Aulus Gellius: The Roman Who Wrote Down Everything He Found Interesting

Aulus Gellius tells us exactly what he did when something caught his attention. If he was reading a Greek or Latin book, or heard something that seemed worth remembering, he made a note of it. The subject did not have to belong to any particular field, and the notes were not arranged according to a predetermined plan. He kept them, he says, as an aid to memory, so that material could be recovered later when the original book was no longer at hand.

Those notes eventually became the Noctes Atticae, or Attic Nights: a work in twenty books filled with discussions drawn from reading, teaching, conversations, questions and things Gellius had encountered during his life. Book VIII itself was later lost, although its chapter headings survive. Across the remaining books, Gellius moves between language, literature, philosophy, Roman history, law, medicine, chronology and numerous smaller questions that happened to attract his attention.

Gellius describes his method plainly:

“For whenever I had taken in hand any Greek or Latin book, or had heard anything worth remembering, I used to jot down whatever took my fancy, of any and every kind, without any definite plan or order; and such notes I would lay away as an aid to my memory, like a kind of literary storehouse, so that when the need arose of a word or a subject which I chanced for the moment to have forgotten, and the books from which I had taken it were not at hand, I could readily find and produce it.”

He did not claim to collect everything. In the Preface, he criticizes other compilers for gathering vast quantities of material without enough discrimination and says that, although he read widely, he selected comparatively few things from the books he encountered. He wanted to preserve things that seemed worth remembering.

How a Pile of Notes Became the Attic Nights

Gellius says that he retained something of the variety and accidental order in which his notes had originally accumulated. The title came from the circumstances in which he began putting the collection together. During long winter nights spent in the countryside of Attica, he began working on the writings that he consequently called the Attic Nights.

The earliest notes and the finished work were not necessarily the same thing. Gellius refers to brief annotations made from things he read or heard, while the material that reached the Attic Nights was developed into literary discussions. The same source could provide material for different chapters, related subjects could appear far apart, and subjects encountered at different moments could later be brought together.

His Preface also explains that he did not intend to exhaust every difficult subject. Some discussions were deliberately brief, providing enough material to stir the reader's interest while leaving further investigation to books or teachers. He even asks readers who find something insufficiently explained to continue the inquiry themselves.

One chapter gives an unusually clear glimpse of material moving from speech into writing. In Book XIV, Gellius recalls hearing Favorinus deliver a long argument against astrologers. Afterward, he says, he promptly wrote down from memory the main topics and arguments that he had heard. He does not claim to reproduce Favorinus word for word; he records what he could recollect of the structure of the discussion.

That procedure closely matches the method announced in the Preface: Gellius hears something, judges it worth remembering, retains the substance, makes notes and ultimately incorporates the material into the Attic Nights.

He could also begin with something already written and deliberately test what remained after the book was put away. In Book XVII, after reading an older author, he describes trying to recall what deserved praise, criticism or special notice.

Reading was followed by an attempt to retrieve and judge what he had just encountered rather than simply moving on to the next text. The Attic Nights repeatedly preserves both the material Gellius retained and the processes of reading, recollection and inquiry through which he reached it.

Learning in the Company of Taurus and Favorinus

Much of what can be reconstructed about Gellius's education comes from the Attic Nights itself. He names teachers in Rome and later describes himself among Roman students in Athens. At the house of Herodes Atticus, he remembers being with countrymen who had travelled from Rome to Greece for further cultivation.

One of his most important teachers in Athens was the Platonist Calvenus Taurus. Taurus appears repeatedly in Gellius's recollections, teaching at home, answering questions from pupils and inviting members of his closer circle to dinner. Formal teaching was only part of the contact between them. Questions could continue after a lesson, during a meal or when Gellius remained behind after other students had left.

In one episode, Gellius becomes ill while staying at the villa of Herodes Atticus at Cephisia. Taurus comes to visit him with some of his pupils. The attending doctor refers to an artery using the ordinary word for a vein, and some of those present react as though the physician has exposed his ignorance. Taurus argues instead that using an imprecise everyday word does not necessarily prove that the doctor misunderstands the thing itself.

Gellius then turns attention to his own knowledge. He admits that he knew little about the elementary workings of the body and considered such ignorance undesirable. He therefore spent some of his spare time reading medical books and learned the basic distinctions between veins, arteries and the pulse.

Another figure appears even more often in his recollections: Favorinus. Gellius says that in Rome he sometimes spent almost entire days with him and followed him wherever he went because he found his conversation so captivating.

