Aulus Gellius

Aulus Gellius was a Roman lawyer and writer who lived in the late second century AD. His own work is modest in scope, but it is one of the most valuable sources for the culture of the early Empire, since it preserves fragments of authors and texts that would otherwise have been lost. Medieval manuscripts give his name as "Agellius", although "Aulus Gellius" is the form that became standard.

He was probably born in Rome around 125 to 128, according to clues in his own writings. He came from a well-connected family and received a thorough education. He studied rhetoric with Titus Castricius and Sulpicius Apollinaris, philosophy with Calvisius Taurus and Peregrinus Proteus, and he also enjoyed the friendship and teaching of Favorinus, Herodes Atticus and Fronto. He attended the Pythian Games in 147 and spent a considerable time in Athens. Back in Rome he held a judicial post, acting as an arbiter in civil cases at the praetor's request, so much of the time he would have preferred to give to literature went to legal duties.

His only known work, the Attic Nights, takes its title from the long winter nights he spent in Attica, where he began it; he finished it in Rome. It grew out of a commonplace book in which he noted anything unusual he heard or read. As a result it has no strict order and mixes notes on grammar, geometry, philosophy, history and much else, arranged in twenty books. The eighth book is lost, surviving only in its index. Its value lies largely in the quotations from ancient authors whose works are now gone, and in the record it keeps of archaic documents such as the Law of the Twelve Tables. Gellius was a curious collector rather than a systematic thinker, and philosophy appears in his pages as one subject of learning among others.

The book was widely read in antiquity. Apuleius, Lactantius and Augustine drew on it, and Macrobius used it heavily in his Saturnalia. In the Renaissance, the jurist Alessandro Alessandri imitated its miscellaneous format in his Genialium dierum, a sign of how far Gellius shaped later European scholarship.