SOURCE: Gries, Konrad. “Valerius-Maximus an Minimus?” Classical Journal 51, no. 7 (April 1955): 335-39.

[In the following essay, Gries decries the content of Valerius's Memorable Doings and Sayings as “nothing but a huge collection of anecdotes, drawn mainly from the history of Rome,” notes Valerius's rhetorically excessive style, and summarizes the textual history of the collection.]

Modern literary historians do not think much of him. To Fowler, he is “artificial, pompous, and dull.” According to Rose, he has a “most atrocious style, bombastic, would-be-clever, full of artificial and at the same time clumsy and obscure phraseology.” Mackail, too, speaks of his “turgid and involved style.” The Oxford Classical Dictionary calls him “shallow, sententious, and bombastic, full of the boldest metaphors and rhetorical artifices … especially forced antitheses and far-fetched epigrams”; in addition, he is “almost entirely noncritical.” Hadas, finally, claims that he is “so little regarded that nine out of ten professional scholars would not recognize his name”; no wonder, for he “has nothing to say worth hearing.”

Modern scholarship has passed him by. His work is not included in the Loeb Classical Library, the Bibliotheca Oxoniensis Scriptorum Classicorum, the Collection des Universités de France published by the Association Guillaume Budé. The latest edition of which I am aware is the Teubner text of C. Kempf—the second edition of which appeared in 1888.¹ Even before that, editors do not seem to have been drawn to him. After the editio princeps of c. 1470, I note three editors in the sixteenth century (Manutius, Pighius, Lipsius), one in the seventeenth (Vorst), two in the eighteenth (Torrenius, Kapp), and three in the nineteenth (Hase, Halm, Kempf). There was a rash of critical attention paid to the emendation of the text, in the latter part of the last century, mainly by German scholars, but it soon faded away. There are no annotated editions that I know of. I cannot recall seeing a recent article devoted to him.

Even the translators seem to have shunned him: the only English version, to my knowledge, goes back to 1678.

Who is this much-belittled, much-neglected author? And what atrocious stuff did he commit? Why were his misguided efforts preserved at all, when much that is precious in Latin literature has disappeared? Being one of Professor Hadas' “nine out of ten,” I decided to seek the answers. Having found them, and being pleasantly surprised at what I found, I ventured to think that some of the readers of the Classical Journal might be interested in the outcome of my inquiry.

The answer to my first question is, of course, in all the handbooks. Our author bears an illustrious name, for at least three other bearers of it distinguished themselves signally in the early history of the Roman republic: the legendary consul of 505 b.c.; the son of M. Valerius Corvinus, himself three times consul (312, 289 and 286); and the consul of 263, surnamed Messalla because of his capture of Messana during the first Punic War. Socially and historically, our Valerius Maximus cuts a poor figure beside these great aristocrats, to whom he was presumably no more related than were the Sullan annalist Valerius Antias and his contemporary the neoteric poet Valerius Cato. What is known of him is to be gathered from the few scattered references that he makes to himself.

The work is dedicated to Caesar, “cuius caelesti providentia virtutes … benignissime foventur, vitia severissime vindicantur.” That “Caesar” is Tiberius is made clear by a reference to his “paterno avitoque sideri,” i.e. Julius and Augustus. A further indication of the time of composition is given in the invocation to “Pudicitia” which opens Book 6, for the words “tu, Palatii columen, augustos penates sanctissimumque Iuliae genialem torum adsidua statione celebras” refer to Livia, who became Julia Augusta when at Augustus' death in 14 a.d. she was adopted into the Julian family. The present “celebras” sounds as if this invocation had been written before her death in 29. A passage in Book 9 (11 Ext. 4) must have been written after the fall in 31 of Sejanus, who is clearly the subject of this violent denunciation of the man who “haec (i.e. pacem, leges) violatis amicitiae foederibus temptavit subvertere,” although he is not named. Two passages (2.6.8 and 4.7 Ext. 2) indicate the author's friendly relations with Sextus Pompeius, consul in 14 a.d. and proconsul of Asia c. 27-30. From the first of these it appears that Valerius accompanied this friend on his trip to the East. The second, written after Pompey's death (“optimi amici iactura”), is an eloquent confession of his indebtedness to the man “cuius in animo velut in parentum amantissimorum pectore laetior vitae meae status viguit, tristior adquievit; a quo omnium commodorum incrementa ultro oblata cepi; per quem tutior adversus casus steti; qui studia nostra ductu et auspiciis suis lucidiora et alacriora reddidit,” which shows that Valerius occupied the position of favored client and protégé. This relationship is made plausible by the last personal reference to be adduced, a passage (4.4.11) in which he seems to include himself among those “qui parvulos census nostros numquam querellis vacuos esse sinimus” and “modicam fortunam quasi praecipuum generis humani malum diurnis atque nocturnis conviciis laceramus.” One gets the picture of a man of modest means, gratefully attached to a powerful member of the nobility, devoted to the Empire and the imperial family, and with enough self-awareness to recognize some of his faults and enough honesty to admit them.

