11 Facts About Velleius Paterculus

Marcus Velleius Paterculus was a Roman historian, soldier and senator.

Velleius Paterculus was born into a noble Campanian family about 19 BC, although the place of his birth is unknown.

Velleius Paterculus was a great-great-great-grandson of Minatus Magius of Aeculanum in Samnium, who received the Roman franchise for his actions during the Social War.

Two years later, Velleius Paterculus was a cavalry prefect serving in the command of Tiberius in Germania, having already held the office of praefectus castrorum.

Velleius Paterculus continued as a senior member of Tiberius' staff until the future emperor's return to Rome in AD 12.

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Velleius Paterculus devotes some attention to Greek and Roman literature, and records unique details about Lucius Afranius and Lucius Pomponius, but he curiously omits any mention of important literary figures such as Plautus, Horace, and Propertius.

Velleius Paterculus' style is characterized by the showy rhetoric, hyperbole, and exaggerated figures of speech that were typical of Silver Age Latin.

Velleius Paterculus exhibits great tact in the manner in which he passes from one subject to another; his reflections are striking and apposite; and his style, which is a close imitation of Sallust's, is characterized by clearness, conciseness, and energy, but at the same time exhibits some of the faults of writers of his age in a fondness for strange and out-of-the-way expressions.

Velleius Paterculus's knowledge is superficial, his blunders, numerous, his chronology inconsistent.

Abridgements are usually little more than skeletons; but Velleius Paterculus has succeeded, in spite of the brief compass of his work, in clothing the bare bones with real flesh, and in endowing his compendium with more than a mere shadow of vitality, thanks to his own enthusiastic interest in the human side of the great characters of history.

Velleius Paterculus' treatise was not intended as a careful and comprehensive study of history.