Reading by Example: Valerius Maximus and the Historiography of Exempla

ISBN-13: 9789004499409 / Angielski / Twarda / 2021 / 352 str.

Jeffrey Murray;David Wardle

Opis

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.