A Storehouse Kept in Its Original Disorder

Whenever I had taken in hand any Greek or Latin book, or had heard anything worth remembering, I used to jot down whatever took my fancy, of any and every kind, without any definite plan or order; and such notes I would lay away as an aid to my memory, like a kind of literary storehouse [...] And since, as I have said, I began to amuse myself by assembling these notes during the long winter nights which I spent on a country-place in the land of Attica, I have therefore given them the title of Attic Nights. ¹

Most books that survive from the ancient world were meant to be something: a history, a speech, a poem, a treatise. The Attic Nights was meant to be nothing in particular, and its author says so in the first paragraph. That is its difficulty and its charm. A reader who opens it expecting a subject finds twenty books of short chapters on the height of Hercules, the meaning of an old Latin word, a lawsuit, a dinner-party argument, a story about a philosopher's slave, in no order that anyone has ever discovered, because, as he tells us, the order is the one in which the notes had first been gathered. What follows is a way of reading such a book, drawn from the man who made it.

Who Is Writing

Aulus Gellius was born about AD 125, was educated at Rome and then at Athens, where he studied with the philosophers and rhetoricians of the day, and returned to Rome to serve as a judge in private cases. ² The Attic Nights is his one book. It runs to twenty parts, of which the eighth survives only as a list of chapter headings, and it seems to have been published in or after 177, long after the notes had begun to accumulate. ² The winter in Attica was spent, as he says, on a "country-place," which is to say that the book is the product of a well-off young man's leisure, and he never pretends otherwise.

It reached us largely intact apart from the missing book and the opening of the preface, and it reached us because later writers found it useful: Macrobius, two centuries on, quotes it wholesale without saying so, and the Church fathers drew on it. ² Its value to scholars has always been that Gellius copied out passages from authors whose books have since vanished, so that his notebook is now the only place where many fragments of early Latin survive. ² That is a good reason to keep the Nights in print. It is not the reason to read them, which is the preface.

What the Preface Says

He tells the reader three things about the book, and each of them is an instruction.

First, how it was made. The sentence quoted above describes a habit that anyone who keeps a notebook will recognise: a book in hand, or a conversation, and a pen ready for "whatever took my fancy." The gathering was unsystematic, though later in the preface he distinguishes useful, stimulating notes from the mere accumulation of material. The notes were laid away "as an aid to my memory, like a kind of literary storehouse," so that when he needed a fact or a phrase he could find it again. The Latin behind Rolfe's "storehouse" is penus, the pantry where a Roman household kept its provisions; the notebook, on this account, is where a mind keeps what it will need later.

Second, how it was arranged, or rather not arranged. "In the arrangement of my material," he writes, "I have adopted the same haphazard order that I had previously followed in collecting it." ¹ This is the decision that makes the book what it is. He could have sorted the notes by subject, as many ancient compilers did, and as most later commonplace-books were sorted under headings. He chose instead to leave them as they fell, so that the reader meets them as he met them. The result is a book with the texture of a life of reading rather than the shape of an encyclopaedia.

Third, what it was for. Not for scholars, or not chiefly. The notes were gathered, he says, so that "like recreation might be provided for my children, when they should have some respite from business affairs and could unbend and divert their minds." ¹ The children are real; the book was in the first place a family possession, a father's reading passed on. And he is modest about the level: he has offered "the first fruits, so to say, and a kind of foretaste of the liberal arts," not a full education in any of them. ¹ He even describes the title as given "off-hand, without premeditation, and indeed almost in rustic fashion," and admits that his writing falls short of other authors in care and elegance. ¹

The Title, and the Titles He Refused

The middle of the preface is a list, and it is worth pausing over because it shows what Gellius thought he was not doing. Other compilers, he says, gave their miscellanies clever names: "The Muses," "Woods," "Athena's Mantle," "The Horn of Amaltheia," "Honeycomb," "Meads," "Fruits of my Reading," "Torches," "Tapestry," and a score more. ¹ Each of those titles makes a claim. A honeycomb is sweetness gathered from many flowers; a horn of plenty overflows; a tapestry is woven to a design. Gellius declines all of them and names his book after the time and place he wrote it. The refusal is a small act of honesty, and it matches the refusal to sort the notes. The book will not pretend to be a design or a harvest. It is what he wrote down on certain nights in a certain place.

The list has one more use. It tells a modern reader that the Nights belongs to a whole genre of ancient books, nearly all of them lost, and that the genre's conventions were already old enough to be mocked. The notebook that has come down to us was, in its own day, one of many.

A Warning to the Wrong Reader

One passage of the preface is sharper than the rest. There are people, Gellius says, who have never taken pleasure in study and have never occupied themselves with the liberal arts, and "for such men it will be by far the best plan to hold wholly aloof from these 'Nights' and seek for themselves other diversion." ¹ He backs it with lines adapted from Aristophanes' Frogs, in which the chorus of initiates orders "the profane and uninitiate throng, averse to the Muses' play," to stand back from the rites. ¹

The passage surprises, coming after so much modesty. But it is the other half of the same thought. A book made "without any definite plan or order" cannot carry a reader who brings nothing; it has no argument to pull him along. It offers, instead, the pleasure of finding things, and that pleasure requires a reader who already likes finding things. Gellius is not being grand. He is describing the one condition under which a commonplace book can be read at all.

One Chapter, to See the Form

The first chapter of the first book is a fair sample. Its heading, in Rolfe's translation, runs: "Plutarch's account of the method of comparison and the calculations which the philosopher Pythagoras used in determining the great height of Hercules, while the hero was living among men." ³ The chapter then reports that Hercules was said to have paced out the running-track at Olympia at six hundred of his own feet; that other Greek tracks were also six hundred feet long but shorter; and that Pythagoras, comparing the lengths, reasoned that Hercules' foot, and so his body, exceeded ordinary men's in the same proportion as the Olympic course exceeded the others. ³ The last sentence draws the conclusion and stops.

Notice what the chapter does and does not do. It names its source, Plutarch, in a treatise now lost, which is why this page is the only record of that argument. It reports the reasoning without endorsing it. It is short. And it stands next to a chapter about a boastful student put in his place with a quotation from Epictetus, which stands next to something else again. That is the book. Each chapter is one thing "worth remembering," set down whole, with its provenance, and left to keep company with its neighbours by accident.

How to Read It, Then

Do not start at the beginning; there is no beginning, only the first note. Use the chapter headings, which Gellius wrote himself and which are often longer than the chapters, as a way of browsing, the way one runs a finger down the spines of a shelf. When a chapter names a source, understand that the source may exist nowhere else, and that Gellius is not showing off but preserving. Expect the tone to shift from grammar to anecdote to law without apology. And read it, as he asked, in "respite from business affairs," because it was made in such a respite and answers to that state of mind.

There is a plainer reason the preface still speaks to anyone who keeps a notebook. Gellius describes the habit exactly, the pen ready while reading, the note laid away for later, the disorder tolerated because sorting would be work; and then he does the thing most such people never do, which is to let the notebook stand as a book. He does not tidy it. He gives it a plain name. He hands it to his children and to whoever else has the taste for it, and warns off the rest. The notebook that is kept "as an aid to my memory" turns out, eighteen centuries later, to be an aid to everyone's, and the storehouse has outlasted the pantry it was named for.