Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings

they had governed the empire with their virtue, justly and holily, were celebrated with divine honor and were transferred into the number of the gods, whence we also call them divine emperors. Indeed, he is said to have drawn his paternal lineage from the Valeria gens and his maternal from the Fabia gens, whence the name Valerius Maximus comes to him from both families. Nothing certain can be brought forward regarding his death.

It appears that this compilation has the same authority as many other similar lives, which it is established were added to the works of ancient writers by learned librarians only at a later time and were not drawn from sources other than those whose access remains open to us today. From this it follows that the origins and causes of the errors, which are quite numerous, and of the trifles, almost all of them, are easily explained. But we shall discuss individual matters more fully when the occasion arises. I thought that one thing should not be omitted in this place: even if this life were not suspect due to its argument and its entire style of speaking, all trust in it would nevertheless be abrogated by the nature and reason of the Valerian codices, which—as we shall demonstrate below—being handed down by some more recent book, do not permit themselves to be thought of as genuine and ancient, unless they are held in our best and most excellent copy or at least in most of the rest of better note.

The same reasoning regarding the codices stands against our agreeing with those who have determined that the praenomen first name of Valerius was either Publius or Marcus. Regarding these first names—since neither better books nor Julius Paris or Januarius Nepotianus, the epitomizers of the factorum et dictorum memorabilium, confirm them, and while a certain Medicean codex apud Torrenius exhibits one and the first Leiden codex exhibits the other, both being of no great authority—it can be affirmed with certainty that the true first name has long since been obliterated and this and that one were invented by librarians.

I think the fatherland of Valerius was the city of Rome itself, in which he certainly spent the greatest part of his life. Regarding his origin, to pass over that most trivial opinion by which the author of the life, deceived by the cognomen Maximus, claimed that the writer drew his maternal lineage from the Fabia gens, which was refuted by Mitalerius (cf. the preface and dedication before the Torrenius copy), it can certainly be doubted whether Valerius was born from the patrician Valerii gens, as learned men believe 1.