Aulus Gellius Research Articles

Aulo Gelio y la literatura española del Siglo XVI: autor, texto, comentario y relectura moderna

This paper will analyse the references to Aulus Gellius made by Spanish authors in the 16th century, with special attention to Fray Antonio de Guevara, Pedro Mejia and Cristobal de Villalon. Likewise, this study will refer to some significant commentaries about Gellius and the miscellanea present in Michel de Montainge’s and Luis Vives’ works. The data will be reviewed in the light of the references to the ancient author himself, as well as to the thematic interest of his quotations, the critic commentaries to his work, and its modern re-reading, in terms of miscellanea or essay.

ON ISOPSEPHIC LINES IN HOMER AND APOLLONIUS OF RHODES

In this article all isopsephic lines in Homer (see Aulus Gellius 14.6.4-5) and Apollonius of Rhodes are identified throughthe use of a computer program written by the author. Such puzzles were first noticed by the Hellenistic scholars when they were attempting to establish authentic texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The use of deliberate isopsephism by Leonides of Alexandria is noted and the question whether there was scribal manipulation of the Homeric texts is investigated. Both analysis of the statistics of the numeric values of epic Greek verses and textual criticism of the passages under examination show that the majority of these pairs of lines are probably not deliberate, but that manipulation of some cannot be ruled out.

ON ISOPSEPHIC LINES IN HOMER AND APOLLONIUS OF RHODES

In this article all isopsephic lines in Homer (see Aulus Gellius 14.6.4-5) and Apollonius of Rhodes are identified throughthe use of a computer program written by the author. Such puzzles were first noticed by the Hellenistic scholars when they were attempting to establish authentic texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The use of deliberate isopsephism by Leonides of Alexandria is noted and the question whether there was scribal manipulation of the Homeric texts is investigated. Both analysis of the statistics of the numeric values of epic Greek verses and textual criticism of the passages under examination show that the majority of these pairs of lines are probably not deliberate, but that manipulation of some cannot be ruled out.

Readers and reading culture in the high Roman Empire: a study of elite communities

Abbreviations 1. Reading as a Sociocultural System 2. The Pragmatics of Reading 3. Pliny and the Construction of Literary Culture 4. Pliny, Tacitus, and the Dialogus de oratoribus 5. Doctors and Intellectuals: Galen's Reading Community 6. Aulus Gellius: The Life of the Litteratus 7. Fronto and Aurelius: Contubernium and Solitary Reader 8. Lucian's Insufficient Intellectual 9. The Papyri: Scholars and Reading Communities in Graeco-Roman Egypt 10. Conclusion References Index

Anonymous: Nox Philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library (review)

Anonymous: Nox Philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library (review)

Portraits de lecteurs: Athénée de Naucratis et Aulu Gelle

Athenaeus and Aulus Gellius are key authors in order to understand the role of libraries and books in the writing of scholarly texts: extracts and quotations play a central part in their works. Reading practices are also displayed through various characters or through self-reflection. This paper is a first step towards a comparison between these two writers, in order to shed light upon their specific use of books, in its technical, social and intellectual dimensions. Beyond the information they provide us with, Deipnosophists and Attic Nights are essential sources in order to understand a particular idea of culture (paideia), where the knowledge drawn from books inspires various scholarly practices, between memory and performance.

Captus sacerdos. Appunti di una ricerca sul Sal 110 ed Eb 5,1-10

A sentence of G. Dumezil (Idées romaines,21980, p. 98), probably inspired by Aulus Gellius (Noctes atticæ I 12,14), may help to clarify the terminology of a curious passage from the Letter to the Hebrews (Heb 5:1-10). In those verses, the author states that every high priest has to be “taken from” among men before being “ordained” and “proclaimed” priest. The technical language of the roman priesthood knows expressions similar to those used in this chapter. In particular, the ancient scholarly tradition has preserved the formula used by the Pontifex Maximus when performing the captio of a Vestal priestesses. As the author does in Heb 5, it was necessary to specify in the formula the subject of choice, the purpose of his priesthood, the legitimacy of the election and who would benefit from the sacrificial action. The letter compares the messianic event with the sacrificial ceremonies in Jerusalem, but also attempts to demonstrate that the new Christian movement, even in absence of temple and sacrifices, performs the essential dynamics of every sacral institution.

