Putting Torture (And Valerius Maximus) To The Test

Abstract

There has been a tendency, even among authors who have regarded Valerius Maximus as worthy of independent study, to use the 'Facta et Dicta' as a neutral conduit of information about other wider areas. Valerius has thus sometimes become a sourcebook mined for nuggets of information but effectively invisible to those who work it. The past thirty years have seen valuable contributions that raise awareness of the importance of the genre of the 'Facta et Dicta' and (to a lesser extent) the personal input of Valerius, but traces of the 'conduit' approach are still preserved in some authors' attempts to justify their study of the work. For instance, Valerius provides an insight into the historical image of Marius, and is valuable precisely because he has no opinion or personal ideas to offer, because he preserves the language of school rhetoric, because his collection gives us strictly conventional material about religion, because he presents an unadulterated mirror-image of imperial policy and propaganda and because he is 'middle-brow' and thus depicts common attitudes. The text has also sometimes been studied for what it reveals about Early Imperial Latin, non-Republican culture and the organisation of Roman knowledge. Most recently, Tara Welch has argued that Valerius deliberately strips 'exempla' of all authorial input, including his own, in an attempt to make himself a conduit for 'traditio'. Alternatively, study of the text is justified by interest in the time period in which it was written.