What did Valerius write? His nine books, which occupy 472 pages in the Teubner edition of 1888, are entitled Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri. The contents were “ab inlustribus electa auctoribus,” as the author states in his preface, “ut documenta sumere volentibus longae inquisitionis labor absit.” In other words, they were meant to be a source book for those who needed illustrative material, “non minus disputantibus quam declamantibus necessariam” (in the words of Valerius' fifth-century epitomator Julius Paris), just as the Exempla of the Middle Ages provided anecdotes with which preachers could enliven their sermons. Valerius' work is, in fact, nothing but a huge collection of anecdotes, drawn mainly from the history of Rome, but also—in passages labeled “Ext.”—regularly glancing at the doings “exterarum gentium.” Although Valerius says merely that he chose those “memoratu digna,” it is plain that his basic interest is in “virtutes” and “vitia,” for it is these aspects of the anecdotes that he stresses. This stress appears even in the table of contents, where headings such as “de fortitudine,” “de amicitia,” “de ingratis,” “de iustitia” are far more frequent than purely descriptive ones like “de somniis,” “strategemata,” and “quae mulieres apud magistratus pro se aut pro aliis causas egerunt.” Its effect upon the anecdotes themselves will be seen as we proceed, for it is all-pervasive. Indeed, to it can be traced the main responsibility for the unfavorable opinions cited above, as well as for the complaint of another epitomator, Januarius Nepotianus (c. 500 a.d.): “opera eius utilia esse, si sint brevia; digna enim cognitione componit, sed colligenda producit, dum se ostentat sententiis, locis iactat, fundit excessibus, et eo fortasse sit paucioribus notus quod legentium aviditati mora ipsa fastidio est.”

What Valerius wrote is certainly not great literature. Yet the information he conveys and the stories he tells, while not always accurate, are still full of intrinsic interest; his style I find highly revealing and often amusing, sometimes very effective; and to catch the gradual disclosure of his character in the personal stand he persists in taking makes it well worthwhile to read him through.

Many of the stories are, of course, familiar to every classicist, for among the “illustribus auctoribus” used by Valerius are Cicero, Sallust and Livy. Thus one can read, to choose a few samples at random, about the untimely death of the two sons of L. Aemilius Paulus, the conqueror of Macedonia (5.10.2); about Cornelia and her jewels (“traxit eam [sc. hospitam] sermone donec e schola redirent liberi, et ‘haec’ inquit ‘ornamenta sunt mea.’” 4.4); about Horatius Cocles and his defense of the bridge (3.2.1); about Alexander the Great and Diogenes the Cynic (“Velim a sole mihi non obstes.” 4.3 Ext. 4); about Marius' escape from death at Minturnae (1.5.5 and 2.10.6); about the killing of Archimedes at the storming of Syracuse (“protecto manibus pulvere ‘noli’ inquit ‘obsecro, istum disturbare.’” 8-7 Ext. 7); about Caesar and the pirates (6.6.15); about Regulus and his voluntary return to Carthage (1.1.14); about the tragic death of Aeschylus (“super quem aquila testudinem ferens elusa splendore capitis—erat enim capillis vacuum—perinde atque lapidi eam inlisit, ut fractae carne vesceretur.” 9.12 Ext. 2). But there are many that are less known, or perhaps found only in this collection. Again, a few samples will suffice to give an idea of the range.

There is the cute story (1.5.3) of the puppy named Persa, whose death both saddened the little girl whose pet he had been, and gladdened the heart of her father, the consul L. Aemilius Paulus Macedonicus, as an omen of impending victory in the campaign against King Perses (Perseus) of Macedonia which had just been intrusted to him. There is the miraculous dream in which Artorius, physician to the future Augustus, on the night before the battle of Philippi, was warned by Minerva not to keep his seriously ill patient out of the coming engagement: Augustus' obedience saved him from being caught when Brutus captured his camp (1.7.1). We attend a Roman trial in the tale of Q. Caecilius Metellus Numidicus, consul in 109 b.c., whose reputation for “integritas” was such that the jury refused to examine the accounts which the man who was accusing him of malfeasance in his province had passed around in proof of Metellus' guilt: “in vita Q. Metelli argumenta sincere administratae provinciae legenda sibi iudices crediderunt” (2.10.1).

