Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings

For if what they believe were true, you would rightly wonder why he, who frequently celebrated the honors and lights of that family when the occasion was offered 1, did not touch upon this affinity even with a word, especially since in other matters concerning his own fortune he betrayed a certain garrulity rather than a taciturn silence. Nor could a certain argument be repeated even from the sharing of a cognomen, which in particular seems to declare a connection between those ancient Maximi and this writer whom we are discussing, if indeed it is established that even in the final times of the free republic there were those who, once the families that used them had become extinct, claimed for themselves and propagated through their descendants the cognomens of ancient clans whose glory, earned by outstanding deeds, was more long-lasting than the lineages themselves. But let us grant to Valerius those most famous ancestors; we will not for that reason approve the audacity of Müller, who concludes from this old nobility of the writer (l.c. p. 339, 342) that he received both his education and his family fortune consistent with the illustrious position from which he was born. Rather, let us decide that either he himself had nothing discovered regarding that ambiguous affinity, or by design he avoided mentioning his origin from a family that had already long since descended from its former splendor and perhaps had even been reduced to poverty. For no other man of the same name became known after the Punic Wars before M. Valerius Maximus, consul in the years 253 and 256 A.D. 2.

However these things may be—for it pertains little to the matter to pursue with doubtful divination things which were of no moment in the birth of the work, nor are they in understanding it—it is most certainly established that Valerius, using only narrow means and a modest condition, owed a somewhat happier state of life and a certain modest happiness to the benevolence and liberality of Sextus Pompeius, a powerful patron and friend. These things are gathered from the consolation which he found in the poverty of the ancient Romans—the Publicolae, Aemilii, Fabricii, Curii—with respect to his own small census (IV, 4, 11), when he inveighs, not excluding himself in a certain way, against those who never allow a moderate fortune to be free from complaints and lacerate it with daily reproaches as if it were the chief evil of the human race. And these things are stated without circumlocution in IV, 7, ext. 2, where pious gratitude