SOURCE: Bloomer, W. Martin. “Audience and Design.” In Valerius Maximus and the Rhetoric of the New Nobility, pp. 11-58. Chapel Hill, N. C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

[In the following excerpt, Bloomer concentrates on the intended audience for and the structural design of Memorable Doings and Sayings, arguing that Valerius's reasons for composing the work were not antiquarian or historical, but rather were motivated by his desire to reinterpret and “de-historicize” existing material.]

From what Valerius tells his reader Memorable Deeds and Sayings is a time-saving, smooth, and seamless collection. In his proem and the prooemia to the various chapters Valerius is concerned to ease transition so as to maintain his reader's interest, to ensure that the reader keeps reading. Assiduous and self-conscious transitions mark, of course, the difficulty of joining two sections and, at the same time, draw attention to the person and skill of the joiner. Valerius' notices of his work's organization attempt to make whole and connected what is disparate. In part this is inevitable for one whose program is to assert the connection of the present with the past. The difference of the past must be downplayed for a number of reasons: to have events in the past serve as models of conduct; to have the emperors as supporters and continuators of the Republic. The design of this presentation of the past is important, for it reveals the structural and thematic connections Valerius found and imposed on the past.

The organization of the book explains in large part Valerius' later popularity. For those who would compose, Memorable Deeds and Sayings is easier of access than any historical narrative. The structures of Valerius' book also reveal contemporary concerns; these divisions of subjects and signals of structure indicate what Valerius deemed worthy of record, and why. The latter is particularly interesting: Valerius was not content to retail stories, but provides his reader with proper interpretation. The categories by which we are to understand the past and judge its actions and values are laid down in the chapter headings and chapter introductions. Valerius has written a book of aristocratic culture: he gives most space and prominence to the institutions and code of conduct of the Roman noble families. So too, it is easily argued, does Cicero, but in retelling and reshaping stories from Cicero and Livy, Valerius has lost the optimate and republican program. Factionalism and indeed nearly all political motivation recede under the pressure of an understanding insistently moral and abstract. Valerius is not simply “rhetoricizing” what were originally political and historical texts. He is, rather, engaged in communicating these texts and especially their leading actors as the culture for a new age. Part of that new culture is to deny the break from the past, the innovations of the present.

Literature of the Julio-Claudian period is often examined as a response to the social and political innovations of the Principate—as critical dissent or sycophantic accommodation, both of which positions presuppose the recognition in the writer of a distance from the past and seem to insist that literature is a direct response to politics. Valerius' work will not be examined … [here] in this way but instead as a creation and communicator of the new culture of the Principate. Valerius' work displays a new generation's appropriation of Roman noble culture.

The categories, difficulties, and failures of that comprehension are first and best examined in Valerius' structures, themes, and their connections. These in turn have significant indications of Valerius' contemporary audience. Clearly, declaimers and schoolboys—apprentice declaimers—found this book useful and in all likelihood contributed to its form and contents, but we can be more exact in defining who was learning of Roman culture through Valerius' work and through declamation in general.¹ This is not a work for Roman nobles; it may not have been a work primarily for the traditionally literate classes of the city of Rome. Provincials and Italians were coming to Rome; and though there is nothing novel in the city's pull, the immigrants' ambitions were novel. The Roman senators certainly resented the emperors' new favorites. Sejanus' humble origin (though exaggerated by his critics) was a topic of abuse in Valerius' day just as Claudius' employ of freedmen in governmental positions would anger those whose families had traditionally conducted Roman public affairs.² Ever since Julius Caesar had packed the senate house with provincials loyal to him, the Romanness of the senate was felt to be in decline.³ Most the provincials who came to Rome did not of course reach the senate, but such access now had precedent.

The Empire did have great need of bureaucrats, soldiers, and men of letters. The allegiance of these men would be uncomplicated by traditional family and factional ties if this staff were drawn from men outside the traditional ruling classes, outside the capital. Success depended first on recognition from above, and letters if not literature was a tried and safe field of contest and distinction. The bureaucracy, the army, and the courts were the great opportunities for those without noble birth. Even the soldier at Rome could profit from literary ability; for the line between soldier and administrator was never distinct, and the Roman patron, high-ranking officer, magistrate, or administrator, always had need of competent men of letters. Velleius Paterculus, Valerius' contemporary, is remembered as the author of a breviary history that he dedicated to his old commanding officer. His success in gaining patronage, of course, came before he wrote the history, which has survived, and his literary competence—we can scarcely call his ability anything more—may well have helped this Italian in his ambitious rise. For those who would be lawyer, administrator, and even soldier, a classical education was the first step. Such an education was different in kind and purposes from the same first step for the careerist in the British Empire. The Roman was not simply competing with his peers for the grade that qualified entrance to civil service. The product of the ancient education was not training in the mechanics of imperial government or in the fundamentals of law but a “Romanness” of speech (including, no doubt for some, morphology and pronunciation) and of the subjects of speech. Valerius' work appealed to such an audience of imperial supporters and beneficiaries. His serviceable design provided the topics of speech and sample demonstrations.

The present [examination] begins and ends with consideration of Valerius' definition and intimation of his audience. The interconnections of this audience with Valerius' methodology and purposes are of paramount importance if we are to advance beyond dismissal of the literature of Valerius and his generation as “rhetorical.” The [consideration] proceeds by examination of Valerius' divisions and order of his material. The general sequence of Valerius' subjects leads to some conclusions about the history of the text's composition and more importantly elucidates the nature of his interests. Examination of the chapter as unit of structure and composition offers the most concrete insight into what Valerius found memorable and how he presented this. An extreme of his presentation then concerns us. Valerius' inclusion of recalcitrant material—subjects and figures of noble culture enshrined by canonical prose masters—exhibits the most distorting qualities of his composition and also his and his generation's particular anxieties. These anxieties, the difficulties that the canonical, republican stories offered, betray themselves again in Valerius' prefaces to certain chapters where he imports the conditions and status of his audience.

THE PROEM AND VALERIUS' AUDIENCE

Valerius declares his purpose, methods, and audience from the very start.

The memorable deeds and sayings of the city of Rome and of foreign nations, which have been so scattered in the works of authors that they cannot conveniently be learned, I have resolved to select from outstanding authors so as to spare those who want concrete evidence the tedious task of research. I have not succumbed to the desire to treat all things. For who can consider the history of the world in a few volumes? Or who in his right mind would hope that he could write Roman and foreign history with greater accuracy or eloquence, so polished as it has been by our elders?⁴

The proem promises that he has selected exempla from illustrious authors as a shortcut for his readers. Valerius' words have not, however, found many believers. Indeed, the proem is most often cited so as to be dismissed, for Valerius' whole enterprise has been judged plagiarism of another collector.⁵ Valerius' statement of method is thus said to be the author's pretense of scholarship. In fact, the proem is more interesting and complex than such skepticism implies. Further, this extreme skepticism is unwarranted. Valerius has done just what he says; in particular he has read the works of Cicero and Livy and drawn from this reading historical anecdotes that illustrate some abstract category such as “Friendship” or “Luxury and Lust” or “Cruelty” or “Illustrious Men Who Dressed Somewhat Outlandishly.” Once Valerius' statement of method is credited, the remainder of the proem may be reconsidered.

