SOURCE: Skidmore, Clive. “Valerius's Moral Purpose.” In Practical Ethics for Roman Gentlemen: The Work of Valerius Maximus, pp. 53-82. Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Skidmore emphasizes the moral-didactic orientation of Valerius's Memorable Doings and Sayings, viewing its central purpose as the depiction of “traditional standards of morality” from a bygone era.

[T]he true purpose of Valerius's work has been obscured by the gratuitous assumption that it was merely a handbook for rhetoricians and declaimers. That can be seen very clearly in Bloomer's monograph. The author is well aware that Valerius's examples from the past ‘serve as models of conduct’, that they are ‘types of morality or immorality’, that his chapters ‘are taken as the various departments of human life’, and that he does ‘advance a certain program of what is valuable and paradigmatic from the past’. In his conclusion, Bloomer refers to...