Aulus Gellius

There are citizens, farmers who've come down from the countryside, foreigners passing through.

A new comedy by Aristophanes is opening, the sharpest comic writer in the city.

It's called The Clouds, and the target of the joke is a real man who lives in Athens, who strolls through the marketplace every day, and whom half the audience knows by sight, Socrates.

The plot is simple.

But now the attack came not with spears, but with laughter.

And it's said that Socrates was in the theater that day.

The writer Aelian records that as the actors repeated his name again and again, some foreigners in the audience began asking who on earth this Socrates was, and that he, to spare them the trouble, rose to his feet and stayed there standing for a good part of the performance so that everyone could compare the original with the caricature without losing his temper, without leaving, letting them laugh.

An ancient work attributed to Plutarch preserves another of his replies.

There are two versions of how he came to be lame.

A Christian writer, Origen, records a story told by a pagan philosopher called Celsus that his master was twisting his leg to hurt him, and that Epictetus, quite unruffled, warned him with a smile that he was going to break it.

And when the leg did break, he said with the same calm, Didn't I tell you? Another ancient source, Simplicius, says simply that he was in poor health and lame from a young age.

We don't know which is true.

In time, he won his freedom and began to teach in Rome.

Until the Emperor Domitian, who mistrusted philosophers and thought them a danger to his power, banished them from the city.

The writer Aulus Gellius mentions Epictetus among those affected, and the old teacher, with no money, no family, and his bad leg, crossed the sea and settled in Nicopolis, a city on the western coast of Greece that Augustus had founded to celebrate his victory at Actium.

There he lived on, next to nothing.

So it's based on the story of the Sibylline books, which were real books that really existed in 510 B.C., And the story of how they came to be sold to the last king of Rome has been written several hundred times.

So it was set down most famously in the year 177 by Aulus Gellius, Roman grammarian, and then by Oregon of Alexandria, and then by Douglas Adams, who did a very great telling.

And the books are real.

And the books were said to be an account of all the mysteries and secrets of the universe.

And she carried nine books, which she said contained all the wisdom and knowledge and all the as yet untold secrets of the world.

And she said she would sell the citizens of the city all nine books for one sack of gold.

Aulus Gellius calls it, what does he say? An immense and exorbitant sum.

So it's already a lot, this sack of gold.

The antiquarians had a more specific ambition, which was to collect a great number of possible explanations with less emphasis on arriving at a truth than on compiling the evidence.

Roman antiquarians, Varro, Aulus Gellius, Macrobius, all worked this way.

The Emperor Claudius wrote antiquarian works and they're lost, which is a small tragedy.

Lost is what happens to most of it.

So I'm thinking there are two that strike me.

One is Aulus Gellius in 26 BC and the failed expedition to Arabia Felix.

where one Silius, who's a Nabataean, finagles himself into the trust of the governor of Egypt in order to lead this expedition, only to take him on an absolutely wild goose chase.

Instead of the most direct route, takes him on this hundreds of miles out the way.

It's there.

To back to the point you're making about, you know, what these passages are telling us, that Aulus Gellius is the one who preserved-

Right

...

I mean, that would make sense of, that Plato's text is circulating earlier, I mean.

That, that would make sense of the Aulus Gellius report that, that Xenophon had responded to and w- developed an opposition to two books that had first reached the public, and that might well be the things that Aristophanes is responding to.

But if Aristophanes is responding to them in 392 BC when the, when he writes and, and when the, in the, when The Assembly Women are pro- as a text is performed, as a comedy is performed, as a play, like that would mean the Republic, that these ideas from the Republic were circulating very, very, very early, that these two books of the Republic were circulating very early.

And again, we don't have any, we don't, we don't have any evidence from the, from Aristophanes' play that the content of book four, which is about the p- the parts of the soul, um, uh, is there.

Again, it would be a hypothetical thing, as I've said many times.

We don't have any direct evidence, but s- but there are these arguments.

There's the Aulu- Aulus Gellius report about Xenophon.

There's the Timaeus for whatever it's worth.

Music of a gentle, monotonous kind has been prescribed in the medical treatment of Romans, Greeks, and even of comparatively modern Europeans.

John Mason Goode, in his translation of Lucretius' De Naturam Rerum, mentions, among others, Galen, Theophrastus, and Aulus Gellius.

An anonymous writer in the press of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, under date of December 23, 1888, takes the ground that its use should be resumed.

The noise made by medicine men around the couch of the sick is no better, no worse, than the clangor of bells in Europe.