Valerius Maximus and the Rhetoric of the New Nobility

Valerius Maximus and the Rhetoric of the New Nobility

There is no modern commentary on the whole of Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta memorabilia, though commentaries on books 1 and 2 have been published by, respectively, David Wardle (1998) and Andrea Themann-Steinke. Progress is likely to be made by further commentaries on individual books and John Briscoe contributes to this with a commentary on Book 8, of particular interest because of the variegated nature of its subject matter. The commentary, like those of Briscoe’s commentaries on Livy Books 31-45 (OUP, 1973-2012), deals with matters of content, textual issues, language and style, and literary aspects. An ample introduction discusses what is known about the author, the time of writing, the structure both of the work as a whole and of Book 8 itself, Valerius’ sources, language and style, the transmission of the text, editions of Valerius, and the methods of citation used in the commentary. The commentary is preceded by a text of Book 8, a slightly revised version of that in Briscoe’s edition in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana (1998), with an apparatus limited to passages where the commentary discusses a textual problem. The book will give readers an understanding of an author once very popular, then long neglected and now enjoying a revival.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

From footnote-fodder to intellectual: Valerius Maximus, a generally under-appreciated minor author of the early first century AD emerges as a holder of distinct views on Rome's dynasty, their world, on how to behave within that world, and as an influencer of later thought both pagan and Christian.

In this study, Michael Ullyot makes two new arguments about the rhetoric of exemplarity in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture: first, that exemplarity is a recursive cycle driven by rhetoricians' words and readers' actions; and second, that positive moral examples are not replicable, but rather aspirational models of readers' posthumous biographies. For example, Alexander the Great envied Achilles less for his exemplary life than for Homer's account of it. Ullyot defines the three types of decorum on which exemplary rhetoric and imitation rely, and charts their operations through Philip Sidney's poetics, Edmund Spenser's poetry, and the dedications, sermons, elegies, biographies, and other occasional texts about Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, and Henry, Prince of Wales. Ullyot expands the definition of occasional texts to include those that criticize their circumstances to demand better ones, and historicizes moral exemplarity in the contexts of sixteenth-century Protestant memory and humanist pedagogy. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England concludes that all exemplary subjects suffer from the problem of metonymy, the objection that their chosen excerpts misrepresent their missing parts. This problem also besets historicist literary criticism, ever subject to corrections from the archive, so this study concedes that its own rhetorical methods are exemplary.

A Companion to Roman Rhetoric introduces the reader to the wide-ranging importance of rhetoric in Roman culture. A guide to Roman rhetoric from its origins to the Renaissance and beyond Comprises 32 original essays by leading international scholars Explores major figures Cicero and Quintilian in-depth Covers a broad range of topics such as rhetoric and politics, gender, status, self-identity, education, and literature Provides suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter Includes a glossary of technical terms and an index of proper names and rhetorical concepts