In particular, Valerius' definition of his subject and intimation of his audience demand attention. Nowhere in this proem does he mention the term exempla, although this is clearly his subject. Valerius is being quite careful to elevate and delineate his subject. At the same time he offers a sort of recusatio for not writing history. What then is he doing? The proem begins grandly: any remotely historical work that begins Urbis Romae cannot fail to echo Livy's massive Ab urbe condita. The diction of this first sentence has led to speculation that Sallust is being recalled here.⁶ The historian at Rome is always engaged in memoria rerum, in the commemoration of the worthy. Valerius' subject at first seems lofty; he proposes treatment of all the world and not simply Rome. Valerius draws his project up short with a brief and Sallustian second sentence (nec mihi cuncta complectendi cupido incessit)—though Sallust would not have been as fond of alliteration. Two rhetorical questions follow, each with a specific contemporary or near contemporary target. The first asks who would write the history of the world in a few volumes. The reader need not turn to the slim volumes of Nepos lost to us but praised by Catullus. Valerius' contemporary Velleius Paterculus was writing a universal history in two books. The second possibility for historical writing seems even remoter to Valerius. He asks, “Or who in his right mind would hope that he could write Roman and foreign history with greater accuracy or eloquence, so polished as it has been by our elders?” That is, who can compete with Livy or with the Augustan encyclopedic historians Dionysius of Halicarnassus or Diodorus of Sicily? This two-sentence negative definition of the book's program is strongly colored by a sense of the inferiority of the present. Perhaps Valerius means to reprove his contemporary Velleius Paterculus for his very slim two books on all the world's history.

But what justifies or distinguishes Valerius' project? The author advances no claim to originality: originality in style or substance or even in historical genre has been denied with these rhetorical questions, which suggest not so much dubitatio as aporia, not the author's hesitation over alternatives but a complete writing block. The narrator does not hesitate on which authorial road to follow but whether to write at all. This is a peculiar recusatio, which implies not the author's unwillingness to write history but the impossibility of other historical writing. Valerius can engage in such an exclusive and polemical rhetoric because he has already made his positive case in his first sentence, and here the audience and not genre, subject, or treatment constitutes originality. The needs of his readers, he maintains, have motivated the personal act of composition. Valerius describes his audience, literally, as those who want to take proofs—that is, those who would read so as to cull instances of memorable deeds and sayings, Roman and foreign. While this may seem a most expansive category, among his contemporaries those who used and wanted historical anecdotes with an authoritative literary pedigree were public speakers, lawyers, and declaimers.

This is clearly Valerius' audience, and their needs justify Valerius' writing. The declaimers' controversiae and suasoriae had Greek and Roman contexts ripe for rhetorical exemplification, and their categories have clearly influenced Valerius' chapter headings. The interaction of the declaimers' contests and Valerius' work involves far more than coincidence of individual anecdote or the correspondence of some of the headings for those examples. The structure and organization of Valerius' book arise from and seek to direct declamatory composition.

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE COLLECTION

BOOK DIVISIONS AND SUBJECTS

Valerius' collection of rhetorical exempla is divided into nine books of, on the average, nine chapters, each with some categorical heading and a number of rhetorical examples. These examples are divided into two categories: the Roman and the foreign. Most often these headings are abstract categories—types of morality or immorality—for example, “Religion,” “Pretended Religion,” “Parental Love,” “Constancy,” “Luxury and Lust.” Frequently, the incongruous or paradoxical interests Valerius—stories that involve a reversal of fortune such as his very last chapter: “The Lowborn Who Tried through Deceit to Enter Others' Families.”

The individual story has most often been taken from a classical Latin author, placed under a heading, and stylistically reworked so as to be suitable for insertion into a declamation. A system of verbal classification forms the heart of Valerius' scheme of organization. First, anecdotes are subsumed in a broad category. Within this generalizing category individual events are listed without narrative expansion or indeed often without narrative explanation. The date is summarily indicated—we are told that the particular person under consideration was consul or, as in 1.6.5, that a cow spoke “in the Second Punic War.” Figures are sometimes given (e.g., troop numbers derived from Livy), but without a systematic attempt to date the years, either by giving an absolute year-number from Rome's foundation or by reference to the consuls. The transitions, the short introductions to each exemplum, are the key to the groupings within the chapters. Without an index, table of contents, or footnotes, the reader needs some guide to this mass of heterogeneous material, and the rubrics, these chapter headings, provide the needed direction. Then, Valerius gives his reader brief introductions and transitions, which often contain the key words of the chapter titles.⁷ For instance, Valerius begins the chapter 4.7, entitled “Friendship,” “Let us now consider the bond of friendship,” and as transition from “Ingrates” to a string of chapters on piety Valerius' proem is “But let us leave off ingrates and speak rather of the pious.”⁸

The various prose genres of Latin literature, especially the works of Cicero and Livy, were mined for rhetorical illustrations. Valerius was not the first to gather rhetorical exempla; any speaker would accumulate exempla, although theoretical treatises on rhetoric did not. Written collections of exempla arose late in the history of rhetoric, and like biography itself (to which they are clearly related) they first appeared in late republican and Augustan Rome. The biographer and historian Cornelius Nepos wrote a work entitled Exempla, as did the prolific Greek freedman of Augustus, Hyginus. The Hebdomades of Varro was an illustrated account of famous men. Valerius himself made use of a prior collection at least once, for he refers to the otherwise unknown “Collecta” of Pomponius Rufus (4.4.pr.). Unquestionably, his work does profit from the antiquarian investigations of scholars of the late Republic. His book, however, has more in common with the functional world chronology of Atticus and the universal history of his contemporary Velleius Paterculus than the scholarly productions of Varro. For declaimers did not retail the recondite; in order to be hortatory, in order to be paradigmatic, examples had to be readily comprehensible and familiar. And the familiar was to a great extent that narrated or immortalized by Cicero and Livy, both of whom are responsible for the commemoration and canonization of the protagonists of the Roman Republic and of foreign history. Valerius most often took as his sources the explicit exempla he found in Cicero's works and those he could glean from Livy's and Pompeius Trogus' narratives. He was not a scrupulous scholar; he did not use a fraction of the sources available to him, which to the historians' regret have perished. And as he worked, he excised anecdotes from their historical surroundings, from the patterns and details that give a particular event its individuality. Great men doing great things and the despicable doing the reverse swiftly become moral categories, not historical events. Analogy and even invention do not lag far behind when historical figures are served up to the declaimers. One Scipio can easily be granted the feats of another (7.5.2), just as a Roman replacement must be found for a Marathonian hero (3.2.22). These practices are the occasion for the charges of historical inaccuracy leveled against the handbook maker by those who wanted a historian.

