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The few surviving lines of Quintus Valerius Soranus, a learned Roman of the early first century BC, mostly from a work called Epoptides. The best-known fragment, preserved by Augustine from Varro, addresses Jupiter as ‘almighty, progenitor and genetrix of kings, things and gods, god of gods, one and all’; another comments on the spelling of a Greek name in Accius, and a third begins with an old adage addressed to Publius Scipio.
Valerius Soranus was remembered as one of the most learned men of his day, and tradition held that he was put to death for revealing the secret name of Rome. His hymn to Jupiter as both father and mother of all things is an early Roman expression of a philosophical, all-embracing conception of the supreme god, and it was cited by later writers for its theology.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Musisque Deoque, the digital archive of Latin poetry (edition: J. Blänsdorf, FPL, 2011), licensed CC BY-SA. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.