Valerius Maximus

Valerius Maximus was a Latin writer active during the reign of Tiberius (AD 14-37) and the author of a collection of historical anecdotes that became one of the most widely read schoolbooks of the Middle Ages. His work belongs to the so-called Silver Age of Latin literature, and it presents Roman history through examples meant to teach moral lessons.

Very little is known about his life. According to the sources, his family was modest and without distinction, and he owed his position to Sextus Pompeius, consul in AD 14 and proconsul of Asia, whom he accompanied to the East around AD 27. Pompeius was the patron of a literary circle that included Ovid, and he was a close friend of Germanicus. Valerius shared his name with a famous republican family, but scholars consider it very unlikely that he belonged to it. He may have descended from plebeian branches of the gens or gained citizenship through the patronage of a Valerius. His birth and death dates are not documented with any certainty.

His main work, Memorable Deeds and Sayings, runs to nine books dedicated to Tiberius and is usually dated to about AD 31. Each section takes as its heading a virtue, a vice or a type of conduct, and gathers stories that illustrate it. Most come from Roman history, though each section closes with foreign examples, mainly Greek. His chief sources are Cicero, Livy, Sallust and Pompeius Trogus. His handling of this material is careless and often inaccurate, full of confusions and anachronisms, yet his examples serve the rhetorical purpose for which they were compiled.

The style reveals a trained rhetorician. He pursues novelty at almost any cost, invents metaphors, favours striking contrasts and uses a diction close to poetry, which often produces obscurity. In practice the book was a store of material from which students of rhetoric could draw historical references to adorn their speeches.

His attitude towards the imperial family has long been disputed. Some critics see him as a flatterer of Tiberius, while others argue that his allusions to power were conventional for his time.

His legacy is substantial. In the Middle Ages he was among the most copied writers of Latin prose, and more than six hundred of his manuscripts survive. Abridgements were made for school use, and only in the Renaissance did the complete text enter the Latin curriculum. Dante drew on him for details, and a Dutch translation published in 1614 stirred the interest of artists such as Rembrandt in some of the subjects it contained.