Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and his Achievement

460 Pages·2003·9.387 MB·English

by  Leofranc Holford-Strevens

AULUS GELLIUS

Aulus Gellius
An Antonine Scholar
and his Achievement
LEOFRANC HOLFORD-STREVENS
Revised edition
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First published as Au/us Gellius
in Great Britain
by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.,
London, 1988,
ISBN 0-7156-1971-3
in the USA by
The University of North Carolina Press,
Chapel Hill, 1989,
ISBN 0-8078-1818-6
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AVLI GELLI
Si tibi post cineres uitalia saecula curae,
Aule, nee omnino mens requiescit iners,
hoe faueas, oro, munus quodcumque ferenti,
noscere qui studui scriptaque teque simul.
iam facies Vrbis, mores, res publica, lingua
non tua, iam didicit spernere Roma deos;
sed cum perpetuis Caesar quoque cesserit umbris,
nondum nox Noctes obruit ilia tuas.
quod legeris gratum est; quod amaris num tibi mirum,
quo nil commodius candidiusque nihil?
crede mihi, tua te pietas, doctrina, lepores,
ipsaque, mi Gelli, Musa perire uetat.
Explicit aulus ge1lius noctium atticarum uir summe bonus in gestis
iocis fabulis recensendis, disceptationibus poetarum et oratorum
confabulationibus facetus, in verborum atque uocabulorum elegan
tia non imus quarum rerum peritissimus atque clarissimus habetur._
(Ludovicus, copyist of Munich, BSB Clm 23715, s. xv; fo. 167v)
Cum sim chara mei domini et dilecta supe1lex,
Alterius nunquam, ni moriatur, ero.
('loachimus Hymonius possessor libri', on title-page of Venice,
1496 edition of Gellius in Bodleian Library, Oxford, Auct. N
4.6)
. . . Gellius a suis commentariis, quibus nihil fieri potest neque
tersius, neque eruditius ...
(Erasmus, Adagia, chi!. 1, cent. 4, adag. 37)
.. (Gellius) uir bonus fuit ac doctus ...
(]. C. Scaliger, Oratio [sc. I] pro M. T,dlio Cicerone contra Des.
Erasmum Rotterodamum (Paris, 153 1), sig. Ez')
Attica nox haec est nulli cessura diei,
quad dedit egregiae Gellius artis opus.
Sermonis Veneres hie sunt, omnesque latinae
deliciae, uulgo non patet ista penus.
(Nicolaus Borbonius, 'In Fronte Gelliani codicis, Extempore',
Nugae (Paris, 1533), sig, e1'; cf. rev. edn. (Lyon, 1538), r. 196,
p. 70. See too prefatory epigram in Brescia, 1485 edn., vv. r-4,
repeated by Hartmann Schedel, Liber crorzicarum (Nuremberg,
r493), fo. 114': 'Si quern Cecropia clarum Latiaque camoena I
esse iuuat, Gelli scripta probanda legat. I Attica nox luci num
quam cessura diumae I ad uarias artes quam bene monstrat
iter.')
In Gellij illustrissimo opere, nihil a:que desidero, ac plures paginas.
Utinam vigecuplo majores essent ha: Noctes, qme dies nostros tarn
concinne illustrant!
(MS note by Jo. Leonhard Schoerly MD, c. 1696, in copy of Jo.
Soter's rst edn. (Cologne, 1526), Biblioteca Apostolica Vati
cana, Raccolta Generale, Class. V. 985 int. r, sig. [d4r)
Preface to the Revised Edition
Neque enim quisquam nisi imprudens, ideo quia mea errata
reprehendo, me reprehendere audebit. (AUGUSTINE)
The present book is a revision of my original monograph, prepared
for a different publisher without constraints of original pagination
or standing type. In appending a subtitle to the plain Aulus Gellius
preferred by the first publisher I sought to abolish the misunder
standing apparently created in some quarters by a superscription
consisting of the subject's name alone; nothing was further from
my mind than to challenge Sir Ronald Syme's Tacitus, or indeed
(as more within mortal scope) his Sallust. My subject was and is
Gellius and his work, not the social or intellectual history of his
lifetime; concentration on an author, rather than an age, was no less
legitimate for me than for Barry Baldwin or Maria Luisa Astarita.