One of the admirable aspects of Valerius is his willingness to include stories about the humble as well as about the mighty and famous. Thus he tells of the anonymous soldier who, fighting under Pompey against Sertorius in Spain, discovered that the man he had just killed and stripped was his brother; he rescued the corpse, arranged for the cremation, and then committed suicide over the burning pyre (5.5.4). Again there is the story (6.8.6) of the anonymous slave who, during the great proscriptions under the second triumvirate, helped his master Urbinus Panapio to escape from his country home and then, dressing himself in his master's clothes and putting on his ring, “se … in cubiculum ac lectulum recepit et ut Panapionem occidi passus est.”

Valerius' interests are surprisingly broad, for he gives us glimpses even of the art world, as in the story (8.11 Ext. 7) of the painter who, furious at his inability to reproduce the froth at the nostrils of an otherwise successful equine picture, at last unwittingly succeeded when the sponge, “omnibus imbutam coloribus,” with which he was going to wipe out the painting accidentally produced the desired result. “Quod ars adumbrare non valuit casus imitatus est.”

There are even funny stories, though Valerius is inclined to take life seriously and fails to appreciate the wit of some of his subjects. He does relate the “iocus” played by the senator M. Popilius, who on his deathbed gave every indication of having included his lifelong friend Oppius Gallus in his will, bestowing upon him his last embrace and kisses and even handing him his rings: Oppius had of course been omitted from the will. But Valerius shakes his head at this frivolity: “senator populi Romani, curia egressus, homo vitae fructibus continuo cariturus, sanctissima iura familiaritatis morte pressis oculis et spiritu supremos anhelitus reddente scurrili lusu suggillanda (‘to insult’—a favorite word with Valerius) sibi desumpsit” (7.8.9).

Not that there are nothing but anecdotes to be found. Valerius occasionally also gives simple facts, as in his examples of longevity among the Romans (8.13.1-6): M. Valerius Corvinus—100; L. Caecilius Metellus—100; Livia, wife of a certain Rutilius—97; Cicero's Terentia—103; Clodia, wife of Aufilius—115 (this good lady had survived fifteen children!). Usually these non-anecdotal facts bear upon Roman customs and traditions, upon which he dwells with respect and admiration: the piety of the old Romans and their devotion to religious ceremonies (1.1.1); their treatment of women and their marriage and dining customs (2.1); various political usages (2.2.6-8, 2.8.6).

These stories, facts and customs are generally rendered in a plain narrative style, as for example in the extract from the Aeschylus anecdote quoted above. But, as Januarius Nepotianus pointed out, Valerius is seldom content to stop with the facts. The characteristic flavor of his work stems largely from two peculiarities. The first is his insistence upon linking one topic to another, one item with the next, and this despite the fact that the collocation is rarely logical or inevitable. Thus the discussion of the various components of “virtus,” which begins with Book 3 (“de indole,” “de fortitudine,” “de patientia,” … “de constantia”), is continued in Book 4.1 with the words “Transgrediar ad saluberrimam partem animi, moderationem.” The first “exemplum,” appropriately, deals with P. Valerius Publicola, “ut ab incunabulis summi honoris incipiam.” The transition to the second is “Vix iuvat abire a Publicola, sed venire ad Furium Camillum libet,” that to the third, “Par Furio moderatione Marcius Rutilus Censorinus.” The next few are given without transition, except for a weak “vero,” “at,” or “quoque.” With 4.1.8, however, Valerius tries again: “Ne Africanus quidem posterior nos de se tacere patitur.” In 12, after explaining his inability to do justice to all the “excellentibus … personis rebusque” by which he is “circumfusus,” he continues “quapropter bona cum venia duo Metelli, … maxima patriae ornamenta, strictim se narrari patiantur.” In 14 he still cannot leave the topic: “Tot familiis in uno genere laudis enumeratis, Porcium nomen … silentio praetereundum esse negat posterior Cato.” Finally, in 15, “Ad externa iam mihi exempla transire conanti M. Bibulus … manus inicit.” The “externa” having been disposed of without too much attempt at linkage, the section closes with a summarizing “sententia” (Ext. 9): “et sane nihil est tam praeclarum aut tam magnificum quod non moderatione temperari desideret”; the following (4.2) begins: “Quae quoniam multis et claris auctoribus inlustrata est, transgrediamur …,” thus neatly closing the cycle begun in 4.1.

