Valeria

1. The sister of P. Valerius Publicola, is said to have advised the Roman matrons to ask Veturia, the mother of Coriolanus, to go to the camp of Coriolanus in order to deprecate his resentment. (Dionys. A. R. 8.39, foll.) Respecting her connection with the legend of Coriolanus, see Niebuhr, vol. ii. p. 102, foll.

2. The last wife of Sulla, was the daughter of M. Valerius Messala. She attracted the notice of Sulla at the theatre, and he married her towards the end of his life. Soon after his death she bore a daughter. Plutarch calls her a sister of the orator Hortensius, but this is a mistake probably arising from the fact that the sister of Hortensius married a Valerius Messala. (Plut. Sull. 35, 37 Drumann, Geschichte Roms, vol. ii. p. 508.)

the daughter of Diocletian and Prisca, was upon the reconstruction of the empire in A. D. 292 [Diocletianus] united to Galerius, one of the new Caesars, by whom she had no offspring, but adopted his illegitimate son Candidianus. After the death of her husband in 311 Valeria rejected the proposals of his successor Maximinus, who, having become enamoured of her person and her wealth, sought to gain her hand even before the established period of mourning had expired. She was in consequence exposed to the brutal fury of the disappointed prince, stripped of her possessions, and banished along with her mother to the deserts of Syria; nor could the earnest entreaties of Diocletian, whose end is said to have been hastened by the misfortunes of his wife and child, procure any alleviation of their misery. Upon the death of their enemy in 314, they repaired in disguise to the court of Licinius, to whose care Valeria had been consigned by her husband with his dying breath; but far from obtaining at Nicomedia the protection and honour which they anticipated, they found themselves, after witnessing the murder of Candidianus and of Severianus, compelled to provide for their safety by a precipitate flight; and having wandered for many months over various provinces in a humble disguise, were at length discovered at Thessalonica, probably in the year A. D. 315, where they were both beheaded and their bodies cast into the sea. It has been conjectured that Valeria and Prisca must at one period have betrayed some favour for Christianity, for we are told that they were the first persons whom Diocletian required to offer sacrifice to the pagan deities when he commenced his persecution; and Tillemont seems to regard all their subsequent sufferings as a temporal punishment for their weak compliance with the commands of the emperor.

Our chief authority for the history of this unhappy lady is the writer of the treatise De Mortibus persecutorum [Caecilius] (cc. 12, 15, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 50, 51), whose notices have been collected, combined, and cast in an imposing form by Gibbon in the fourteenth chapter of his history.

[W.R]

[Messalina.]

[Polla, No. 1.]

patrician and afterwards plebeian also. The Valeria gens was one of the most ancient and most celebrated at Rome; and no other Roman gens was distinguished for so long a period, although a few others, such as the Cornelia gens, produced a greater number of illustrious men. The Valerii are universally admitted to have been of Sabine origin, and their ancestor Volesus or Volusus is said to have settled at Rome with Titus Tatius. (Dionys. A. R. 2.46; Plut. Num. 5, Publ. 1.) One of the descendants of this Volesus, P. Valerius, afterwards surnamed Publicola, plays a distinguished part in the story of the expulsion of the kings, and was elected consul in the first year of the republic, B. C. 509. From this time forward down to the latest period of the empire, for nearly a thousand years, the name occurs more or less frequently in the Fasti, and it was borne by the emperors Maximinus, Maximianus, Maxentius, Diocletian, Constantius, Constantine the Great and others. The Valeria gens enjoyed extraordinary honours and privileges at Rome. Their house at the bottom of the Velia was the only one in Rome of which the doors were allowed to open back into the street. (Dionys. A. R. 5.39; Plut. Publ. 20.) In the Circus a conspicuous place was set apart for them, where a small throne was erected, an honour of which there was no other example among the Romans. (Liv. 2.31.) They were also allowed to bury their dead within the walls, a privilege which was also granted to some other gentes; and when they had exchanged the older custom of interment for that of burning the corpse, although they did not light the funeral pile on their burying-ground, the bier was set down there, as a symbolical way of preserving their right. (Cic. de Leg. 2.23; Plut. Publ. 23.) Niebuhr, who mentions these distinctions, conjectures that among the gradual changes of the constitution from a monarchy to an aristocracy, the Valeria gens for a time possessed the right that one of its members should exercise the kingly power for the Tities, to which tribe the Valerii must have belonged, as their Sabine origin indicates (Hist. of Rome, vol. i. p. 538); but on this point, as on many others in early Roman history, it is impossible to come to any certainty. The Valerii in early times were always foremost in advocating the rights of the plebeians, and the laws which they proposed at various times were the great charters of the liberties of the second order. (See Dict. of Antiq. s. v. Leges Valeriae.)

The Valeria gens was divided into various families under the republic, the names of which are : -- Corvus or Corvinus, Falto, Flaccus, Laevinus, Maximus, Messalla, Potitus, Publicola, Tappo, Triarius, Volusus. Besides these we meet with other cognomens of the Valerii under the republic, which are mostly the names of freedmen or clients of the Valeria gens. They are given below in alphabetical order, together with the surnames borne by the Valerii in the imperial period. [Valerius.] The few Valerii, who occur without any surname, are not of sufficient importance to require any notice. On the coins of the gens we find the cognomens Acisculus, Catullus, Flacccs, Barbatus.

VALE´RIA the name of the NE. part of Lower Pannonia, which was constituted as a separate province by the emperor Galerius, and named Valeria in honour of his wife. (Aurel. Vict. de Caes. 40; Amm. 16.10, 28.3.) This province was bounded on the E. and N. by the Danubius, on the S. by the Savus, and on the W. by Lake Peiso. (Comp. PANNONIA p. 531, and Muchar, Norikum, vol. 1. p. 3.)

VALE´RIA (Οὐαλερία, Ptol. 2.6.58), a town of the Celtiberi in Hispania Tarraconensis, on the Sucro. At a later period it became a Roman colony in the jurisdiction of Carthago Nova. (Plin. Nat. 3.3. s. 4.) Now Valera la Vieja, with ruins. (Cf. Florez, Esp. Sagr. 8. p. 198, with 5. p. 19, and 7. p. 59.)

(1) A sister of P. Valerius Publicola, who advised the Roman matrons to ask Veturia, the mother of Coriolanus, to go to the camp of Coriolanus in order to deprecate his resentment. See Coriolanus.

(2) The last wife of Sulla. She was the daughter of M. Valerius Messala, and bore a daughter soon after Sulla 's death.

(3) Galeria Valeria, daughter of Diocletian and Prisca. She was, upon the reconstruction of the Empire in A.D. 292, united to Galerius, one of the new Caesars. After the death of her husband in 311 Valeria rejected the proposals of his successor Maximinus, who in consequence stripped her of her possessions, and banished her along with her mother. After the death of Maximinus, Valeria and her mother were executed by order of Licinius, in A.D. 315.

(4) Messalīna. See Messalina.