The still-lamented author of Intellectual Life in the Late Roman
Republic also wrote a book entitled Cicero: A Portrait; she did not
hybridize the two as Cicero and his Age. Had I wished to broach
the broader topic, my title should have been Social and Intellec
tual Life in the Age of Hadrian and the Antonines; alternatively,
had I wished to illustrate a society from an individual history, I
would have chosen Aristeides or Galen, defying the perfectionist
who should rebuke me for not awaiting full critical editions. I call
Gellius an Antonine scholar because he practised his scholarship
under Antoninus Pius and his successors, notwithstanding that in
certain respects his heart beat closer to Hadrian; I do not endorse
the fashion for calling Hadrian an Antonine avant la lettre, at best
a reverse parallel to the English habit of assigning the masterpieces
of the Jacobean stage to Elizabethan literature.
Reviewers, if they are not as indolent as Tennyson supposed
them, may care to seek out the changes for themselves; readers
may wish to know that, apart from correcting the usual slips and
infelicities, I have updated my references, reordered material as I
saw fit, substituted my present for my former opinions, and added
Preface to the Revised Edition
V111
such new matter as was required by subsequent scholarship, by my
own reconsiderations, or by the observation that passages I had
not thought to need comment had in fact been mistranslated or
misexplained. An egregious example, consisting in mental bowd
lerization, is noted in the section on Gellius' view of women that
I incorporated along with other treatments of his values and opin
ions in the expanded Chapter 16. In a new appendix I revisit the
stylistic tendencies, Greek and Latin, of the second century AD;
I have also included an account of Gellius' transmission, made a
separate index verborum, and .included the index loco rum potiorum
whose want in the first edition had been felt by other scholars and
myself. Nothing has been excised unless I deemed it erroneous or
superseded.
Freedom of adaptation was particularly valuable in the case of
Fronto, my citations of whom, from van den Hout's text of 1954,
had been overtaken a few weeks before publication by the same
scholar's second edition, rendering obsolete many of my references
and altering a few texts, notably the letter in which the depressed
consular displays his annoyance with Gellius. A few years later,
Werner Eck discovered that scholars had concurred in the wrong
answer to Ausonius' quaestio, under what consuls Fronto was con
sul. Favorinus now has twelve more months in which to take Gellius
with him on a visit to the aged consular; it is by mere good luck
that nothing in my chronology of Gellius' youth is thereby falsified,
but the symbolism, so apt as it seemed for a Hellenizing age, that
Fronto should be suffect in Herodes' year, briefly alluded to (being
a cliche) in my first editi,en, must now give way to a subtler con
ception perhaps more appropriate to the reign of Pius: the Latin
orator, who is the older man and holds a place at court, precedes the
Greek orator in the consulate, but without the glory of opening the
year, to which Herodes' flamboyance was no doubt more suited.
If in the late nineteenth century Gellian studies were beset by the
self-contented scepticism that supposed all settings to be fictitious
and all learning second-hand, in the late twentieth the danger came
from the ingenuous naivete that believed the encounters to have
taken place and the books to have been in the author's library.
Perhaps this was an attempt at rehabilitation, for so great, it seems,
is scholars' discomfort in the presence of art that those who took
Gellius' dialogues for pure fiction held him in lower esteem than
those who made him a mere reporter. I remain close to the sceptics
Preface to the Revised Edition
IX
in the matter of mise en scene, somewhat less so in that of his reading,
but a whole heaven distant in my evaluation of his merits.