He recalls:

“I often spent whole days in Rome with Favorinus. His delightful conversation held my mind enthralled, and I attended him wherever he went, as if actually taken prisoner by his eloquence; to such a degree did he constantly delight me with his most agreeable discourse.”

Favorinus appears discussing philosophy, literature, language, law and Roman antiquities, sometimes answering questions and sometimes deliberately provoking them. Gellius plainly admired him, but the relationship was not presented as one in which a pupil simply accepted whatever his teacher said.

In Book XVIII, for example, Favorinus wants evidence for several Latin usages. Gellius later searches Cicero and older writers, finds examples and brings them back to him. The man Gellius had once followed through Rome could himself ask his former pupil for textual evidence.

Favorinus also demonstrates that Gellius's interest in old language did not amount to indiscriminate archaism. In one chapter, Favorinus rebukes a young man who fills his ordinary speech with obsolete words. Curius, Fabricius and Coruncanius, he argues, used the language of their own age and spoke so that people understood them. The young man, by contrast, spoke as though he were addressing people from a distant past.

The longer conversations in the Attic Nights should not automatically be treated as verbatim transcripts. Gellius shaped his material in writing, and elsewhere he openly admits when he is reconstructing an argument from memory. Yet the repeated settings around teachers, meals, visits and gatherings form a consistent part of the world he chose to preserve.

The Saturnalia Gellius spent with fellow Roman students at Athens gives one of the liveliest examples. They gathered for dinner and posed questions to one another, deliberately avoiding matters that were excessively obscure or difficult. The number of questions matched the number of diners, and the order of answering was decided by lot.

There were prizes too: a book by an old Greek or Latin writer and a laurel crown. If nobody could solve a question, the crown was dedicated to the god whose festival they were celebrating. The questions could concern an obscure passage in an old poet, ancient history, philosophy, a sophistical puzzle, an unusual word or a difficult grammatical form, bringing books, conversation, competition and entertainment together at the same table.

From a Starry Voyage to a Storm at Sea

Some of Gellius's investigations begin far away from a desk or library. During a voyage from Aegina to Piraeus, he describes Greek and Roman students sitting together at the stern of a ship on a clear summer night and looking at the stars. The Greek members of the company begin discussing the Greek names of constellations, and Gellius turns to his Roman companions with a question about the Latin Septentriones.

Another voyage produces a very different problem. Sailing toward Brundisium, Gellius is caught in a violent storm. Among the passengers is a Stoic philosopher, and Gellius notices that the man becomes visibly frightened. Once the immediate danger has passed, he wants to understand how such fear fits with Stoic teaching.

He later consults a book containing teachings of Epictetus and finds a distinction between the involuntary first reactions caused by frightening impressions and the judgment that follows them. The philosopher's fear during the storm becomes the starting point for the discussion that opens Book XIX.

A practical visit to Cornelius Fronto leads somewhere equally unexpected. Gellius finds Fronto suffering badly from gout while builders show him plans for new baths. Fronto chooses a design and asks what completing it will cost. The architect estimates about 300,000 sesterces, and one of Fronto's friends adds that another 50,000 will probably be needed, praeterpropter — approximately, or “more or less.”

Fronto interrupts the discussion and asks what praeterpropter actually means. A copy of Ennius's Iphigenia is brought in, a passage containing the word is read, and the rest of Gellius's attention turns to language. The bathhouse plans become the setting for a grammatical discussion.

Questions could also follow him while he exercised. Gellius says that when he had leisure from legal business and went walking or riding for exercise, he sometimes occupied himself with linguistic problems. During an evening walk at Praeneste, for example, he found himself considering the different senses and uses of the preposition pro.

Even a legal or public question could send him toward a shelf. In one case, after hearing jurists debate a problem, Gellius went looking for the relevant work of Varro in a library. Elsewhere, a reference in a Greek history to white hellebore prompted him to find out what the substance actually was. The sequence changes from chapter to chapter, but hearing, reading or observing something could all provide the beginning of another inquiry.

In Bookshops, Libraries and Arguments Over Old Authorities

Gellius also describes setting out deliberately in search of books. When he wanted to learn the terminology of dialectic, he sought a work by Lucius Aelius in the library of the Temple of Peace. He found and read it, but decided that it had not been written clearly enough to teach someone approaching the subject. He therefore returned to Greek books.

The value of a book depended on what Gellius could actually obtain from it. Age and reputation alone did not end the search. Bookshops appear repeatedly in his recollections. In the Sandalarius district at Rome, Gellius describes being among the booksellers when Sulpicius Apollinaris encounters a man who boasts that he understands Sallust thoroughly. Apollinaris puts his expertise to the test with a question about Sallust's language, and the man's claim quickly collapses.