"Nox Philologiae": Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library by Erik Gunderson

"Nox Philologiae": Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library by Erik Gunderson

Cato the Elder in Aulus Gellius

Cato the Elder in Aulus Gellius

Christian Humanism in the Age of Critical Philology: Ralph Häfner's Gods in Exile

Hauler's book is a monumental study and a milestone of Germ an -language research.1 He delineates, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of the Christian humanism of European philologists in the era of criticism. Recovering an immense wealth of forgotten sources, the book reveals the complex interaction and tension between pagan mythology and Christian culture in philological controversies. Though authors might denounce the pagan histories of gods as fabulae, they were constitutive for the productive and emulative reception of ancient Greco-Roman patterns in and Baroque culture. How could the peculiar logic of this paganizing be handled? Was it advisable to have faith in the integrative power of Christian truth, which was capable of finding precursors or even proofs of one's own truth in pagan patterns, or should the pagan be selectively separated from the Christian? And what was the role of philology in this process? Did the growing expertise in criticism advance the process of dissociation of paganism and Christianity? Did it further new possibilities of synthesis in the spirit of Apologetics?The reconstruction of these processes involves much more than what the book's very specific title suggests. It is a large-scale history of scholarship written from the perspective of the most important tensions that Christian humanism had to overcome in its final stage. From an Anglo-American perspective, this book contributes to recent reconstructions of ideas of early modern men of learning, as well as the growing number of studies on antiquarianism and the history of religion.2 The final stage of Christian humanism, the period of time covered by the book, begins in the late sixteenth century and ends in the 1730s, a point in time which Hamer presents, with some justification, as the end of an era.HYMNOLOGY AND POLYMATHYThe study consists of three basic parts. The first one is the Persistence of Orphic-Platonic Hymnology in Christian Humanism (Fortleben der orphisch-platonischen Hymnologie im christlichen Humanismus). This topic, apparently very specialized and marginal, proves to be a key arena of early modern scholarship, an arena traversed by the battle lines between pagan tradition and Christianity as well as between poetry and theology. Were hymns inspired poetry? What kind of inspiration could and should be conceded to hymns to Jupiter and the sun? Of course, those humanists who reappropriated Orphism and Neo-Platonism were interested in this genre. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and even into the midsixteenth century, this was not yet a problem. However, the more philological consciousness (and confessionalization) evolved, the more the genre's scope was delimited. What scope remained? Hafner relates the problem to the revival of an eclectic in the wake of the Second Sophistic. This eclectic Platonism, which was particularly influential from 1500 on, combined Platonism with rhetorics, and the claim of comprehensive polymathy with the joyful presentation of the findings of reading. In this respect, Apuleius and Aulus Gellius were two model authors for early modern polyhistors. We must include Martianus Capella as a continuation of the Renaissance of the Second Sophistic into Early Christian Encyclopedism (Renaissance der Zweiten Sophistik bis in die fruhchristliche Enzyklopadie hinein, p. 18).Hafner's approach is starkly original and, in my opinion, highly productive for the current debates about early modern encyclopedism and cultures of knowledge that are sometimes deadlocked.3 Too frequently, polymathy is used synonymously for encyclopedism, which is often associated with modern concepts of systematic classification. Yet, according to Hamer, this is a misunderstanding. It neglects the playful elements and skillful rhetorical options of throwing questions out into the open rather than narrowing them dogmatically. Perhaps the only addition to Hafner's sources could have been Louis de Cressolles's Theatrum veterum Rhetorutn, which, according to Marc Fumaroli in L'âge de l'eloquence, marked the return of the Second Sophistic. …

Nox philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the fantasy of the Roman library

In this strikingly original and playful work, Erik Gunderson examines questions of reading the past - an enterprise extending from antiquity to the present day. This esoteric and original study focuses on the equally singular work of Aulus Gellius - a Roman author and grammarian (ca. 120-180 A.D.), possibly of African origin. Gellius' only work, the twenty-volume Noctes Atticae, is an exploding, sometimes seemingly random text-cum-diary in which Gellius jotted down everything of interest he heard in conversation or read in contemporary books. Comprising notes on Roman and classical grammar, geometry, philosophy, and history, it is a one-work overview of Latin scholarship, thought, and intellectual culture, a combination condensed library and cabinet of curiosities.Gunderson tackles Gellius with exuberance, placing him in the larger culture of antiquarian literature. Purposely echoing Gellius' own swooping word-play and digressions, he explores the techniques by which knowledge was produced and consumed in Gellius' day, as well as in our own time. The resulting book is as much pure creative fun as it is a major work of scholarship informed by the theories of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida.