These compositional practices explain, therefore, the unhistorical quality of certain exempla—to work as exempla events had to be to a certain extent “dehistoricized.” Up to now a preoccupation with Valerius' shortcomings as historical source has narrowed scholarly attention to the individual exemplum, its relation to a single source, and its historical reality. This has obscured the nature of Valerius' composition. Valerius' choice of themes and his connections of these themes reveal his methods, interests, indeed his preoccupations. The choice of material and statements of the relations of those materials divulge the principles of exclusion and inclusion, what to Valerius' mind made a person or action worthy of memory. Further, his organization, including the juxtaposition of certain stories, provides insight into the terms in which he understood the past and into the connections he saw in the most disparate material. Valerius' indications of his organization, the chapter headings and prefaces, provide insights into how and why he juxtaposed certain stories, under what terms he understood the past, and what connections he saw in the most disparate material. Not only should the general subjects themselves be examined, but Valerius' composition should be scrutinized at a level intermediate between the general consideration of subjects and their divisions, on the one hand, and a minute consideration of a particular exemplum and its literary antecedents, on the other. Individual sources, the study of which has so preoccupied Valerian scholars, will not explain his choice and arrangement of material. Valerius did create a certain structure for his work; he chose to communicate a connected structure with his references (often in the first person and in the prefaces to individual chapters) to the propositum that guides him, and to his deviations from and recall to this program.

At the outset the propositum is quite clear. The thematic development and cohesion of the first three books are obvious: their subject—religion most broadly conceived—moves from formal state ceremonies at the beginning of book 1 to, in book 3, those personal moral qualities that rendered the Roman noble “religious,” pious and estimable in the eyes of his peers and clients. Valerius offers no systematic account of Roman or foreign religion but instead a list of precedents, what the Romans would have called exempla or documenta of the mos maiorum. The first book, for example, presents famous Romans and some Greeks who are exemplars of religion, specifically types and antitypes of performers of public religious ritual and of religious revelation. A snake appears at the altar while Sulla is sacrificing, who then, on the haruspex's urging, immediately leads out his army to conquer the Samnites (1.6.4). The ghost of Tiberius Gracchus appears in a dream to his brother to warn him of the coming catastrophe (1.7.6). These examples belong to the public sphere; they depict the observance, flaunting, and revelation of the divine will by the leading men of the Roman Republic. No story of the individual devotion of an otherwise unknown Roman is told. Piety alone does not ensure commemoration, as Valerius' subject is not private pietas but the instances of the pietas offered the state by the mos maiorum, literally the custom of the ancestors.

Book 1 begins with religion observed, neglected, pretended, and rejected and then moves to auspices, omens, prodigies, dreams, and miracles. These latter categories again relate events of public importance. Indeed, this is the sort of fantastic material that the priests had recorded in their annals, the predecessor to Roman historical writing. Even the chapter on dreams, a favorite figure for the declaimers, relates only those whose contents were of public importance. The chapter begins with the dream of Augustus' physician before the Battle of Philippi (Athena advised that the ailing Octavian be on hand) and proceeds to the admonitory dream of Calpurnia, Caesar's wife, on the eve of the Ides of March (1.7.1 and 2). The transition to the fourth example openly declares this criterion for inclusion: “The following dream is equally relevant to public religion.”⁹ Valerius seems to have found this assertion necessary because the historical figure, the dreamer, was a plebeian. The man's rank is excused since his dream averted disaster from the Republic.

In these final two chapters of book 1, on dreams and miracles, the foreign examples do outnumber the Roman. The Roman continue to be oriented toward civic matters, whereas the foreign examples attest heaven's favor or warning to famous individuals (Hannibal, Croesus, Cyrus, Alexander the Great, Alcibiades, the poet Simonides). The contrast of national and individual greatness and divine favor is inescapable as the memorial of foreign men moves from individual to individual without regard for chronology or national origin. The effect of these foreign examples is not, like the Roman, a careful marshaling of praise but a disconnected series of unusual events.

Book 2 constitutes the juncture between the public and the individual. The first five chapters narrate the offices and practices of the Roman magistracies with foreign examples reserved for the sixth chapter. This division reflects the preponderance of Roman material characteristic of the first three books. A patriotic bias runs throughout Valerius' work, but the first part of Memorable Deeds and Sayings particularly celebrates Rome's ancestral religious institutions. The course of Valerius' program remains clear throughout the second book: following the foreign institutions comes a treatment of military practices (2.7 and 2.8). Valerius has moved from the civic to the military side of the magistracies. But chapters 1-5, 7, and 8 do not treat Roman political institutions systematically. Only the first five chapters were a unity. The remaining seem to fill in some of the gaps—the foreign, the military, and the extraordinary. For at 2.8 and 2.9 he treats two extraordinary Roman magistracies, the triumphator and the censor. He is once again not interested in the office itself, or even in those who triumphed, for this chapter considers the cases of those who do not triumph—either because the senate or the courts denied them the honor or, in the singular case of Cn. Fulvius Flaccus (2.8.3), because he refused it. The only details we learn of the office is the number of slain needed to earn a triumph (2.8.1) and the triumphator's practice of inviting and then disinviting the consuls to dinner on the eve of the triumph (2.8.6). Valerius is characteristically interested in the exceptional and the paradoxical, those whose exclusion defines the office and the chapter title. Similarly, the final instance of the next chapter, “Censorial Severity,” lists those who gained the censorship after having been expelled from the senate by the censors (2.9.9).

The final chapter of the book makes the juncture to a new type of religious theme; here again Valerius reveals his guiding principle. The topic of 2.10 is maiestas, a word hard to translate: the English majesty has too much of the later Latin imperial, royal ring to it. In Valerius' exempla it necessarily involves an audience (a jury, the senate, the Roman people, a king) and is that audience's publicly manifested respect for a man of the highest station. No king has maiestas in Valerius, although Xerxes does show it to the Athenian tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton. In the preface to this chapter Valerius justifies his inclusion of the topic by likening majesty to a private censorship (quasi privata censura—an oxymoron: “as if a private individual held the censorship”). Valerius imagines the show of respect to a private man the equivalent of election to the Roman office charged with maintaining morals. His concern is both to find the proper praise and to rank the praiseworthy.¹⁰ His task is not simply one of invention, to find instances of a category, but of hierarchy and equivalency. Valerius' work presents the process and the product of that ordering.

