Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings

ON THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF VALERIUS MAXIMUS.

The only authority to whom we can attribute trust in compiling the life of Valerius Maximus—since neither ancient writers, aside from the title of this work and the name of the author, have handed down anything about him to memory, nor is there anything from elsewhere that pertains to this—is Valerius himself in these books of dictorum et factorum memorabilium memorable sayings and deeds. For I do not expect that the life by an uncertain author, which is circulated in some more recent manuscript codices and in the printed copies of the Valerian work 1, will be considered of any weight, given that it itself clearly relies solely on certain added locations in this book, based on conjectures that are either little probable or openly false.

However, it is this:

‘Valerius Maximus, a Roman citizen, born of patrician lineage, devoted his entire boyhood and a great part of his youth to the acquisition of letters and the honorable arts. Having then assumed the toga of manhood, he applied himself to the discipline of military affairs, where he is said to have served in the ranks for some time and to have sailed to Asia with Sextus Pompeius. Upon returning from there, when he saw that he could benefit his fatherland as much by speaking well as by acting well—a purpose from which his military study had detained him—he returned to the same and decided to commit to literary monuments, as he himself confesses, the deeds and sayings of the city of Rome and foreign nations worthy of being remembered. This he achieved happily and gloriously. He flourished, however, in the times of Tiberius Caesar and wrote this history under his empire, whose divinity he also invokes. For the Roman emperors, when