Asentimiento y “lo que depende de nosotros”: dos argumentos compatibilistas en el estoicismo antiguo

The aim of the present paper is to analyse two stoic arguments (one of them preserved by Cicero and Aulus Gellius, the other by Nemesius and Alexander) frequently interpreted as a defense of compatibilism. We shall present an alternative interpretation of both arguments, focusing on the naturalistic context provided by early Stoic metaphysics and ethics. The two notions we will mainly deal with will be the concept of assent and the distinction between that which depends on us and that which doesn't.

Eighteenth (duodevicesimus) or Twenty-Second (duoetvicesimus)? Twenty-Second but duovicesimus (Gel. 5.4.1-5 and Non. s.v. duodevicesimo p. 100M)

Abstract Manuscripts of two relatively late authors of classical Latin, Aulus Gellius and Nonius Marcellus, have garbled the word duovicesimus, a word that fell out of use after the first century BC. Modern scholars have had difficulty in restoring the true form of the word to the ancient manuscripts and then in assessing the effect of that restoration on the histories written by three authors of the second and first centuries BC, who are cited as having used that word: Fabius Pictor, Cato the Elder, and Varro. Once the valid form of the word is restored and its meaning realized, the following conclusions are possible. Fabius Pictor had his own peculiar chronology of the period between the Gallic sack of Rome and the first plebeian consul. Cato the Elder marked the beginning of the siege of Sarguntum as the sixth violation of a treaty by the Carthaginians. It is highly likely that Varro had Ancus Marcius die in the twenty-second year of his reign.

Two Possible Sources for Chaucer's Description of the Pardoner

AULUS GELLIUS (b.c. ce125),1 in Book 3 of the Attic Nights, relates the following observation made by Sallust in The War with Catiline: ‘Avarice implies a desire for money, which no wise man covets; steeped as it were with noxious poisons, it renders the most manly body and soul effeminate …’2 The relevance of this observation to Chaucer's description of the Pardoner is apparent. At least since W. C. Curry's analysis, critics have associated the word ‘mare’ in the narrator's speculation, ‘I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare’ (I.691), with the possibility of effeminacy.3 Jill Mann observed a connection between the label ‘mare’ and the description of homosexual men as effeminate in a poem by Walter de Chatillôn.4 Monica McAlpine opines, in an article that has become the standard point of reference on the subject, that ‘ “Mare” must be a term commonly used in Chaucer's day to designate a male person who, though not necessarily sterile or impotent, exhibits physical traits suggestive of femaleness.’5 While McAlpine argues for the Pardoner's homosexuality, she acknowledges that effeminacy need not imply homosexuality and critics have continued to debate the implications of the description.6 Richard Firth Green, for instance, has argued that effeminacy is a sign not of impotence or homosexuality but rather of womanizing.7

The poems ex Graeco by Petrus Crinitus (1474–1507) and the validation of his major themes

In addition to imitating ancient Latin like Aulus Gellius, Suetonius Tranquillus, and the poet Horace in his writings, the Florentine Petrus Crinitus (1474–1507) also composed Latin poems ex Graeco, taking as his models poems from the Greek Anthology and prose texts from the Apophthegmata Laconica of Ps. Plutarch. Crinitus, however, produced serious and even melancholy adaptations, downplaying the humor present in the Greek models. His poems ex Graeco thereby reflect the serious tone and didactic themes of his other poems. Crinitus' selective handling of his Greek models is evident when his poems ex Graeco are compared with their Greek sources and with other poems in his extant collection to which they are thematically related.

