Long a source for quotations, fragments, and factoids, the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius offers hundreds of brief but vivid glimpses of Roman intellectual life. In this book Joseph Howley demonstrates how the work may be read as a literary text in its own right, and discusses the rich evidence it provides for the ancient history of reading, thought, and intellectual culture. He argues that Gellius is in close conversation with predecessors both Greek and Latin, such as Plutarch and Pliny the Elder, and also offers new ways of making sense of the text's 'miscellaneous' qualities, like its disorder and its table of contents. Dealing with topics ranging from the framing of literary quotations to the treatment of contemporary celebrities who appear in its pages, this book offers a new way to learn from the Noctes about the world of Roman reading and thought.

Aulus Gellius originated the modern use of 'classical' and 'humanities'. His Attic Nights, so named because they began as the intellectual pastime of winter evenings spent in a villa outside Athens, are a mine of information on many aspects of antiquity and a repository of much early Latin literature which would otherwise be lost; he took a particular interest in questions of grammar and literary style. The whole work is interspersed with interesting personal observations and vignettes of second-century life that throw light on the Antonine world. In this, the most comprehensive study of Gellius in any language, Dr Holford-Strevens examines his life, his circle of acquaintances, his style, his reading, his scholarly interests, and his literary parentage, paying due attention to the text, sense, and content of individual passages, and to the use made of him by later writers in antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and more recent times. It covers many subject areas such as language, literature, history, law, rhetoric, medicine; light is shed on a wide range of problems in Greek as well as Latin authors, either in the main text or in the succinct but wide-ranging footnotes. In this revised edition every statement has been reconsidered and account taken of recent work by the author and by others; an appendix has been added on the relation between the literary trends of Latin (the so-called archaizing movement) and Greek (Atticism) in the second century AD, and more space has been given to Gellius' attitudes towards women, as well as to recurrent themes such as punishment and embassies. The opportunity has been taken to correct or excise errors, but otherwise nothing has been removed unless superseded by more recent publications.

Written by Leofranc Holford-Strevens to accompany his Oxford Classical Texts edition of Aulus Gellius' Noctes Atticae, this volume presents more expansive discussions and explanations of choices of readings at various places in the text than would be possible within the narrow confines of the edition's apparatus criticus (in which all passages discussed in Gelliana are marked with an asterisk). The grounds adduced are generally grammatical in the modern sense of the word, concerning accidence, vocabulary, or syntax, but sometimes invoke palaeography, logic, or other matters of content. Previous scholars, and also translations, are frequently cited in order either to credit the person first on record as having understood the text correctly or to indicate the source of a current misinterpretation. The preliminary matter includes an extensive list, significantly expanded from that drawn up by Martin Hertz, of places where scribes have inadvertently corrupted the text through inappropriate importation of the Christian terms with which they were familiar, while a separate appendix contains corrections to and revisions of passages in the author's previously published monograph Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and his Achievement (OUP 2003, corrected paperback 2005) and article 'Recht as een Palmen-Bohm and other Facets of Gellius' Medieval and Humanistic Reception' in The Worlds of Aulus Gellius (co-edited with Amiel D. Vardi, OUP 2004).

This classroom-tested, accessible text will motivate second-year Latin students to continue their study. Aulus Gellius, a well-educated nobleman, began his observations during the long winter nights spent in Attica. These selections touch on diverse aspects of Roman culture and can be easily understood and translated by intermediate students.

This is the first collection of essays in any language on Aulus Gellius; its contributors, both established and younger scholars, include Gellian experts looking out with specialists in other fields looking in; they combine traditional and new approaches. Subjects range from the bilingual culture in which Gellius wrote, through his stylistic judgements, his skills in etymology and narrative, his relation to the antiquarian tradition, the generic expectations of miscellany, his claim to educate his readers, the theory of 'Gellian humanism', and his attitude towards intellectuals, to his reception in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution.