priest, the other, bishop of Terni (Interamna). The Passion of the former is part of the legend of SS. Marius and Martha and their companions; that of the latter has no better historical foundation: so that no argument can be drawn from either account to establish the differentiation of the two saints . It would appear from the two accounts that both belonged to the same period, i.e. to the reign of the emperor Claudius (Gothicus); that both died on the same day; and that both were buried on the Via Flaminia, but at different distances from Rome. The Martyrologium Hieronymianum mentions only one Valentinus: “Interamnae miliario LXIIII. via Flaminia natale Valentini.” It is probable that the basilica situated at the second milestone on the Via Flaminia was also dedicated to him. It is impossible to fix the date of his death. The St Valentinus who is spoken of as the apostle of Rhaetia, and venerated in Passau as its first bishop, flourished in the 5th century. Although the name of St Valentine is very popular in England, apparently no church has been dedicated to him. For the peculiar observances that used to be commonly connected with St Valentine’s Eve and Day, to which allusion is frequently made by English writers, such works as John Brand’s Popular Antiquities (edited by W. C. Hazlitt, vol. ii. pp. 606–11, London, 1905), W. Hone’s Every-Day Book, and Chambers’s Book of Days may be consulted. Their appropriateness to the spring season is, in a general way perhaps, obvious enough, but the association of the lovers’ festival with St Valentine seems to be purely accidental.[1]
See Acta Sanctorum, February, ii. 753, 756, and January, i. 1094; G. B. de Rossi, Bullettino di archeologia cristiana (1871), p. 101 and (1878) p. 59. (H. De.)
VALENTINE AND ORSON, a romance which has been attached to the Carolingian cycle. It is the story of twin brothers, abandoned in the woods in infancy. Valentine is brought up as a knight at the court of Pippin, while Orson grows up in a bear’s den to be a wild man of the woods, until he is over-come and tamed by Valentine, whose servant and comrade he becomes. The two eventually rescue their mother Bellisant, sister of Pippin and wife of the emperor of Greece, by whom she had been unjustly repudiated, from the power of a giant. There are versions of the tale, which appears to rest on a lost French original, in French, English, German, Icelandic, Dutch and Italian. In the older versions Orson is described as the “nameless” one. The kernel of the story lies in Orson’s up-bringing and wildness, and is evidently a folk-tale the connexion of which with the Carolingian cycle is purely artificial. The story of the wife unjustly accused with which it is bound up is sufficiently common, and was told of the wives both of Pippin and Charlemagne.
The French prose romance was printed at Lyons in 1489 and often subsequently. The Historye of the two Valyannte Brethren: Valentyne and Orson . . . by Henry Watson, printed by William Copland about 1550, is the earliest known of a long series of English versions. A ballad on the subject was printed in Bishop Percy’s Reliques of English Poetry, and the tale adapted for the nursery was illustrated by Walter Crane in the Three Bears' Picture Book (1876). For a detailed bibliography of the English, French, German, Dutch and Italian forms of the tale, see W. Seelman, “Valentin und Namelos” (Norden and Leipzig, 1884), in vol. iv. of Niederdeutsche Denkmäler, edited by the Verein für niederdeutsche Sprachforschung.
VALENTINIAN I., Roman emperor of the West from A.D. 364 to 375, was born at Cibalis, in Pannonia. He had been an officer of the guard under Julian and Jovian, and had risen high in the imperial service. Of robust frame and distinguished appearance, he possessed great courage and military capacity. He was chosen emperor in his forty-third year by the officers of the army at Nicaea in Bithynia in 364, and shortly after-wards named his brother Valens (q.v.) colleague with him in the empire. The two brothers, after passing through the chief cities of the neighbouring district, arranged the partition of the empire at Naissus (Nissa) in Upper Moesia. As emperor of the West, Valentinian took Italy, Illyricum, Spain, the Gauls, Britain and Africa, leaving to Valens the eastern half of the Balkan Peninsula, Greece, Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor as far as Persia. During the short reign of Valentinian there were wars in Africa, in Germany and in Britain, and Rome came into collision with barbarian peoples of whom we now hear for the first time—Burgundians, Saxons, Alamanni. The emperor’s chief work was guarding the frontiers and establishing military positions. Milan was at first his headquarters for settling the affairs of northern Italy; next year (365) he was at Paris, and then at Reims, to direct the operations of his generals against the Alamanni. This people, defeated at Scarpona (Charpeigne) and Catelauni (Châlons-sur-Marne) by Jovinus, were driven back to the German bank of the Rhine, and checked for a while by a chain of military posts and fortresses. At the close of 367, however, they suddenly crossed the Rhine, attacked Moguntiacum (Mainz) and plundered the city. Valentinian attacked them at Solicinium (Sulz in the Neckar valley or Schwetzingen) with a large army, and defeated them with great slaughter, but his own losses were so considerable that he abandoned the idea of following up his success. Later, in 374, he made peace with their king, Macrianus, who from that time remained a true friend of the Romans. The next three years he spent at Trier, which he chiefly made his headquarters, organizing the defence of the Rhine frontier, and personally superintending the construction of numerous forts. During his reign the coasts of Gaul were harassed by the Saxon pirates, with whom the Picts and Scots of northern Britain joined hands, and ravaged the island from the wall of Antoninus to the shores of Kent. In 368 Theodosius was sent to drive back the invaders; in this he was completely successful, and established a new British province, called Valentia, in honour of the emperor. In Africa the Moorish prince, Firmus, raised the standard of revolt, being joined by the provincials, who had been rendered desperate by the cruelty and extortions of Count Romanus, the military governor. The services of Theodosius were again requisitioned. He landed in Africa with a small band of veterans, and Firmus, to avoid being taken prisoner, committed suicide. In 374 the Quadi, a German tribe in what is now Moravia and Hungary, resenting the erection of Roman forts to the north of the Danube in what they considered to be their own territory, and further exasperated by the treacherous murder of their king, Gabinius, crossed the river and laid waste the province of Pannonia. The emperor in April of the following year entered Illyricum with a powerful army, but during an audience to an embassy from the Quadi at Brigetio on the Danube (near Pressburg) died in a fit of apoplexy. His general administration seems to have been thoroughly honest and able, in some respects beneficent. If he was hard and exacting in the matter of taxes, he spent them in the defence and improvement of his dominions, not in idle show or luxury. Though himself a plain and almost illiterate soldier, he was a founder of schools, and he also provided medical attendance for the poor of Rome, by appointing a physician for each of the fourteen districts of the city. He was an orthodox Catholic, but he permitted absolute religious freedom to all his subjects. Against all abuses, both civil and ecclesiastical, he steadily set his face, even against the increasing wealth and worldliness of the clergy. The great blot on his memory is his cruelty, which at times was frightful, and showed itself in its full fierceness in the punishment of persons accused of witchcraft, soothsaying or magical practices.
See Ammianus Marcellinus xxv.-xxx.; Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. 25; T. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, bk. i. chap. 3; H. Schiller, Geschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit (Gotha, 1883–87), bk. iii. chap. iv. 27–30; H. Richter, Das weströmische Reich (Berlin, 1865), pp. 240–68.
After his death, his son, Valentinian II., an infant of four years of age, with his half-brother Gratian (q.v.) a lad of about seventeen, became the emperors of the West. They made Milan their home; and the empire was nominally divided
- ↑ Until nearly the close of the 19th century the custom of sending “valentines”—i.e. anonymous love-tokens, written or otherwise—on St Valentine’s day was fairly general. They gradually lost their original significance, and the custom, where it survives, has become completely vulgarized.