The Curse of the Ephesians: A Long Footnote to Byron

In 'The Curse of Minerva', Byron has the goddess place a curse on Lord Elgin for his theft of the famous marbles from her Temple in Athens, the Parthenon: Oh, loathed in life nor pardon'd in the dust, May hate pursue his sacrilegious lust! Linked with the fool that fired the Ephesian dome, Shall vengeance follow far beyond the tomb, And Eratostratus and Elgin shine In many a branding page and burning line; Alike reserved for aye to stand accursed, Perchance the second blacker than the first. (199-206) The question is: Who was Eratostratus? Far from shining in many a branding page and burning line, Eratostratus does not appear in any record whatsoever, ancient or modern, other than Byron's poem. Byron is apparently misremembering another name: Herostratus, the man who set fire to the great Temple of Diana (or Artemis) at Ephesus in 356 BC. The standard editions of Byron set the name straight with no further comment. But what made him get the name wrong? Was it only a desire to alliterate it with 'Elgin' along with an aristocratic nonchalance about classical scholarship? Or did he know what he was doing? After turning over the ancient sources about Herostratus, I have felt a pricking in my thumbs: something else may have been at work on Byron, something ancient and uncanny. For what is odd about his mistake is that the original vengeance that was meant to follow Herostratus beyond the tomb was precisely never to shine in the annals, however blackly, but to be erased from all remembrance forever. Byron seems to have forgotten that, too, if he ever knew it. By repeating the name, Byron is effectively breaking ranks with an ancient punishment, a damnatio memoriae of unusual severity. It is also true, however, that by repeating the name half wrongly he is half carrying out the vengeance. One could even say that by substituting a near-name for the true one Byron has repaired the breach in the prohibition around the true one in the best possible way. How better to erase a name than circulate one somewhat like it? The many readers of Byron, at least, will have a rival name running interference in their minds with the original, if they know the original at all, and some readers will confuse it further with Eratosthenes and thus obliterate the original completely. And that was the goal of the Ephesian authorities. As far as it can be reconstructed from the slender survivals of ancient texts, here is what happened in Ephesus. The great Temple of Diana, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, so magnificent that it had been spared by Xerxes when he destroyed nearly all the other temples in Asia, was set afire by an Ephesian named Herostratus in 356 BC. Under torture by the authorities, Herostratus confessed that his motive was to spread his name throughout the world. As his most fitting punishment the Ephesians decreed 'uti nomen eius, qui templum Dianae Ephesi incenderat, ne quis ullo in tempore nominaret', as Aulus Gellius put it five centuries later in Noctes Atticae (2.6.18) - 'that the name of him who burned the Temple of Diana of Ephesus, no one at any time might name'. That is all we have about the deed and its punishment. It sets one pondering. In what sense was it a punishment of Herostratus to ban his name? He was presumably tortured to death. To augment the torture the Ephesian officials no doubt told him his name would be banned. But after they tossed his broken body into an unmarked grave there would be no reason to institute the ban, if punishment is what they sought. 'To the dead fame comes too late', as Martial said (Epigrammata 1.25.8), and so does oblivion. Of course it may have been believed that vengeance could indeed follow far beyond the tomb, and that the shade of the dead would continue to suffer in Hades by knowing that his name has been lost to memory. As each new shade arrived from the upper world, Herostratus' shade would ask how his reputation fared; the new shade would reply, 'Who? …

L'interjection dans un corpus d'auteurs latins

SummaryThough they have hardly been studied so far whether by ancient or modem grammarians, interjections, which make up a highly heterogeneous category, are items of discourse the use and stylistic value of which seems to depend on several factors. While the Ancients - among them Aulus Gellius - had already noticed that a particular interjection could only be used by men and some other by women, it has so far never been established that a writer or a literary genre could have an impact on the use of interjections. The present paper examines, on the one hand, the frequency with which interjections are used in a Latin corpus consisting of 1,600,000 words and. on the other, occurrences that specifically belong to prose, poetry or to this or that writer.

