Victorious Valerians I

Before getting to Valerius Messalinus it would be well to dispense with one red herring, which is to say the 'victorious black eagle'.

de la Bedoyere ran with this as a translation of Valeria Victrix in Eagles Over Britannia (2001, 45); it still persists at livius.org (which is why I keep having to make this argument). I'm not sure which came first, but they are both wrong.

It should fall at the first hurdle (even if we were to believe the translation valeria=black eagle) for the simple reason that a noun is no use to us in this context. The legionary cognomina are all adjectives and although attributive use of a noun (or nouns in apposition) - so something like 'the eagle legion' - does work in Latin, there simply is no parallel for such useage among the names of the legions. We would really need something like valeriana.

As for the translation itself. It appears in Lewis and Short on the basis of older texts of Pliny's Natural History but the definitive texts rejects the difficult 'eodem in valeria' - lacking in clear sense - for 'eodem leporaria' and it is leporaria which appears in the Oxford Latin Dictionary as the equivalent of the Greek melanaetos.

It is one strange side effect of the reliance of internet sources on out of copyright texts.

Despite Perseus playing host to the definitive Teubner text:
Naturalis Historia Pliny the Elder. Karl Friedrich Theodor Mayhoff. Lipsiae. Teubner. 1906.

their English text, Bostock and Riley 1855, was based on earlier editions; likewise Lewis and Short 'A Latin Dictionary, Founded on Andrews' edition of Freund's Latin dictionary'1879 relied greatly on earlier works and did not have the benefit of Mayhoff's revised text (unlike the Oxford Latin Dictionary).