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.All these powers, though, must beutilized for virtue.And Valerius outlines clearly his conception of the close connectionbetween harsh discipline and the military religion of the state.Indeed, thefather of the Roman empire (imperii nostri pater), Mars, may be worshippedby means of punishments meted out to those who fail in the exercise ofvirtue:his, ut ita dicam, piaculis, Mars, imperii nostri pater, ubi aliqua exparte a tuis auspiciis degeneratum erat, numen tuum propitiabatur,146 RITUAL VOCABULARY AND MORAL IMPERATIVESadfinium et cognatorum et fratrum nota, filiorum strage, ignomin-iosa consulum eiuratione.(Valerius 2.7.7)By means of these sin-offerings, as I would call them, O Mars,father of our rule, when there was degeneration of any kind fromyour divine authority, your divine power was propitiated, bycensure of in-laws and blood-relatives and brothers, by the slaughterof sons, by the humiliating abdication of consuls.Punishments so conceived constitute, at least rhetorically, religious acts ofatonement.Mars and, we may assume, other deities concerned with theRoman state took an interest in the behavior of Roman soldiers.59 Byanalogy, the general who, while exercising virtue, punishes in accord withthe views of the gods, enacts their rituals.And, in extremis, when, forexample, father executes son, we observe how virtue and ritual, private andpublic religion, the deepest emotions of love, affection, grief, and angercombine to render military discipline a virtue safeguarded by religious zeal.ConclusionsOur survey of ritual in Valerius Maximus is hardly complete.A closereading of Valerius Maximus Memorable Deeds and Sayings with an eyetowards religious vocabulary yields in fact such rich dividends that we mayconclude that just as the gods live, ritual lives, inasmuch as an abiding faithin the efficacy of traditional religious forms animates Valerian rhetoric.Valerius moral representations find confirmation, reflection, and contrast intraditional rituals precisely in proportion as religion in general and rituals inparticular matter.Valerius religious rhetoric appears to have expected theseelements of imperial Rome s religious inheritance to have struck deeplysympathetic chords in his audience, an audience that accepted gods, theirrituals, and the absolute primacy of the state.147 5SANCTITAS MORUM, OR THEGENERAL INTERSECTIONS OFRELIGION AND MORALITYYou can go mad from too much remembering, particularly ofthe endless flow of & images & , of the dark caravans ofwords that cross the pages & to invade and ravish the delicatehouse of memory.1Our first three chapters, in so far as practicable, placed a narrow range ofValerian anecdotes in their historiographical, historical, and technicalcontexts in order to isolate the religious voice of Valerius text.We discov-ered that traditional state gods manifested themselves rhetorically aspresent, powerful, and concerned.Caesars too, the new gods of Valerius ownday, lived (at least in rhetorical representation) in the hearts of Roman citi-zens, and cared in their turn deeply about their subjects conduct.Ourfourth chapter examined in more general fashion some of the ways in whichValerius Maximus was able to shape the ritual language of the Romanrepublic to conform to the contours of a rhetorical program focusing onmorality rather than on politics or political history.In our concludingchapter, we shall cast our net even more widely.We shall trawl, as it were,the surface of Valerian waters.We shall be compelled to forego (as relent-lessly as possible) digressions into subsidiary issues.Our aim is a generalimpression of how religion intersects with morality, to recuperate the reli-giosity of virtuous conduct, the kind of behavior that, Valerius writes, cannot be praised enough (satis digna laudatio reddi non posset; 9.11.2), thekind of behavior to which he lends a religious cast through phrases like sanc-titas morum or the sacredness of moral conduct (9.11.2).We haveestablished the adherence of Valerius text to gods and to traditional reli-gion.We can thus, by shifting focus, by looking at virtue first and religionsecond, now survey the general intersections of religion and morality perme-ating Valerius work, and thereby recapture in part an ancient way oflooking at the world that, in its own search for propriety in conduct, appearsto appeal to divinity and to the sacred as a matter of course.148 SANCTITAS MORUMElementa virtutis: the elements of virtueValerius proposes in his third book to treat the constituent parts of properconduct, the elements of virtue (elementa uirtutis; 3.init.).Gods do not playa heavy-handed role in this book, but they are certainly not absent.In fact,gods observe human activities, and can intervene in a helpful way when theyapprove.The immortal gods, amazed at the bravery of Horatius Cocles as hedefended the Pons Sublicius, kept him safe2: Amazed at his bravery, theimmortal gods provided him with inviolate safety ([eius] fortitudinem diiimmortales admirati incolumitatem sinceram ei praestiterunt; 3.2.1)
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