The third book moves to abstract personal moral qualities: “Bravery” (3.2), “Patience” (3.3), “Constancy” (3.8). The transition to the private or personal realm has been made with maiestas at 2.10, where the private qualities of the men make the office and not the other way around. The formally religious has receded as his subject. A movement from divine to human institutions recalls Varro's works of those titles, but Valerius has not been treating these spheres as separate subjects nor does his work reflect antiquarian concerns or the antiquarian's precision. Book 2 had not been without categories of personal qualities; the two chapters that have as titles abstract nouns denoting personal virtues—“Frugality and Innocence” (2.5—this is clearly the theme for this chapter although the title is one supplied by later manuscripts), “Majesty” (2.10)—seem the spillover of the prior chapters, as if Valerius had had more material than the original category could embrace. Thus in 2.10 men of majesty as private censors follow the chapter devoted to “Censorial Severity,” and similarly at 2.5.1 the first golden statue of the city is a natural successor to the final example of the preceding chapter, at 2.4.7, the first gladiatorial contest at Rome; and so 2.4, “Spectacles” (public games), gives way to 2.5, “Frugality and Innocence.” Both preceding chapters in these pairs involved a Roman magistracy; the foils that follow in the second chapters underscore the quality of Valerius' interest in these subjects. The offices do not hold him in themselves; rather the men do. He chooses to commemorate the qualities of these men that define them and their category, especially in some paradoxical fashion like those denied a triumph or those who had the honor of the censorship without the office. Valerius is celebrating the character and achievements exhibited by magistrates and those worthy of magistracies.

The shift from the public to the individual has been made by the beginning of the third book, although the move is not absolute. He has exhausted the subject of Roman state traditions as exemplified in Roman nobles. From book 2 through book 6 Valerius presents individual moral exemplars; that is, his chapter headings are predominantly the names of virtues: “Moderation” (4.1), “Friendship” (4.7), “Justice” (6.5). Valerius writes of virtues made manifest in the lives of famous Romans and foreigners. The divisions after book 6 are clear. Book 7 begins with a chapter that is clearly meant to join the new book with the preceding; “Felicity” (constancy of fortune) (7.1) is the opposite half of the prior chapter, “The Mutability of Customs and Fortune” (6.9). Valerius has several such pairs of chapters. Book 7 differs in that after 7.2 and 7.3, which are a pair of opposites (wise and foolish, respectively, deeds and sayings) and a chapter on military stratagems (mental cleverness seems the slim connection), Valerius turns to the law, to the forensic world. “Necessity” at 7.6 is an interloper, but Valerius justifies its inclusion as it is a law unto itself.¹¹

The legal sections, 7.5 and 7.7-8.6, have no foreign examples. This is significant: Valerius' treatment of wills, witnesses, and the courts reflects the concerns of the orator. No doubt the orator who would benefit from these exempla is more academic than professional. Significantly, however, Roman declamation has been criticized as reflecting Greek or even fictional legal practice; but no matter how farfetched the case of a controversia in Seneca may seem, the argument is conducted as if at Rome.¹² Foreign precedents are of no service to the pleader-in-training. The world of fantasy and of historical recreation belongs to suasoriae, not controversiae. Foreign examples recur with the change in subject at 8.7, which begins a series of six chapters on the arts. The fine arts are not being canvassed; rather Valerius has written of the arts ancillary to practical oratory, whose legal concerns constitute the prior section. Admittedly, these chapters wander from the forensic, but their connection with the preceding is clear. “Study and Industry” (8.7) is one of the rare chapters in which the foreign material outweighs the domestic; as with “Wise Deeds and Sayings” the foreign majority is due to Greece's wealth of philosophers, poets, and statesmen. Valerius then considers “Proper Leisure” (8.8) the balancing opposite to “Study and Industry.” The role of studium in eloquence is a commonplace; Valerius has begun here and then, as he often does, has considered the opposite in a separate chapter. Eloquence and its art, a proper continuation of his forensic theme, then become the subject again at 8.9 and 8.10.

Yet the exempla afforded by foreign artists led him from his proper subject: just as with 8.7, “Study and Industry,” the foreign examples constitute a majority at 8.11, “The Rare Effects of Art,” and 8.12, “Artistic Virtuosi.” The end of this book is discursive. Valerius seems emboldened by these artistic digressions, for the final three chapters of book 8 are a hodgepodge; disparate material—“Famous Cases of Longevity” (8.13), “The Love of Glory” (8.14), “Outstanding Things Which Happened to Individuals” (8.15)—cluster at the end of the book. Perhaps these were the residue of Valerius' inquiries. The ninth book could not receive them, for this final book offers a different class of exempla—vices. The titles are, familiarly, abstract nouns denoting personal qualities such as “Cruelty” (9.2) or “Avarice” (9.4).

From the religious and institutional subjects of books 1 and 2 to the vicious of the final book, the most obvious common thread is the format, the subordination of human action to a series of discrete anecdotes, moral and immoral, comprehended by a unifying rubric, the chapter heading. Valerius' own entries into the text, the references in the proems to his program, his first-person statements of transition and even of temporary disjuncture and then recall, all reinforce this formal cognitive system. Valerius' work communicates a way of understanding and relating events. A structured understanding of the whole of history or of religion or of rhetoric is neither the purpose nor the outcome. Transition, the ability to display verbal connection, which involves the choice and deft use of a subsuming rubric and the ordering of instances under that rubric, is the prized figure and structure. Such a technique is almost naive in its reliance and faith in rhetorical structures; it draws attention to itself and, more to the point, to the virtuosity of the speaker who employs it. Such a rhetoric when compared with that of Cicero seems distracting. Clearly, it is meant to be. The listener now is trained to hear familiar matter but to listen for the novel figure, connection, or treatment.

When the overt structures that purport to tie a work together are the author's entries into the text and various rhetorical junctures, often metonymic, the structure of the whole will not seem organic. A highly subordinated, compact structure is not Valerius' aim. When transition, the verbal display of connection, is especially prized, the two parts to be joined will come to be more and more disparate. The reader is not simply being instructed in some antithetical mode of thought—having been told of one subject, be ready to entertain the opposite. Certain of Valerius' chapters do work this way, and the suitability of opposite examples for debate is obvious. But when the display of transition becomes a valued oral skill, the course of subjects is necessarily more and more discursive. The ability to move from one exemplum to the next is not a narrow talent; it is essential to the declaimer who must hold an audience by surprise and paradox. It is also essential to the use of an exemplum, to argument by example since the speaker and adviser must always assert the relevance and connection of the paradigm to the present circumstances. Ovid is the greatest late Augustan and Tiberian master of transition, but Valerius too learned and taught the joining of the opposite, the paradoxical, and the discursive.

Valerius' work is a showpiece in many ways, including its use of transition, the sophisticated signaling of shift of topic. Book divisions are thus not arbitrary or random: the division of subjects between books 1, 2, and 3 and between 8 and 9 are striking. Book length and number of chapters are fairly uniform (the final book has the most chapters; perhaps a final book on a different tack, vices, was an afterthought, though one with plenty of material).¹³ The book divisions then are original; their length is appropriate for a single papyrus roll.¹⁴ These divisions and structures reveal the concerns of Valerius and his audience and explain why his work has been serviceable for so many audiences. We are bent on discovering the structure of Valerius' organization and understanding. These are not primarily those of the book but of the chapter. For the chapter is the unit that Valerius has in particular organized to be understood together.

