work is but a supplement to his history. He speaks himself with noble pride of this great work. “This I do assert,” he says, “that this historical record of Alexander’s deeds is, and has been from my youth up, in place to me of native land, family, and honours of state; and so I do not regard myself as unworthy to take rank among the foremost writers in the Greek language, if Alexander be forsooth among the foremost in arms.” “Quel délire de l’amour propre!” here exclaims Sainte-Croix. His merits as an author are thus well stated by a writer in Smith’s _Classical Dictionary_: “This great work (the _Anabasis_) reminds the reader of Xenophon’s _Anabasis_, not only by its title, but also by the ease and clearness of its style.... Great as his merits thus are as an historian, they are yet surpassed by his excellences as an historical critic. His _Anabasis_ is based upon the most trustworthy historians among the contemporaries of Alexander.... One of the great merits of the work is the clearness and distinctness with which he describes all military movements and operations, the drawing up of the armies for battle, and the conduct of battles and sieges.” Q. CURTIUS RUFUS Nothing is known with any certainty respecting either the life of this historian or the time at which he lived. Niebuhr makes him contemporary with Septimius Severus, but most critics with Vespasian. Zumpt again, who, like some other eminent scholars, identifies him with the rhetorician Q. Curtius Rufus, of whom Suetonius wrote a life now lost, places him as early as Augustus.[5] The style in which his history is written certainly shows him to have been a consummate master of rhetoric. He was particularly given to adorning his narrative with speeches and public harangues, and these, as Zumpt observes, are marked with a degree of power and effectiveness which scarcely anything in that species of writing can surpass. It may also be said that his style for elegance does not fall much short of the perfection of Cicero himself. It has of course its faults, and in these can be traced the incipient degeneracy of the Latin language, such as the introduction of poetical diction into prose, the ambition of expressing everything pointedly and strikingly, not to mention certain deviations from strict grammatical propriety.