Quintus Valerius Soranus

Quintus Valerius Soranus (b. circa 140–130 BC, d. 82 BC) was a Latin poet, grammarian, and tribune of the people in the Late Roman Republic. He was executed in 82 BC while Sulla was dictator, ostensibly for violating a religious prohibition against speaking the arcane name of Rome, but more likely for political reasons. The cognomen Soranus is a toponym indicating that he was from Sora.

A single elegiac couplet survives more or less intact from his body of work. The two lines address Jupiter as an all-powerful begetter who is both male and female. This androgynous, unitarian conception of deity, possibly an attempt to integrate Stoic and Orphic doctrine, has made the fragment of interest in religious studies.

Valerius Soranus is also credited with a little-recognized literary innovation: Pliny the Elder says he was the first writer to provide a table of contents to help readers navigate a long work.

Cicero has an interlocutor in his De oratore praise Valerius Soranus as “most cultured of all who wear the toga,” and Cicero lists him and his brother Decimus among an educated elite of socii et Latini; that is, those who came from allied polities on the Italian peninsula rather than from Rome, and those whose legal status was defined by Latin right rather than full Roman citizenship. The municipality of Sora was near Cicero's native Arpinum, and he refers to the Valerii Sorani as his friends and neighbors. Soranus was also a friend of Varro and is mentioned more than once in that scholar's multi-volume work on the Latin language.

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