CHAPTER DIVISION AND CHAPTER TITLES

Valerius' chapter titles have much to reveal. Not simply an index to the subjects of his or his audience's interest or a clue to the system of symbols and categories from the contemporary intellectual pursuit of declamation, these chapter titles betray certain gaps. These are hiatuses in his program, the categories of his interest that depart from traditional material and indicate the elision, the attempted juncture of competing ideologies. The form of these chapters has not changed: all titles are prepositional phrases (about x or y); the object of the preposition and subject of the chapter are either an abstract noun, occasionally a pair of such nouns, or a relative clause. The favored title is the single abstract noun; the relative clause is used where Latin afforded no nominal abstraction. This is made quite clear by the proem to the single chapter that has a Greek title, “Stratagems” (7.4: “[examples of this category] have virtually no satisfactory expression in our language; in Greek they are called Stratagems”).¹⁵ No traditional virtue could embrace instances of “The Humble Born Who Rose to Prominence” (3.4) or “Women Who Pleaded Their Own and Others' Cases before Magistrates” (8.3) or “The Lowborn Who Tried through Deceit to Enter Others' Families” (9.15). Moreover, the relative clause at times allows Valerius to append a category clearly related to the prior chapter. The second chapter may be the opposite category: so 3.5, “Those Who Degenerated from Their Noble Birth,” follows the humble born of 3.4; and 5.9, “Those Who Showed Restraint to Their Suspected Children,” follows on “The Severity of Fathers toward Their Children,” itself a response to the prior chapter (5.7) “Paternal Love and Indulgence.” The difference of form does not of itself imply a different sort of subject; each chapter deals with a class of men; where possible Valerius provides an abstract quality as the common category for the men whose behavior has made them memorable.

Even so, the set of what Valerius finds memorable is finite. While on occasion his most immediate principle of composition is the juxtaposition of contrary chapters, every virtue is not followed by its corresponding vice. Indeed, vices are reserved for the final book. Similarly, the virtues commemorated, while they may seem eclectic, are not indiscriminate. The long series of virtues from books 3 through 5 are notable not, as in the first two books, for a concern with the proper demeanor and behavior of the magistrate, but for the concern with the proper conduct of the individual within the family. This concern with birth, achievement, and behavior is signaled at the outset of the third book (3.1, “Inborn Talent”). Chapters 3.4 and 3.5 have titles in the form of relative clauses (“The Humble Born Who Rose to Prominence” and “Those Who Degenerated from Their Noble Birth”) because these were not part of Rome's traditional, aristocratic virtues. Here the contrast in title type serves to emphasize legitimacy and propriety.¹⁶ Similarly, from 4.4 to the first example of book 6 Valerius' subject is proper kin relations, orderly behavior within the family. This subject recurs in the extended treatment of fidelity (6.6, “The Republic's Fidelity”; 6.7, “Wives' Fidelity to Their Husbands”; 6.8, “Slaves' Fidelity to Their Masters”). This last topic leads to “The Mutability of Customs and Fortune,” a transition remarkable not for its admonitory originality but, like all these chapters, for its concern with status and the behavior proper to each status and role.

Within a chapter exempla are joined in a sort of hierarchy as if the individual anecdotes were steps leading to the perfect manifestation of the quality in question. Valerius is concerned that his reader realize the ranking; thus one exemplum is said to be equal to another or one is said to surpass another or one is simply said to be the best or greatest of the category. The sequence of exempla is most often chronological, so the structure alone does not indicate relative merit; rather the hierarchy is indicated in Valerius' transitions, the lead-in sentences for each exemplum. In brief, this is how Valerius presents the fruit of his labor. Those interested in proofs need only select from the graded series. As Cicero advised, Roman examples precede and dominate.

COMPOSITION BY CHAPTER: THE CONSTRUCTION OF 1.6

Much of Valerius' treatment of an individual story thus depends on the choice of chapter title and the manner of composition within the chapter. Valerius' manner of composition and structure of presentation are best appreciated by an example, by the examination of a particular chapter. In the introduction to 1.6, “Prodigies,” Valerius justifies the inclusion of the subjects and sketches briefly an organizational principle: “An account of prodigies as well, both the favorable and the adverse, is owed to our undertaking.”¹⁷ This undertaking is the whole section of book 1, which, in canvassing religion and religious institutions, succeeds especially in celebrating the Roman examples. In this chapter Valerius generally follows chronology: miraculous signs are surveyed, beginning with the kings and culminating with the Caesars. As an apologetic afterthought come the three foreign examples: Xerxes, Midas, and Plato. The chronology at second glance seems far less than strict. …

Chronological order is not followed, so it seems, until the episodes are divided (as Valerius indirectly posited in his introductory sentence) into the favorable and the adverse. Numbers one to four are felicitous events; five to thirteen augur ill to Rome. Within each of these two groupings there still remains one exception to the temporal sequence. An omen, or properly a prodigium (what we might call miraculous omens—distinguished from an omen that could be a single ordinary event with prophetic importance), following the defeat of P. and Cn. Scipio in Spain (211) intervenes between the seventh-century king Servius Tullius (1.6.1) and the miraculous overflow before the capture of Veii in 397. In the adverse prodigies, the folly of C. Hostilius Mancinus (cos. 137) does not come between Marcellus and Octavius (cos. 87), but is placed too early, coming between Flaminius and Tiberius Gracchus (proconsul 212). Valerius' sense of history is not at issue here—he knew perfectly well that the Punic Wars followed Veii—but he has with 1.6.1 and 1.6.2 joined two like prodigies. His motivation is the easy verbal link, “of equally fortunate outcome was that flame” (aeque felicis eventus illa flamma), which ties the anecdote of the young man who would be king to the story of Lucius Marcius, leader of the fractured forces of the Scipios. Chronological order has been sacrificed for verbal point. The third exemplum is introduced solely with “Likewise” and then immediately turns to the narration of the divine favor shown the Romans in their siege of Veii: “Likewise, when in a bitter and lengthy conflict the citizens of Veii …” (item, cum bello acri et diutino Veientes). The fact of temporal sequence, Valerius feels, need not be pointed out.

As for Mancinus interrupting the flow of history, Valerius has again juxtaposed like events. In both the disaster of Lake Trasimene and this setback from the Numantine Wars, the consul ignored prodigies, with the immediate consequence of a signal Roman defeat. By removing Mancinus from his correct position and placing him between Flaminius and Gracchus, Valerius can then also present together a series of three consuls who met their own deaths (but without the loss of their Roman armies). The first two of these, Gracchus and Marcellus, met chance deaths after ignoring prodigies. Valerius then turns to Octavius, who feared but could not avoid his fate (1.6.10). Ever eager to ease his transitions from one exemplum to the next, Valerius follows an underlying scheme that is temporal, but this he violates in order to join like events and to comment on this likeness, to draw attention to similarity but not just any similarity. In these chapters of book 1 that embrace dreams, miracles, omens, and prodigies, he is not interested in the sciences of the astrologer, haruspex, or augur. Thus in 1.6 the events are not organized by grouping all the like omens together. An exception is 1.6.5, where the stuff of the magistrates' annals (cows talking, stones raining, etc.) is appended to the like prodigies of 461 b.c., but this sequence is added as an afterthought (and, as we shall see, because Valerius found it in the passage of Livy from which he has culled other parts of this chapter). The priests' records and the Etruscan science do not hold him in themselves; cases of chickens ignored or the various epiphanies of snakes or lobeless livers are not the organizing categories. Rather a series of great men is split into good and bad examples; chronological order is thereafter observed except where the similar fortunes of men allow Valerius to group them together and to draw some generalizing, often moral connection.

