Reading by Example: Valerius Maximus and the Historiography of Exempla

Long regarded as a sycophantic producer of overblown moral platitudes, Valerius Maximus emerges from a series of studies as an independent thinker capable of challenging his readers through the material he has collected: he makes them think about real moral dilemmas and grants to non-Roman societies a remarkable equivalence to Rome. Through his silences as much as his sermons he decodes the value- and political-system of his day. Valerius is talented as a reader of others and himself was read appreciatively in the Later Empire and even more so by Christians in Medieval Europe. Contributors are John Atkinson, George Baroud, Emma Brobeck, Diederik Burgersdijk, Kyle Conrau-Lewis, Alain M. Gowing, Rebecca Langlands, Sarah Lawrence, Simon Lentzsch, Jeffrey Murray, Roman Roth, David Wardle.