21 Exempla for the Emperors: A Comparison of the Prefaces to Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta memorabilia and Plutarch’s Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata
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Abstract
There are various parallels between Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta memorabilia and Plutarch’s Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata: both works are anecdote collections, address a Roman emperor (Tiberius and Trajan), and deal with the Roman, Greek, and—albeit to a lesser extent—barbarian past. Since the Chaeronean knew, read, and made use of the Latin text, these similarities raise the question of whether the Greek author enters into a dialogue with the Roman, and what this tells about their goals. A detailed comparison of the prefaces to the works provides an answer: this analysis reveals significant differences with respect to material, working method, function, target audience, and self-presentation of the authors. This not only shows that their aims are essentially different, but also suggests that Plutarch indeed had Valerius Maximus’ compilation in mind when he wrote his own, as he implicitly seems to criticize the Roman author’s presentation of the relationship between the emperor and his subjects as something similar to the distance between gods and human beings.