To bind the stories further, he makes use of transitions that depend on verbal and not historical connections. So the “headlong audacity” (praeceps audacia, 1.6.6) of Flaminius is followed by the “mad obduracy” (vesana perseverantia, 1.6.7) of Hostilius Mancinus whose “rashness” (temeritas, 1.6.8) is joined to Gracchus'. The stringing together of exempla—familiar stories incongruously, that is imaginatively, joined—is a feature of the rhetorical schools and of Roman declamation in general.¹⁸ Valerius' fondness for abstraction is not simply a mannerism of style. In this chapter, for example, a progress of abstract qualities leads to the crowning example of the chapter heading—here, the worst of the disastrous prodigies. Abstraction enables transition, just as, more generally, it groups disparate events into the various chapters of Valerius' work. Valerius communicates a moral understanding of the events of this chapter through a steady emphasis on abstract qualities and on their relation.

He did not find his material in this form or even in these combinations. In this chapter Valerius does give the impression of a composer skipping from one book to another while dictating. The sixth exemplum of this chapter provides a test case for examination of his method of inquiry and of composition. At 1.6.6 Valerius recounts the infamous episode of the Roman consul Flaminius at Lake Trasimene—uniquely memorable and commemorated by Polybius, Coelius Antipater, Cicero, and Livy. Coelius' work was abridged by Brutus (whose epitome may have been Cicero's source).¹⁹ Valerius had, it is clear, sources far greater in number and different in character from those extant. Where Valerius is choosing between Livy and Cicero, we may gain no insight about these additional sources but, at least, can learn about his methods and purposes of research. The exemplum about Flaminius offers some light here:

Moreover, C. Flaminius—the consul who took office without consulting the auspices—just before joining in battle with Hannibal at Lake Trasimene, ordered the assembly of the standards, was thrown to the ground over his fallen horse's head, and, undaunted by this prodigy, threatened to punish the standard bearers (who maintained that the standards could not be moved) if they did not dig them up that instant. If only this folly had had as recompense his death alone and not the greatest slaughter of the Roman people! In that battle fifteen thousand Romans were killed, six thousand captured, and ten thousand put to flight. Hannibal, who had entombed Rome's power as much as he could, sought out for burial the butchered body of the consul. (1.6.6)²⁰

That Valerius can be determined to have followed any source at all would be remarkable. The details of the story (the fall from the horse, the immobile standards, the ensuing defeat) were well known. Perhaps we are to imagine Valerius the excerptor working in haste—using his written sources' phrasing with some of the mechanical stylistic variation described by Bliss.²¹ The verbal parallels make clear that Valerius had the twenty-second book of Livy before him: equus repente corruit consulemque lapsum super caput effudit (22.3.11), which is “declined” by Valerius as lapso equo super caput. This change in case, rather than a feature of a peculiar aesthetic, is the natural result of having the subject at hand (here Flaminius) the grammatical subject of the exemplum, a common practice for Valerius. He has begun in the briefest manner possible—indicating name, rank, and historical context—and narrates nearly the entire episode in a single sentence that subordinates (convolutedly) the material of the source. Direct speech is eliminated—for example, Flaminius' words before his fall and his command to the standard bearer. In Valerius this soldier has been expanded to signiferis negantibus. Livy, however, had reported Flaminius' words as “Go tell them to dig up the standards” (Abi, nuntia, effodiant signum), for which Valerius has substituted “he threatened punishment if they did not dig them up that instant” (malum, ni ea continuo effodissent, minatus est). In simplifying the situation (i.e., not narrating the one standard bearer's difficulties and the order for men to uproot the standards), Valerius has eliminated the extraneous agent. Thus all can be told in one period.

An even stronger tie between the two passages is that Valerius has repeated the prodigies narrated by Livy at 22.1.8-13. These Valerius has appended to 1.6.5, the preceding exemplum. Finally, the numbers of casualties, prisoners, and fugitives (found at Livy 22.6.8-7.3) he has used to round off 1.6.6. Valerius has, then, certainly read this particular section of Livy. He has taken a famous, major episode from the narrative and has, in all probability, been led astray from his proposed scheme by the additional prodigies that Livy had to tell, in an adjacent section, of Cn. Domitius.

At first glance, Valerius does not seem to have needed or known Cicero's version of Flaminius' disaster. At De natura deorum 2.8, Cicero mentions Coelius Antipater's writing about Flaminius “at Trasimene” (Valerius has “at Lake Trasimene”).²² This is the closest thing to an echo or parallel. In De divinatione 1.77, Cicero again follows Coelius who, it would seem, differed from Livy, for Flaminius is said to have neglected (i.e., abandoned) the intractable standards, as he seems not to have done in Valerius. The evidence that Valerius did have Cicero's De divinatione before him while composing 1.6 comes from the foreign exempla of that chapter. There are to be found miraculous stories of Midas and Plato. Cicero writes of these marvels in the De divinatione, immediately after Flaminius at Trasimene and the dire portents of this disaster. Valerius' passage is as follows:

Ants deposited grains of wheat in the mouth of Midas, the conqueror of Phrygia, while asleep as a child. When his parents wondered what this prodigy presaged, the augurs answered that he would be the richest of all mortals. Nor was this an empty prophecy: for Midas excelled all kings in wealth. He recompensed the swaddling clothes of his infancy, given as a cheap present of the gods, with treasures heavy with gold and silver.

(1.6.ext.2.)²³

It is a full but manifest expansion of the first two sentences of Cicero's passage:

Ants deposited grains of wheat in the mouth of the Phrygian Midas, asleep while a boy. It was predicted that he would be the richest of men, which happened. But when bees settled on the lips of the young Plato sleeping in his cradle, the response was that he would have singular sweetness of eloquence. So was future eloquence foretold in infancy.

(De div. 1.78)²⁴

Valerius makes the latter two sentences the core of the concluding exemplum of this chapter:

Rightly and justly would I prefer the bees of Plato to the ants of Midas; the latter presage a frail and perishable, the former a firm and eternal happiness, by putting honey in the lips of the child sleeping in his cradle. When the seers heard this, they said that a singular sweetness of eloquence would flow from his mouth. And indeed in my opinion those bees, fed not on Mount Hymettus fragrant with thyme but on the Heliconian hills of the Muses, which teem by the goddesses' inspiration with every kind of learning, seem to have instilled the sweetest nourishment of highest eloquence upon the greatest genius.

