 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.