ABSTRACT
Our first three chapters, in so far as practicable, placed a narrow range of Valerian anecdotes in their historiographical, historical, and technical contexts in order to isolate the religious voice of Valerius’ text. We discovered that traditional state gods manifested themselves rhetorically as present, powerful, and concerned. Caesars too, the new gods of Valerius’ own day, lived (at least in rhetorical representation) in the hearts of Roman citizens, and cared in their turn deeply about their subjects’ conduct. Our fourth chapter examined in more general fashion some of the ways in which Valerius Maximus was able to shape the ritual language of the Roman republic to conform to the contours of a rhetorical program focusing on morality rather than on politics or political history. In our concluding chapter, we shall cast our net even more widely. We shall trawl, as it were, the surface of Valerian waters. We shall be compelled to forego (as relentlessly as possible) digressions into subsidiary issues. Our aim is a general impression of how religion intersects with morality, to recuperate the religiosity of virtuous conduct, the kind of behavior that, Valerius writes, “cannot be praised enough” (satis digna laudatio reddi non posset; 9.11.2), the kind of behavior to which he lends a religious cast through phrases like sanctitas morum or “the sacredness of moral conduct” (9.11.2). We have established the adherence of Valerius’ text to gods and to traditional religion. We can thus, by shifting focus, by looking at virtue first and religion second, now survey the general intersections of religion and morality permeating Valerius’ work, and thereby recapture in part an ancient way of looking at the world that, in its own search for propriety in conduct, appears to appeal to divinity and to the sacred as a matter of course.