(1.6.ext.3)²⁵

Once Valerius' reading of both the De divinatione and a section of the Ab urbe condita has been established, the composition of the entire chapter can be reassessed. Source identification is the beginning of such analysis. The case of the first exemplum is very like that of Flaminius: the De divinatione has a brief mention of the episode of the flame about the head of the young Servius Tullius, whereas Livy provides a sustained anecdote complete with Queen Tanaquil's speech. Valerius' treatment is nearly too brief to allow identification of the model chosen. Indeed, no model was necessary, at least according to Cicero: “What history has not written of the flame about the head of the sleeping Servius Tullius?” (Caput arsisse Servio Tullio dormienti quae historia non prodidit?). The lack of verbal parallels prevents any sure conclusion. However, Valerius certainly has more than Cicero tells; and though, as Cicero indicates, the subject was familiar and the sources many, the use of Livy in other exempla of this chapter, together with Livy's and Valerius' emphasis on Tanaquil's role, suggests that Livy is being abridged here. Again, the De divinatione seems to have suggested a subject while the Ab urbe condita provided a fuller account. In this case, perhaps because the topic was a commonplace, Valerius does not dwell on Servius Tullius.

Valerius is clearly following Livy for his second example of the chapter. Here too Livy is not simply copied out. Various details are selected or suppressed so as to make a coherent, consistent anecdote. (This is the exemplum that Valerius has imported from its proper chronological place in order to join the same prodigies.) For the modern Latinist the most famous instance of a prophetic flame is the fire about Ascanius' head, which so worried the onlookers. Valerius does not take stories from Virgil; poetry seems off limits, as if Valerius dealt only in “facts.” More to the point, he chose his models from Latin prose. The story of Marcius is not told in the De divinatione, but, among other direct verbal echoes, the casualty figures mentioned in the exemplum demonstrate that Livy 25.39.12-16 was Valerius' source. This passage is not taken over entire, for in Livy the details of the battle or battles are far from clear. The Augustan historian reports the variant accounts and figures of Claudius Quadrigarius (said to be following the Annals of C. Acilius), Valerius Antias, and Piso.²⁶ The versions of the latter two, along with all discussion of booty, are omitted by Valerius. In fact, he has jumped from the beginning of the Livian passage to the point where narration of the prodigy begins. Thus no hint of historical uncertainty is allowed to punctuate the exemplum. Valerius Antias reported that only one camp was taken; Valerius like Livy mentions two camps. Valerius is not concerned with variant accounts; he takes (or mistakes) the first figure reported by Livy, omits the annalists' conflicting reports, and moves to the prodigy where he again borrows and varies Livy's diction.

A preference for Livy guides Valerius also at 1.6.3, the miraculous overflow of the Alban Lake with the Romans' consequent embassy to Delphi. Cicero mentions this prodigy at De divinatione 1.100. Here too Cicero begins by drawing attention to his source (“annals”), but unlike the other notices from the De divinatione this offers a full account. Valerius, however, has used Livy 5.15.2-4. In addition to Valerius' echoes of Livy (e.g., neque caelestibus auctus imbribus, neque inundatione ullius amnis adiutus, solitum after sine ullis caelestibus aquis causave qua alia quae rem miraculo eximeret, in altitudinem insolitam), Valerius' version follows Livy and not Cicero, who has no embassy to the Delphic oracle and makes the prophet a deserter from Veii. Valerius and Livy have the haruspex captured by Roman soldiers after which the senate is doubly advised.

Valerius did use Cicero's work for the next example: 1.6.4, Sulla sees a snake, is drawn from De divinatione 1.72. The remainder of the chapter, with the exception of the foreign examples and perhaps the examples treating the Caesars, is from Livy. The passage 1.6.5 joins like prodigies from Livy 3.10.6 and 22.1.8-13. The diction of 1.6.8 and 9 follows Livy 25.16 and 27.26.13-14 respectively. For 1.6.7 and 11 the parallel texts in Livy are not extant, but comparison with the epitome (Periochae 55 and 106 respectively) strongly suggests that Livy was the source for the first exemplum. The epitome records no prodigies for Crassus before the disaster of Carrhae. Parallels are also wanting for the prodigies before Pharsalus and the Ides of March (1.6.12 and 13). Our purpose is not to posit use of Livy wherever a parallel of substance might allow but to describe the origins of Valerius' material. …

First, he is writing a section on prodigies. A natural and easy method might have been to read through Livy in order to cull examples or to check one's notes (these would be the results of wide reading). Valerius, however, seems to have worked from a more suitable text, one filled with omens and prodigies. Cicero's brief notices of prodigies in the first book of the De divinatione were Valerius' departure point; in particular he has read from 1.72 through 1.121. The foreign examples receive rhetorical amplification. The Roman figures had been famously treated, at considerable length, in an Augustan classic. So Livy's wording lies behind the portents of 1.6.5 and the battle at Trasimene of 1.6.6. The modern scholar, had he wanted to know more than Cicero told, would have gone to Cicero's source, Coelius Antipater. Valerius, on the other hand, is interested in the preeminent, classical, and so canonical stylistic treatment of a story. Cicero's notices, when they are too brief, do not allow the sort of stylistic modification that is Valerius' method of composition.

The stylistic and substantial characteristics that disqualify Valerius as a historian should be attributed to these same interests. Valerius does not compare accounts in order to weigh conflicting reports. Reported variants are suppressed as Valerius strives to make his material and especially its message unequivocal. Lack of narrative and of historical exegesis are not here the marks of a poor historian. Actual historical errors are far from legion. In this section can be singled out the slip of C. for P. Volumnius (though who can say this is not a copyist's error?) and the compression of time in 1.6.9 where Marcellus meets his death after the capture of Syracuse. The Sicilian city fell in 211, but the general did not fall into the Carthaginians' hands until 208. Valerius is not guilty of historical error, only of omission, with the result that an unwary reader might suppose Marcellus' death followed shortly on Syracuse's fall. History can be grandly declared to be serving rhetorical demands, but this ignores and distorts the manner of Valerius' composition. He is engaged in the selection of a series of exempla; for the theme of this chapter he finds his guide in a classical theoretical work of Cicero. Livy then provided the material of these anecdotes worked out at greater length but still with venerable, canonical style. Valerius' work does, on close inspection, display consistent criteria in the selection and emulation of models, but these criteria are not those of a historian or an antiquarian.

Notes

1. Like the public performances of the declaimers, the cases of the lawyers have not been preserved. Still the model school exercises of Pseudo-Quintilian (the Minor Declamations) attest at the least to the use of historical exempla in practice declamations. Caesar, the Catos, Scipios, and Gracchi appear with some frequency (e.g., 268.19-20, 338.21, 377.9, 379.3). Certain historical figures provide the theme for declamation: Alexander is afflicted with an illness after burning an Athenian temple (323).