The second peculiarity is Valerius' compulsion to comment in lush, highly rhetorical language on practically every item in the collection. These comments are not merely indicative of the author's educational and social background, the real source of the linguistic excesses and effusions of an imitative and unoriginal personality. They also disclose various aspects of this personality, so that one closes the book with the feeling that one has come to know a good deal about the mentality of what may well be a typical representative of the middle-class Romans of the first half of the first century a.d. A brief sampling here may both show some of these traits and let the reader judge whether the style is too rich for his taste.

Most obviously it is ancient Rome and its greatness that elicit Valerius' affection. His “exultat animus maximorum virorum memoriam percurrens” (4.3.13) is akin in spirit to Livy's “nulla unquam res publica nec maior nec sanctior nec bonis exemplis ditior fuit” (Praef. 11). His pride in Rome's good qualities transpires for example in this remark (4.7 Ext. 1): “Haeret animus in domesticis, sed aliena quoque bene facta referre Romanae urbis candor hortatur,” as does his grief for her sorrows in 2.8.7, after an item taken from the Civil Wars: “Piget taedetque per vulnera rei publicae ulterius procedere.” He seems sincerely religious, as in 1.6.11: “Sic deorum spreti monitus excandescunt, sic humana consilia castigantur, ubi se caelestibus praeferunt”; yet his remarks in 1.8.7 indicate a healthily sceptical attitude which strikes a modern note (it also shows, again, how close his attitude toward early Roman history is to that of Livy): “Nec me praeterit de motu et voce deorum immortalium humanis oculis auribusque percepto quam in ancipiti opinione aestimatio versetur, sed quia non nova dicuntur sed tradita repetuntur, fidem auctores vindicent; nostrum est inclitis litterarum monumentis consecrata perinde ac vera non refugisse.”

Valerius feels toward slaves and women the way one would expect a Roman to feel: “Restat ut servorum etiam erga dominos quo minus expectatam hoc laudabiliorem fidem referamus” (6.8), and, after stories illustrating the grief and joy of Roman women after the news of the battle of Lake Trasumennus had reached Rome, “Quas dolor non extinxerat, laetitia consumpsit. Sed minus miror, quod mulieres” (9.12.2). The same feeling of condescension is displayed to the common man, as in the story of Pompey's soldier referred to above, which begins (5.5.4): “Sed omnis memoriae clarissimis imperatoribus profecto non erit ingratum, si militis summa erga fratrem suum pietas huic parti voluminis adhaeserit.”

How Valerius thought about philosophy, finally, is adequately indicated by his comments on the bees that were said to have dropped honey on the lips of the sleeping Plato when he was a baby; they will at the same time give a striking example of Valerius' style at its worst—or, shall we say, at its most abundant (1.6 Ext. 3): “Mihi quidem illae apes, non montem Hymettium tymi flore redolentem, sed Musarum Heliconios colles omni genere doctrinae virentes dearum instinctu depastae, maximo ingenio dulcissima summae eloquentiae instillasse videntur alimenta.”

It would be pleasant to present the reader with more examples of Valerius' views and style, but these are perhaps sufficient. My last question remains to be answered: “Why were the works preserved?” Nepotianus already saw the answer when he wrote: “mecum sentis opera eius utilia esse.” As a handy compendium of facts and stories, with an admirable accent on the ethical, they traveled amost unscathed through the Dark and the Middle Ages. In addition to the two abridgements already mentioned, there is a recension of an abridgement made at Ravenna in 450 a.d.; a series of extracts prepared about 875 by a student of the Abbott of Ferrières, Servatus Lupus; manuscripts of the text of the ninth and tenth centuries; and a versification by Radulfus Tortarius of Fleury in the twelfth. Petrarch in the fourteenth was acquainted with him, and his editio princeps is dated in the late fifteenth. Thus he never suffered the almost total eclipse of, say, Catullus. His present detractors, in view of this to them undeserved popularity, might well quote Valerius himself (8.7 Ext. 4): “Stupet mens admiratione … et iam transit alio.” A fitting phrase with which to stop our account of this very ordinary Roman, whose book, in complete contrast to Horace's famous “Nil admirari” is a constant wonderment at the virtues and vices of mankind, and a constant passage from one marvel to the next.

Note

1. I have not seen the edition of Pierre Constant (Latin text and French translation), published by the Librairie Garnier.