Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings

...is completed between the years 781 and 785 A.U.C. (28–32 A.D.). For no one now doubts that the most bitter and vehement execration which is read in IX, 11, ext. 4, must be referred to Sejanus and was written after the ruin and slaughter of that man’s kin. And so, G. I. Vossius (de hist. Lat. I, 24) contends that the memorabilia of Valerius are more recent than the histories of Velleius Paterculus, since Sejanus is extolled with the highest praises in that book (II, 127) 2. But between the death of Sejanus and the aforementioned execration, only a small amount of time can have intervened, since the fact that the man’s name is omitted in silence, without any more open or accurate indication of either his person or his crime being added, indicates a deed perpetrated only very recently, which was still vivid in the minds of men, and the very agitated emotion with which he inveighs against him betrays a fresh anger. Thus, it is hardly credible that the intervening time exceeded the space of one year. If this is granted, not without cause do I seem to be able to gather, from the reasoning by which the rash attempts of Sejanus and their detestation are annexed almost at the end of the entire work, that the preceding books had already been finished by the author before the death of Sejanus. For otherwise, how would it not be strange that he did not already note in some earlier volume the perfidy of the man to whom Tiberius had entrusted his whole self, whom he had cherished in intimate friendship, and whom, lifted to the highest honors, he had made all but equal to himself? Why, I ask, would he have passed over an occasion for rebuke, offered so many times when he was writing about the ungrateful, about rashness, and about perfidy, he who so willingly catered to the emperor? All doubt is removed from this matter by the fact that Julia (Livia Augusta), mother of Tiberius, who died in the year 782 (29 A.D.)...

1) In some manuscripts of the 15th century, such as the Vienna codices CLXXIII and CLXXIIII in Endlicher, and the Florence codex CLXXXV in Bandinius's catalog of the Leopold Library I, p. 493, a certain epistle inscribed 'Valerius Maximus to Rufinus on not taking a wife' or 'dissuasions against taking a wife' is appended to the Valerian texts besides that spurious fragment of the tenth book. Since learned men have never held it, nor will hold it, to be a work of this author, it will be enough to have mentioned it. That epistle is published among the spurious works of Jerome in Vallarsi XI, col. 240. Cf. Fabricius, biblioth. Lat. I, p. 337, II, p. 467. G. E. Müller, einleit. Introduction V, p. 363.
2) Cf. also Fabricius, bibl. Lat. T. II, c. 5. Moller, diss. de Val. Max. Dissertation on Valerius Maximus § 13. Hoffmann in the German translation (Stuttgart 1829), p. 6. Yet we shall soon see that Valerius had composed the first six volumes before Velleius finished his own history.