Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-17T00:05:21.908Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Reading for the moral’ in Valerius Maximus: the Case of severitas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Rebecca Langlands
Rebecca Langlands
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This paper sets out to contribute to our understanding of the way exempla functioned in Roman culture through a close study of ethics in our only major extant collection of exempla from ancient Rome, Valerius Maximus' Facta et dicta memorabilia. I develop what Matthew Roller in a recent article calls the ‘discourse of exemplarity’ by demonstrating what Valerius Maximus can tell us about the dynamic process of reading and learning from exempla in ancient Rome, and also by suggesting that one role of exempla in Roman culture was to promote ethical deliberation within a tradition of ‘controversial thinking’. The main part of the paper analyses Valerius' treatment of the theme of seueritas and his presentation of pertinent exempla (especially in chapters 2.7 and 6.3) in order to illustrate the claims about Valerius' work and about Roman exempla more generally that I shall outline in this introductory section. In summary my contention is that Valerius' arrangement of exempla in sequence under ethical categories is designed to tell Roman readers not simply what to think but how to think ethically, enabling Roman readers both to explore the scope of those moral categories and to develop their skills of moral reasoning.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Cambridge Classical Journal , Volume 54 , 2008 , pp. 160 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Beard, M. (1993) ‘Looking (harder) for Roman myth: Dumézil, declamation and the problems of definition’, in Graf, F. (ed.) Mythos in mythenloser Gesellschaft: Das Paradigma Roms, Stuttgart and Leipzig. 44–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benhabib, S. (1992) Situating the self. New York.Google Scholar
Bloomer, W. M. (1992) Valerius Maximus and the rhetoric of the new nobility, London.Google Scholar
Brown, C. (1998) Contrary things: exegesis, dialectic and poetics of didacticism, Stanford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chaplin, J. (2000) Livy's exemplary history, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, M. L. (1996) Rhetoric at Rome: a rhetorical survey (2nd edn.), London.Google Scholar
Conley, T. (1994) Rhetoric in the European tradition, Chicago.Google Scholar
Cramer, R. (2002) review of Weileder (1998), Gymnasium 109, 72–3.Google Scholar
de Certeau, M. (1984) The practice of everyday life, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Dowling, M. (2006) Clemency and cruelty in the Roman world, Michigan.Google Scholar
Flescher, A. M. (2003) Heroes, saints, and ordinary morality, Georgetown.Google Scholar
Friend, C. (1999) ‘Pirates, seducers, wronged heirs, poison cups, cruel husbands, and other calamities: the Roman school declamations and critical pedagogy’, Rhetoric Review 17, 300–20.Google Scholar
Gelley, A. (ed.) (1995) Unruly examples: on the rhetoric of exemplarity, Stanford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glucker, J. (1995) ‘Probabile, veri simile, and related terms’, in Powell, J. G. F. (ed.) (1995). 115–43.Google Scholar
Gowing, A. M. (2005) Empire and memory: the representation of the Roman republic in imperial culture, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Griffin, M. (1992) Seneca: a philosopher in politics, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gunderson, E. (2003) Declamation, paternity and Roman identity: authority and the rhetorical self. Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hampton, T. (1990) Writing from history: the rhetoric of exemplarity in Renaissance literature, Ithaca.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harvey, I. (2002) Labyrinths of exemplarity: at the limits of deconstruction. New YorkGoogle Scholar
Inwood, B. (2005) ‘Rules and reasoning in Stoic ethics’, in his Reading Seneca: Stoic philosophy at Rome, Oxford, 95–131.Google Scholar
Konstan, D. (2005) ‘Clemency as a virtue’, CP 100, 337–46.Google Scholar
Langlands, R. (2006) Sexual morality in ancient Rome, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levick, B. (1999) Tiberius the politician, London.Google Scholar
Lowrie, M. (1997) Horace's narrative odes, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyons, J. D. (1989) Exemplum: the rhetoric of example in early modern France and Italy, Princeton.Google Scholar
Mansfeld, J. and Inwood, B. (eds.) (1997) Assent and argument: studies in Cicero's Academic books. Leiden.Google Scholar
Maslakov, G. (1984) ‘Valerius Maximus and Roman historiography: a study of the exempla tradition’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 2.32.1, 437–96.Google Scholar
Mendelson, M. (1994) ‘Declamation, context, and controversiality’, Rhetoric Review 13, 92–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendelson, M. (2002) Many sides: a Protagorean approach to the theory, practice, and pedagogy of argument. Dordrecht.Google Scholar
Milnor, K. (2005) Gender, domesticity, and the age of Augustus: inventing private life, Oxford Studies in Classical Literature and Gender Theory, Oxford.Google Scholar
Mitchell, J. A. (2004) Ethics and exemplary narratives in Chaucer and Gower, Woodbridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, T. (2006) Popular morality in the early Roman empire, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Mueller, H.-F. (2002) Roman religion in Valerius Maximus, London.Google Scholar
Oakley, S. P. (1998) A commentary on Livy books 6–10, vol. 2: books 7–8, Oxford.Google Scholar
Powell, J. G. F. (ed.) (1995) Cicero the philosopher, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rendell, S. (1992) ‘Examples, counterexamples’, Comparative Literature 44, 59–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roller, M. B. (2004) ‘Exemplarity in Roman culture: the cases of Horatius Codes and Cloelia’, CP 99. 1–56.Google Scholar
Sanok, C. (2007) Her life historical, Pennsylvania.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skidmore, C. J. (1996) Practical ethics for Roman gentlemen. The work of Valerius Maximus, Exeter.Google Scholar
Späth, T. (2003) review of Weileder (1998), Gnomon 75, 460–2.Google Scholar
Stem, R. (2007) ‘Exemplary lessons of Livy's Romulus’, TAPA 137, 435–71.Google Scholar
Thurn, N. (2001) ‘Der Aufbau der Exemplasammlung des Valerius Maximus’, Hermes 129, 79–94.Google Scholar
Wardle, D. (1997) ‘“The sainted Julius”‘, CP 92, 323–15.Google Scholar
Weileder, A. (1998) Valerius Maximus. Spiegel kaiserlicher Selbstdarstellung, Munich.Google Scholar