Valerius Maximus Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Konrad Gries

Critical Essay by Konrad Gries

SOURCE: Gries, Konrad. “Valerius-Maximus an Minimus?” Classical Journal 51, no. 7 (April 1955): 335-39.

In the following essay, Gries decries the content of Valerius's Memorable Doings and Sayings as “nothing but a huge collection of anecdotes, drawn mainly from the history of Rome,” notes Valerius's rhetorically excessive style, and summarizes the textual history of the collection.

Modern literary historians do not think much of him. To Fowler, he is “artificial, pompous, and dull.” According to Rose, he has a “most atrocious style, bombastic, would-be-clever, full of artificial and at the same time clumsy and obscure phraseology.” Mackail, too, speaks of his “turgid and involved style.” The Oxford Classical Dictionary calls him “shallow, sententious, and bombastic, full of the boldest metaphors and rhetorical artifices … especially forced antitheses and far-fetched epigrams”; in addition, he is “almost entirely noncritical.” Hadas, finally, claims that he is “so little regarded that nine out of...
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