This is the second instalment in a series of articles by Classics Ambassador Ffion Shute introducing lesser-known Roman authors. You can enjoy the first instalment on Frontinus here. The series covers forgotten gems ranging from history to architecture to military tactics, whose authors deserve to be more widely known. Strictly no Livy or Tacitus here: these articles will help you to know your Frontinus from your Fronto!

Aulus Gellius

Aulus Gellius was born into a noble family in the late 120s CE. His own writing provides us with a glimpse of his background, saying that he had several prominent ancestors in Rome during the late Republic. He himself was appointed iudex, a senior magistrate responsible for overseeing court cases. As well as fulfilling these civic duties, he was an enthusiastic scholar of rhetoric and language, his wider intellectual interests varying greatly. At some point in his career, he moved to Athens, where he spent many years associating with some of the prominent philosophers and rhetoricians of the day, including the statesman Herodes Atticus. The conversations he had with his social circle in Athens led him to write his only known work, Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights), a miscellany of anecdotes, grammar, philosophy, gastronomy, history and many more subjects, spanning some 20 books.

During the compilation of Noctes Atticae, he returned to Rome and became close to Favorinus of Arelate, a philosopher and personal friend of the emperor Hadrian. We know little of his personal life but Gellius’ writing shows us that he was a lively character, studying with all kinds of people and reading many books, enthusiastically collecting information in dozens of different fields.

Noctes Atticae

Noctes Atticae is remarkably complete for such a large work. Out of 20 books, 19 survive in their entirety. Gellius’ preface tells us that he deliberately made no attempt to order the work: he instead preferred to write down a stream of information as it occurred to him. He starts the first book with surprisingly scientific methods for estimating the leg length of the demi-god Hercules, before launching into a description of a meal he had with a philosophy student, who was “intolerably loquacious and presuming”.

Many names, both famous and obscure, crop up throughout Attic Nights. He directly quotes the works of Cicero, Virgil and Plutarch, as well as providing extracts from other authors whose works have otherwise been lost completely. In book 7, for example, he quotes two paragraphs of the Annals of Lucius Piso Frugi, a prominent politician from nearly 300 years previously. This work was an influential and comprehensive history, yet this fragment in Gellius’ miscellany is its only major surviving passage. Whereas Livy merely cites Piso, Gellius quotes him in full in order to praise his “pure and charming” style of writing, displaying his own interest in the uses of archaic Latin, as well as providing us with a hint of one of the many large works of ancient literature that we do not have today.

One of the most famous stories recorded in Noctes Atticae is the fable of Androcles and the lion, a tale often attributed to Aesop: a man sentenced to fight wild beasts in the arena is pitted against a lion that fortunately he had helped with a thorn in its paw many years previously. Students of the Cambridge Latin Course Book 1 may remember translating a version of this story called ‘pāstor et leō’, accompanied by a rather endearing (if anatomically incorrect) mosaic of a lion!

A mosaic from Tunisia depicts a lion. Gellius’ Androcles would have been rightly startled if it had this expression.

Other highlights include a few lines of a poem about food by the otherwise unknown poet Julius Paulus (interesting but admittedly not as good as Horace!), extracts from the Annals of various minor historians, in-depth grammatical commentary on Cicero’s court speeches, and an angry call-out of a “disgraceful error” in the grammar employed by the unfortunate Caesellius Vindex, not the revolutionary Vindex but a literary critic who should apparently have known better. While being in favour of newer additions to the Latin language, Gellius is something of an enthusiast for archaic words and constructions that he picks up from earlier works. He frequently intersperses his Latin with Greek words, either to better explain a concept without a satisfactory name in Latin, or to give an explanation of something grammatical in Greek. He records his own difficulties in trying to render passages of Plato in acceptable Latin.

The whole of Attic Nights is a treasure trove of information regarding almost everything of interest to a classicist. His notes on grammar, history, philosophy, antiquarianism, poetry and more provide us with so many different tastes of missing literary sources. Its jumbled format and eclectic mix of subjects reflect the mosaic of 500 years of Mediterranean cultural history that led up to the Roman Empire at its height.

Philosophy

Gellius is deeply interested in philosophy, often reflecting on the works of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and others. He is also opinionated on the subject, although he does not appear to associate himself with one particular school of thought. He tends towards reflecting on the philosophers of each school as individuals, rather than delving too deeply into the nature of their thinking. He mentions Epictetus and Zeno as Stoics and seems generally sympathetic towards ‘true Stoics’ as supposed to ‘pseudo-Stoics’. Within the first few pages, the reader is greeted with a scathing observation of a school of young upstarts, who, “while they called themselves Stoics, showed no frugality or inclination to honest work, but rather babbled about empty theories”. In the next book, he defends the philosopher Epicurus against Plutarch’s “unjust” criticisms riddled with “obvious artifice”.

Stoicism and Epicureanism are not the only schools of philosophy mentioned – Academics, Cynics, Peripatetics and Pyrronians are all named, focusing especially on the atmosphere of lively debates, dramatised in the Greek manner with much use of direct speech and set in famous locations. This reflects the mood in the Roman world at the time, with Marcus Aurelius the ‘philosopher emperor’ coming to power in 161, and an increasing interest in Greek culture (philhellenism) that brought with it an interest in ideas from particularly Athenian schools of thought. Indeed, Gellius’ friend Herodes Atticus taught rhetoric to a young Marcus Aurelius. Attic Nights can be viewed as an important representation of philhellenism and imperial-era philosophical discourse.

Herodes Atticus (101-177 CE) was a distinguished rhetorician and philanthropist. He funded numerous public works and was popular with the Antonine emperors.

Influence

For a lesser-known author, some of Aulus Gellius’ ideas and anecdotes have infiltrated ways of thinking through the ages to a surprising extent. In fact, the very term ‘Classics’ was originally coined by him. In Book 8, he uses the phrase “classicus asiduusque scriptor”, with the first two words pertaining to archaic concepts of refined and upper-class ideals, while the third word means ‘writer’. His intention in the passage in which this phrase appears is to contrast an ordinary writer with an author of noble and sophisticated works. Modern interpretations have deemed the meaning of ‘classicus’ as closest to the modern word ‘classy’. Classics at its birth was the original noble pursuit!

As well as naming the subject for us, Gellius was quickly picked up by later scholars. He is quoted at length by St Augustine and appears in the textbooks of the later grammarian Priscian, by which time a copying error renders him wrongly as ‘Agellius’.

The reason that the name of Aulus Gellius is not now as famous as other authors commenting on rhetoric or philosophy may be down to the fact that he is a miscellanist. It is hard to pin him down as a source on a particular subject or find an area where he had original and influential ideas of the magnitude required to place him in a category with Cicero, Tacitus or even a Seneca. However, this does not mean that he should be dismissed merely as a source of anecdotes. His is an overwhelmingly enthusiastic and positive voice in a world of negativity in Roman literature – far from the affected exasperation of Pliny the Younger, the caustic moralising of Juvenal or the judgemental pessimism of Tacitus that dominate what we think of as the voices of the Flavian-Antonine period.

His ability to provide an understanding of cultural context through the lens of many subjects is impressive, while his originating of the term ‘classics’ is especially apt: he used cultural knowledge of the past to relate to and understand his contemporary world, with its varied and fast-changing culture – something that classics as a subject is so important in doing today.

The Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens was built in memory of his wife, Appia Regilla, possibly to stave off rumours that he had her killed. It is still in use – now a popular venue for charity concerts.

Attic Nights is available in three Loeb volumes (195, 200 and 212). Reading all of them is not compulsory!

©FfionShute

Next time: the influential architect and civil engineer Vitruvius!