Aulus Gellius

Aulus Gellius was a scholar of the 2nd century ce who lived in Rome apart from a visit to Greece, the author of a miscellany in twenty books and some four hundred chapters that he called Noctes Atticae, in English Attic Nights, in memory of beginning work on it during winter’s nights in Athens. The subjects covered include history, law, geography, philosophy, but above all grammar in its broad ancient sense of linguistic and literary studies; a persistent theme is the relation between Greek and Roman culture. At the time, the literature and the language of pre-Augustan and particularly pre-Ciceronian writers were much in vogue; Gellius abounds in quotations from early texts not otherwise preserved, but at the same time gives a vivid picture of intellectual life among a bookish elite and displays an engaging authorial personality. The work is written not in the functional prose of technical authors but in accordance with the literary fashion of the age, with archaic words and constructions alongside neologisms.