Late Antiquity: Before and After

We have lived now through a long generation of "late antique renaissance." I set for myself the task in this talk of trying to say concisely what difference that renaissance has made both for the field as narrowly constructed and for the wider field of "classics" itself. Disciplines in Motion Formally, the story of late antiquity in the last decades resembles that of other periods and cultures. Where we inherited what looked like fundamentally sound narratives, built up laboriously and even heroically over time but still requiring supplementation and correction, narratives deploying characters whose identities could be grasped unambiguously, what we have come away with is a new appreciation for the way in which this period especially has been interpreted through constructions of narrative and constructions of identity that are at sharp variance with what we know about the people to whom they apply. Moreover, the constructions that have been in long use are often ones that go back to the late antique period itself. Hence when we accept them, we essentially connive with one party or another of that period to tell a story their way about people seen through their eyes. The late antiquity that I know best is the period that has loomed largest in the scholarly debates of the last generation, roughly from Diocletian and the [End Page 203] tetrarchy to Heraclius and the first defeats suffered at Islamic hands. In that period we now see first and foremost a series of contests among self-justifying contemporary narratives, many of which have had their appeal into our own day. Chief among those narratives is the invention of classical antiquity itself. Roman dominance had long been marked culturally by acceptance of the authority of Greek texts and with the prestige of Greek culture supereminent, but by the fourth century, with the rise of a new class of arriviste aristocrats (the creation of Constantine) and with the loss of widespread facility with Greek in the Latin provinces of the empire, a new narrative was needed. The revival of "classical Latin" texts and authors (Juvenal, for example, and Tacitus) in this period, and the elaboration of school texts and school curricula (e.g., the writings of Donatus and the so-called quadriga Messii —Cicero, Sallust, Terence, and Vergil), gave first coherent shape to the reading lists that still survive in graduate departments of classics. The Nicomachi who read and copied Livy1 were acting a new classicizing role, as were Augustine and his students and family when they retired to a country villa outside Milan in the winter of 386/7 and began enacting their own version of Ciceronian dialogues from Tusculum—even to the point of having scribes take down everything they said in shorthand for Augustine to publish as a display of his fidelity to Cicero and to his newfound philosophical ideas. That self-conscious enactment of the past persisted well into the sixth century and was probably only finally ended when the brutal efforts of Justinian to re-establish "The Roman Empire" in the west led, naturally enough, to its eradication. The next new class had few pretensions.2 We should not belittle the seriousness of the enterprise these writers were engaged upon. Macrobius in the Saturnalia musters up his threadbare learning (borrowing from Aulus Gellius and others in ways we would never let our students get away with) to create a portrait of his elders and betters of the previous generation enacting their own Ciceronian dialogue—a calque, if so I may call it, on the De republica of Cicero, though at the same time perhaps a veiled reply to Augustine's attempt to appropriate the Platonic-Ciceronian lineage in his De civitate Dei. In so doing, Macrobius is saying something important to himself and to his contemporaries about who and what they were precisely by attaching themselves to that particular past in that particular way.3 The philosopher Boethius and...

Paradoxes in Aulus Gellius

The noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius contain almost all the ancient paradoxes. Nevertheless, in comparison with his philosophical sources, the author shows a shift in the perspective of his approach. He analyses the `master argument' of Diodorus Chronus only from an ethical point of view and, among the seven paradoxes attributed to Eubulides of Milet, he quotes the `heap' as an absurdity (absurdum), the `horned one' and the `not-someone' as a trap (captio), the `liar' as a sophism (sophisma). Following the advice of Cynics, Gellius mistrusts deceptive manoeuvres, which highlight gaps in binary logic. At the same time, however, he is interested in argumentative structures, which lead one of two opponents on to victory. The extensive report of the quarrel between Protagoras and Evathlus, and many observations of Gellius on convertible forms of reasoning in literary texts fall within this rhetorical field.

Getting away with murder: The literary and forensic fortune of two RomanExempla

Valerius Maximus tells two stories of women who, having killed close relations to avenge murders committed by their victims, were brought before a court but neither acquitted nor convicted. Of these stories, the second, concerning a woman from Smyrna whose case was adjourned by the Areopagus for a hundred years, enjoyed a literary fortune, being taken up by Aulus Gellius and from him by Ammianus Marcellinus, John of Salisbury, Rabelais, and Montaigne; the only author to take the woman’s sex into account, John of Salisbury, held that she was in the wrong. However, it was from Valerius that the two stories passed into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century civilian jurisprudence, which used them, without consideration of their subjects’ gender, to illustrate the principle ofiustus dolor, or justified grief, as a defence or mitigation in cases of homicide; the Woman of Smyrna was even exploited, with a misrepresentation of the facts, to defend the conduct of Guido Franceschini in the case that gave rise to Browning’s poemThe Ring and the Book.