AULUS GELLIUS Aulus Gellius An Antonine Scholar and his Achievement LEOFRANC HOLFORD-STREVENS Revised edition OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRllSS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 (,DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sao Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford lJniversity Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc. i New York © Leofranc Holford-Strevens 2003 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as Au/us Gellius in Great Britain by Gerald Duckworth & Co. 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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