Of the life of Alexander we have five consecutive narratives...Here, it might, he thought, are authorities enough; hut unluckily, among all the five, there is not a single contemporary chronicler. All five write at secondhand, ... Diodorus we believe to be perfectly honest, but he is, at the same time, impenetrably stupid. Plutarch, as he himself tells us, does not write history... his object is to recount anecdotes, rather to point a moral than to give a formal narrative of political and military events. Justin is a feeble and careless epitomizer. Quintus Curtius is, in our eyes, little better than a romance-writer; he is the only one of the five whom we should suspect of any wilful departure from the truth.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Of the life of Alexander we have five consecutive narratives...Here, it might, he thought, are authorities enough; hut unluckily, among all the five, there is not a single contemporary chronicler. All five write at secondhand, ... Diodorus we believe to be perfectly honest, but he is, at the same time, impenetrably stupid. Plutarch, as he himself tells us, does not write history... his object is to recount anecdotes, rather to point a moral than to give a formal narrative of political and military events. Justin is a feeble and careless epitomizer. Quintus Curtius is, in our eyes, little better than a romance-writer; he is the only one of the five whom we should suspect of any wilful departure from the truth." in the context of "Freedman, Historical Essays, https://archive.org/stream/dli.bengal.10689.14264/10689.14264_djvu.txt, quoted in Devahuti, D., & Indian History and Culture Society. (1980). Bias in Indian historiography. Delhi: D.K. Publications. p. 84" to mean that wisdom is timeless.