2. For the restoration and reconstruction of Sejanus' family connections, see Adams 1955, Sealey 1961, Stewart 1953, and Sumner 1965.

3. Syme 1939, 78-96.

4. Urbis Romae exterarumque gentium facta simul ac dicta memoratu digna, quae apud alios latius diffusa sunt quam ut breviter cognosci possint, ab inlustribus electa auctoribus digerere constitui, ut documenta sumere volentibus longae inquisitionis labor absit. Nec mihi cuncta conplectendi cupido incessit: quis enim omnis aevi gesta modico voluminum numero conprehenderit, aut quis compos mentis domesticae peregrinaeque historiae seriem felici superiorum stilo conditam vel adtentiore cura vel praestantiore facundia traditurum se speraverit?

5. Alfred Klotz first advanced this thesis in 1909; Clemens Bosch 1929 was its next champion. For analysis of these and other source critics and demonstration that Valerius was reading and excerpting directly, see my discussion in chapter 3.

6. Guerrini (1979, 154) maintains that Valerius' wording (facta simul ac dicta memoratu digna … digerere constitui) echoes Sallust's Catiline 4 (statui … memoria digna … perscribere). See my discussion, in chapter 3, of Valerius' alleged borrowings from Sallust.

7. The authenticity of the chapter headings has been disputed. See Helm 1955, 97-98. It is hard to imagine an author not including such rubrics. Certainly any reader would, especially if he wished to read the text again.

8. Valerius 4.7, De amicitia: Contemplemur nunc amicitiae vinculum. Valerius 5.4, De pietate in parentes follows De ingratis and begins, Sed omittamus ingratos, et potius de piis loquamur.

9. Valerius 1.7.4: Sequitur aeque ad publicam religionem pertinens somnium.

10. On this theme in particular Valerius had a distinguished predecessor. Cicero sought to equate private status with public office in the case of the murder of Tiberius Gracchus by Scipio Nasica, who in so doing defied the consul or, as Cicero would have it, acted the proper part of consul (Tusc. 4.51). This highly charged optimate point of view has lost its factional volatility for Valerius (1.7.6) who does not justify the action by reference to the good of the Republic; he is concerned with respect and status. Indeed, for Valerius the office is of less importance than the public deference granted it.

11. This metonymic connection may indeed seem slim, but the declaimer often had to pit the spirit against the letter of the law (aequitas and ius). Necessity provides a similar conflict—a condition where legal formula failed to direct action. Valerius is interested not in Roman law but in declamatory training for the aspirant lawyer. For discussion of the conflict of ius and aequitas and the more general issue of law and declamation, see Parks 1945 and Bonner 1949, 45-48 (rhetorical schools as preparation for the bar) and 84-132 (analysis of the Romanness of declamatory law).

12. Bonner (1949, 131) has noted the suitability of declamatory training in argument: “arguments used were often parallel to those of the advocates in Roman courts.”

13. Valerius' epitomator Julius Paris refers in his prologue to ten books of Valerius. His manuscripts include another work (not by Valerius) after Memorable Deeds and Sayings. There would then be no difficulty about the number of Valerius' books except that Aulus Gellius (12.7.8) cites 8.1.amb.2 as from the ninth book of Valerius. Perhaps a table of contents constituted a first book. See Helm 1955, 115.

14. Reynolds and Wilson (1974, 2-4) describe as a very long book (papyrus roll) P. Oxy. 843, which contains the text of Plato's Symposium, about seventy pages. Valerius' fifty-page books would have taken a full roll each.

15. appellatione nostra vix apte exprimi possunt, Graeca pronuntiatione Strategemata dicuntur.

16. The emphasis on legitimacy in Valerius is quite striking; an interest in wills and their correct execution and a more general insistence on the legitimate connection of the present to the past reflect in great measure Augustus' own legislation and preoccupation.

17. Prodigiorum quoque, quae aut secunda aut adversa acciderunt, debita proposito nostro relatio est.

18. See Seneca's criticism of Ovid (Contr. 2.2.12) and also Bornecque 1967, 98-99.

19. See Pease 1963, 179, who cites Zingler, De Cicerone Historico Quaestiones, 24-25.

20. C. autem Flaminius inauspicato consul creatus cum apud lacum Trasimennum cum Hannibale conflicturus convelli signa iussisset, lapso equo super caput eius humi prostratus est nihilque eo prodigio inhibitus, signiferis negantibus signa moveri sua sede posse, malum, ni ea continuo effodissent, minatus est. verum huius temeritatis utinam sua tantum, non etiam popul i Romani maxima clade poenas pependisset! in ea namque acie ¯X¯V Romanorum caesa, ¯VI capta, ¯X fugata sunt. consulis obtruncati corpus ad funerandum ab Hannibale quaesitum, qui, quantum in ipso fuerat, Romanum sepelierat imperium.

21. Bliss (1951, 56) established that Valerius had modified his sources deliberately with a finite number of types of verbal transformations (e.g., changes in word order or the substitution of compound for simple words of the same stem and vice versa).

22. Cicero: apud Trasumenum; Valerius: apud lacum Trasimennum. The different spellings of this name are immaterial as the manuscripts differ. See Pease 1955 on De natura deorum 2.8.

23. Midae vero, cuius imperio Phrygia fuit subiecta, puero dormienti formicae in os grana tritici congesserunt. parentibus deinde eius corsus prodigium tenderet explorantibus augures responderunt omnium illum mortalium futurum ditissimum. nec vana praedictio extitit: nam Midas cunctorum paene regum opes abundantia pecuniae antecessit infantiaeque incunabula vili deorum munere donata onustis auro atque argento gazis pensavit.

24. Midae illi Phrygi, cum puer esset, dormienti formicae in os tritici grana congesserunt. divitissimum fore praedictum est; quod evenit. at Platoni cum in cunis parvulo dormienti apes in labellis consedissent responsum est singulari illum suavitate orationis fore. ita futura eloquentia provisa in infante est.

25. formicis Midae iure meritoque apes Platonis praetulerim: illae enim caducae ac fragilis, hae solidae et aeternae felicitatis indices extiterunt, dormientis in cunis parvuli labellis mel inserendo. qua re audita prodigiorum interpretes singularem eloquii suavitatem ore eius emanaturam dixerunt. ac mihi quidem illae apes non montem Hymettium tymi flore redolentem, sed Musarum Heliconios colles omni genere doctrinae virentis dearum instinctu depastae maximo ingenio dulcissima summae eloquentiae instillasse videntur alimenta.

26. Valerius reports the number of Carthaginians slain as thirty-eight thousand (octo et triginta milibus hostium caesis). Livy begins his account with the number as given by Claudius Quadrigarius (Ad triginta septem milia hostium caesa). This might be Valerius' (and not some scribe's) error: the next figure given, in the same sentence, is captos ad mille octingentos triginta. If this “error” is not simply the loss of a stroke, it might have arisen from an eye jumping from ad triginta to ad … oct … triginta, which would account for Valerius' word order octo et triginta.

Bibliography

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