From time ~o time, I shall be found not to have eschewed specula
tion, which is no offence until it shall have been demonstrated that
had its conclusion been the case, testimony of some nature ought to
have survived; only then is the want of evidence for a proposition
evidence against it. Scholarly caution, all too often a euphemism
for indecisive dithering, or else a paradoxical excuse for fantastic
hypotheses worthy of the barrister defending a hopeless case, is no
true name for the parti pris that what cannot be proved must be
false, nor for a refusal to infer what is not explicitly attested; one
may reasonably decline to leap a mountain chasm without fearing
to cross a road. On the one hand, when even in the surviving books
much of what passes for source-criticism is mere waste paper, I
have no interest, unlike Hosius, in applying those hit-one-miss
a-hundred procedures to the lost book 8. On the other hand, in
that same book, though well aware that were it to be discovered in
a palimpsest I might be proved wrong, I am not afraid to argue
(as I did in my first edition) from one of the surviving chapter
summaries that Gellius came from a Roman colony in Africa; to
suggest (then in a footnote, now in the text) on the basis of an
other that he was initiated at Eleusis; and (now for the first time)
that the passage of Cicero promised in a third was the same that
alone in his extant works contains the words quoted, amor amici
tiae, even though it might have seemed a quicksand for one who
spoke so often and so lovingly of Favorinus. This has led me to con
sider more closely the context in which his affection was expressed,
namely the philosopher's reputation for sexual malpractice, which
extends beyond the malice of Antonius Polemo; and that in turn, to
consider Gellius' own view of such matters, at the risk of correction
by those with a more expert understanding.
Having far more to say than could be accommodated by any pub
lisher if I stopped to cite at length every passage that I discussed,
I wrote, and still write, as if the reader had a copy of Gellius to
hand. Such copies are easy to procure, nor do reviewers appear to
have objected; if apology for the plan may yet seem due, it is freely
offered. By contrast, I do not apologize in the least for requiring
comprehension not only of Latin and Greek (for so does much
that he wrote), but of modern European languages, scorning the
practice of many Anglophone, and indeed Francophone, authors of
Preface to the Revised Edition
X
citing only their own tonguefellows: not only has no one language a
monopoly on truth or utility in its writings, but if a classical scholar
were commanded by some tyrant to read scholarly literature in one
modern language only, but permitted to choose the language, the
best choice might still not be English.
I should have been not only arrogant but an ass to suppose that, in
default of new factual information, I had said the last word on Gel..:
lius. I was well aware of various one-sidednesses in my approach,
in particular that in studying the chapters on his contemporaries as
represented in the Nights, I was, perhaps paradoxically, relating his
depictions rather to other historical evidence than to the methods
and interests that they revealed. This deficiency I attempted to
make good in 'Aulus Gellius: The Non-Visual Portraitist', first
presented at a seminar in 1991; another seminar in the same year
had given me the opportunity of revisiting Favorinus from both
the historical and the philosophical standpoints, resulting in 'Fa
vorinus: The Man of Paradoxes'. Other topics will be addressed in
a collection of essays, Aulus Gellius and his Worlds, jointly edited
with Amiel D. Vardi.
Dr Vardi is amongst the scholars who have contributed the most
to Gellian studies since my first edition; others, in the order of the
alphabet, are Stephen Beall, Giorgio Bernardi Perini, and Franco
Cavazza. The last-named has, for books 4-13, supplied the want of a
full-scale modern commentary; rather than constantly note specific
points of agreement and dissent, I invite the reader to compare what
is said in that commentary, as in others, with my own comments
below, and likewise to co,tnpare the three contributions on Gellius
in vol. II 34.2 of ANRW. Neither in fact nor by right is Gellius my
property, to be written about only by myself and those to whom I
might give licence.
I have not conducted a rigorous analysis of structure: although
there is sometimes a connection of themes between neighbouring
chapters of the Nights, and the repetition of facts and phrases may
be seen as deliberate linking rather than careless editing, a literary
appreciation, either of the individual books as books (such as we
take for granted in the study of Augustan poets, and have seen
undertaken for Cicero's letters), or of the books as components of
the whole, remains as far off as a predictive account of internal
responsion in a Pindaric ode.
Despite examining various recentiores, I have not the basis for