Gellius himself once encountered a very different collection of books for sale at Brundisium. The Greek volumes were old, dirty in appearance and filled with extraordinary stories and marvels. Their unexpectedly low price tempted him, and he bought a large number for very little money. During the following two nights, he says, he hurried through them, selecting and noting some of the remarkable things he found.

That scene comes particularly close to the procedure described in the Preface: Gellius encounters books, reads through them, selects material and transfers parts of it into notes that can later enter his own work.

His reaction to such collections, however, is more complicated than simple enthusiasm for marvels. Elsewhere, in Book XIV, a friend presents him with a large miscellaneous volume produced from wide and obscure reading. Gellius initially approaches it eagerly, only to find it full of the sorts of marvels and peculiarities he regards as useless. He returns the book.

Books could also be brought directly into an argument. In Book XIX, a question arises in Fronto's company about whether the Latin word harena could properly be used in the plural. Caesar's De Analogia is requested, brought out and read, and Gellius says that he committed some of Caesar's words to memory.

At other times, comparison changes his opinion of a text. In Book II, he considers a Latin comedy passage that seems elegant enough on its own. When he compares it directly with the Greek original from Menander, his judgment changes: what had seemed successful in isolation now appears much weaker beside its source.

Translation gave him another way to compare languages. While Plato's Symposium was being read with Taurus, Gellius tried to render part of it into Latin. His account focuses on the difficulty of carrying the character and expression of the Greek into another language rather than simply replacing one set of words with another.

The same willingness to test what he read appears in his treatment of prestigious authorities. Tiro, Cicero's freedman and literary assistant, had an obvious closeness to Cicero's writings, and Gellius uses material associated with him repeatedly. Yet that connection does not place Tiro beyond criticism.

In Book VI, Gellius examines Tiro's attack on Cato's speech for the Rhodians. Tiro criticizes Cato's rhetorical strategy, but Gellius returns to the speech itself and to the circumstances in which it was delivered. His answer is that Tiro has not sufficiently understood what kind of speech Cato was giving or the situation in which he gave it.

Gellius does not simply ask readers to accept his correction. At the end of the chapter, he tells them to take up Cato's complete speech and seek out Tiro's letter so that they can judge his response for themselves.

The same instinct appears in his interest in manuscripts with prestigious pedigrees. He mentions copies believed to have been corrected by famous ancient scholars or associated with people particularly close to an author. A text of Cicero connected with Tiro could therefore carry special weight, as could manuscripts with an old reputation for accuracy.

Such pedigree was not necessarily identical with the best reading. Gellius sometimes evaluates competing forms himself, using language, context and comparison as well as the history attached to a copy.

His treatment of the length of pregnancy shows the same habit working across several types of evidence. Gellius brings together physicians, philosophers, poets and Roman legal material. He records a case in which a woman gave birth in the eleventh month after her husband's death and was accused of having conceived after his death. Hadrian decided that birth in the eleventh month was possible after consulting the views of ancient philosophers and physicians.

Gellius continues comparing claims rather than allowing one authority to close the discussion. A commentator could be checked against the text he was explaining, one writer against another, and legal experience against medical or philosophical opinion. Authority gave him a reason to pay attention, but not always a reason to stop asking questions.

The Art of Remembering What He Had Read

Memory runs through the Attic Nights, not only because Gellius made notes to recover material later but because he describes deliberately training himself to remember what he had read.

In Book XVII, after reading the first book of the historian Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius, Gellius says he tried to recall afterward the things that seemed worthy of attention, whether because they deserved praise, criticism or simply notice. He regarded this kind of recollection as a way of exercising memory and storing useful expressions and ideas for later use.

A similar process follows a literary dinner in Book XIX. Gellius and Julius Celsinus had eaten with Julius Paulus and heard the Alcestis of Laevius read at the table. While walking back toward Rome near sunset, they went over unusual words and expressions from the poem and committed noteworthy language to memory.

Reading therefore did not necessarily finish when the text was put down. Gellius and his companion continued discussing what they had heard, recalling particular expressions and deciding what deserved to be retained.

Another chapter gives a particularly clear reason for making notes. Gellius had heard a sophist publicly make serious chronological mistakes, placing famous men in periods where they could not belong. He wanted to avoid making comparable errors himself.

He explains:

“I wished to have a kind of survey of ancient times, and also of the famous men who were born in those days, lest I might in conversation chance to make some careless remark about the date and life of celebrated men, as that ignorant sophist did who lately, in a public lecture, said that Carneades the philosopher was presented with a sum of money by king Alexander, son of Philip, and that Panaetius the Stoic was intimate with the elder Africanus.”

Gellius says that he consequently made notes from chronological books about the periods in which prominent Greeks and Romans had lived. The notes had been gathered at different times and in different places, and he later assembled them into the chronological survey preserved in Book XVII.

There is another revealing example in a holiday scene at Rome. With public business in the Forum suspended, Gellius and companions read Ennius's Annals. A word used by Ennius — proletarius — leads to a question about its old legal meaning. Members of the group consult someone knowledgeable in the law, and eventually the inquiry reaches the jurist Julius Paulus.

Reading Ennius therefore becomes a legal investigation because one word in the text demands explanation. The Attic Nights repeatedly preserves this movement from encounter to recollection, from recollection to question and from question to further reading or conversation.

Curiosity Had Its Limits

Gellius did not believe that every curiosity deserved preservation. His Preface attacks miscellaneous writers who accumulated enormous quantities of material without discrimination. He complains that readers can become exhausted before finding even a small number of things that are pleasant to read or useful to remember.

The enormous miscellaneous volume given to him by a friend in Book XIV becomes a practical example. It contains material gathered from wide and obscure reading, and Gellius initially approaches it eagerly. What he finds, however, consists largely of marvels and peculiarities that fail his own test of usefulness, and he returns the volume to its owner.

His experience with the cheap Greek books at Brundisium is more complicated. He is attracted to their strange stories and extracts some of them, but the chapter also allows those marvels to be examined rather than simply presented as unquestioned truth.

He occasionally went further and tested a written statement himself. In Book IX, after encountering the commonly written and believed claim that olive leaves turn over at the summer and winter solstices, Gellius says that he tried the claim himself more than once and found it almost exactly true.

His Preface asks readers to behave critically as well. If they encounter something new, they should not reject it merely because it is unfamiliar. If something seems wrong, they should consider both Gellius and the authority from whom he obtained it. If a subject is insufficiently explained, they should investigate further.

Gellius was capable of error, and his work gives ample material for disagreement. He could accept dubious traditions and make mistakes of his own. Yet the habits he repeatedly describes involve questioning, comparing and returning to evidence rather than merely accumulating names and facts.

His purpose was broader than collecting curiosities. In the Preface, he presents his selections as recreation and as material capable of stimulating further learning. He wanted readers who were busy with other responsibilities to encounter words and subjects that might otherwise escape them, while those with greater appetite could go on to fuller books and teachers. An obscure word could delight him and an unfamiliar claim could send him searching, while an entire book of marvels could still leave him unimpressed.

A Life Hidden Inside Hundreds of Questions

Gellius held judicial responsibilities, which he mentions when describing the time available for study. In Book XIV he recalls a difficult private case that he himself had to judge. The legal rule did not resolve his problem, and philosophical advice did not give him an answer he could confidently apply. In the end, he declared non liquet — that the matter was not clear.

He also had children. The damaged beginning of the Preface refers to providing recreation for them when they had respite from their own affairs, and later Gellius mentions both the management of his estate and his children's education among the responsibilities that limited the time available for continuing his collections.

He says that he intended to continue gathering such material for as long as life and leisure allowed. The work reached twenty books. Book VIII was subsequently lost, although its chapter headings were preserved separately, and the end of Book XX is also damaged.

Much of Gellius's private life cannot be recovered in comparable detail. What the Attic Nights provides instead is a remarkably detailed record of the subjects and situations to which he repeatedly chose to return.

It preserves the doctor who said “vein,” the Stoic philosopher who turned pale in a storm, the supposed Sallust expert who could not answer a question, Favorinus talking while Gellius followed him through Rome, students competing for books during Saturnalia, old Greek volumes bought cheaply at Brundisium, Fronto abandoning a discussion of his bathhouse because somebody had casually said “more or less,” and a public speaker whose chronological mistakes sent Gellius back to his books.

It also preserves Gellius translating Plato, comparing Latin literature with Greek originals, exercising his memory after reading, writing down arguments after hearing them, searching libraries, browsing among booksellers, consulting jurists, questioning commentators, examining manuscript pedigrees and returning to older texts when an authority's explanation did not satisfy him.

The subjects constantly change, but the habits behind them recur throughout the work. Something catches his attention; he reads, listens, remembers, asks, compares or checks; one answer can produce another question; and what he considers worth keeping finds its way into his notes. From those notes came the Attic Nights.