BMCR 2009.05.13: Holford-Strevens on Keulen, Gellius the Satirist: Roman Cultural Authority in Attic Nights. Mnemosyne Supplements 297

Wytse Keulen, Gellius the Satirist: Roman Cultural Authority in Attic
Nights. Mnemosyne Supplements 297.  Leiden/Boston:  Brill, 2009.  Pp.
365.  ISBN 978-90-04-16986-9.  EUR 121.00, $179.00.

Reviewed by Leofranc Holford-Strevens ([email protected])
Word count:  5080 words
-------------------------------
To read a print-formatted version of this review, see
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2009/2009-05-13.html
To comment on this review, see
http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/05/20090513.html
-------------------------------

In this learned and ingenious but problematic book Keulen argues that
in the Attic Nights, hitherto considered purely as a learned miscellany
enlivened with vignettes of Antonine life, Aulus Gellius deploys his
considerable powers of irony and satire to the deflation of all
cultural authorities except himself, whom he commends to the emperor as
a humble but invaluable adviser. It will be no surprise to the author
that, as I told him while he was still writing, I cannot concur with
his conclusions; but it is hard to do him justice even in a long
review, since his principle of piecing together numerous passages from
both Gellius and other authors in order to tease out an unexpected
hidden meaning makes his arguments hard to summarize for readers'
judgement. I can but recommend that they study the book itself in the
light of what Gellius and his public might be expected to have known.
The public is important, since Gellius is not envisaged as rejoicing in
sinu at a private joke.

In his introduction, Keulen asserts (p. 3) that 'the ideological and
cultural framework for Gellius' discourse of praise and blame'
represents a thoroughly Roman, not Hellenic or philhellenic, outlook.
This, though easy to support with quotations, remains hard to square
with several chapters in which Roman poets are found falling short of
their Greek models; Keulen relegates them to a footnote (p. 6 n. 18) as
not contradicting but validating Roman cultural authority, rather, I
suppose, as a proconsul might validate Roman rule by occasionally
deciding a case for the provincial against the publicanus. There is
something a little glib in this. In war and government Romans were
assured of their superiority, in certain artistic and intellectual
disciplines they did not try to compete; but in literature they did.
For a time after Augustus, they were sufficiently confident that the
task of emulation had been achieved for writers to make their Latin
predecessors, rather than the Greeks, the starting-point for their own
work; but by Gellius' day the reaction against post-Vergilian
literature had considerably depleted the stock of acceptable Latin
writing. In those circumstances the effortless assurance presupposed by
this validation of authority seems less plausible; rather, Gellius
stands here at the positive end of the perpetual Roman ambivalence
towards Greek culture (p. 7). But that he should participate in that
ambivalence is of no interest; what counts is how this ambivalence is
configured in him, as against (say) Fronto, Apuleius, Pius, Marcus, or
even Hadrian.

Noting the ability of Latin-speaking intellectuals to secure imperial
benefactions for their prote/ge/s and cities (he might have added
themselves), Keulen argues that Gellius presents 'the key to success'
as being the knowledge of Republican Latin texts (p. 8). But what
success had Gellius achieved, or indeed sought? He was comfortably off
from the outset, but not seriously rich; he associated in student days
with famous men, but none of them brought him advancement; in his world
a proconsul of Crete and Cyrene (2. 2) was a great man and not a
failure. He was put on the album iudicum, a function of his wealth, but
undertook no other munus that he speaks of. For all that he upholds the
active life against the pursuit of book learning, his own example tells
the other way: to be sure he deploys Republican texts for the benefit
of urban landlords (15. 1. 3-4) and takes it for granted that ethics
are ethics but business is business (12. 12. 4), but there is more to
success than fireproofing one's properties and keeping one's cards
close to one's chest. A Gellius who should give lessons on how to rise
in the world would resemble the Phormio whom Hannibal heard lecturing
on the art of war.

According to Keulen (p. 9) '"writing authors" like Fronto and Gellius'
can be seen as 'authoritative and powerful'. For sure Fronto made his
name and fame by his speeches, embarked on a public career, and was
made instructor to the future emperors (though his letters reveal all
too well the limits of his power), but Gellius remained, so far as we
can see by choice, a homo priuatus all his life, who outside his work
appears only in a letter of Fronto's, and that as a nuisance. To say
that we have not 'much information regarding Gellius' actual cursus
honorum and rank' (p. 12) is to veil the truth: given his readiness to
tell us about his judicial functions, he was hardly the man to conceal
a magistracy or other public service--nor to forbear dragging some
antiquarian text into its discharge. Accordingly, it was not Gellius
the man, totally forgotten, but his work that acquired authority,
through the learning and eloquence praised by Augustine (CD 9. 4). In
matters of grammar and rhetoric he speaks with a straightforwardly
self-conferred authority; when he has fault to find, he does not
undermine his victim with subtle hints, as Keulen would have him
undermine his more illustrious contemporaries, but says straight out
that Caesellius Vindex is wrong (6. 2), that Gaius Gracchus does not
rise to the occasion (10. 3), even that his own teacher Sulpicius
Apollinaris does not satisfy (2. 16. 10). I miss such passages in
Keulen's first chapter, 'Gellius the Roman Educationalist', which
otherwise well describes Gellius' self-presentation as an authority on
good Latin.

In ch. 2, 'Memory and Authority', however, Gellius becomes the
subversive satirist, something Fronto is made to suspect when he
complains 'ista mea ab Gellio pessime quaeri' (Ad amic. 1. 19); Keulen
translates 'searched for by Gellius with the most malicious intentions'
(p. 39) without explaining why it should not mean 'in a most improper
way' (by pestering other people for copies rather than asking him
directly) or even 'wanted very badly' (i.e. much). To be sure Gellius
at 19. 8. 17 happens in reading Varro on a word-form that Fronto,
speaking off the cuff, did not think any good author had used; any of
us might be caught that way. In 2. 26 Gellius finds Fronto resting on a
low couch for the sake of his gout; this, we are told, is satirical,
evidently because the similar representation of Milo at Apul. Met. 1.
22. 6 is. But Milo has no existence outside the book in which he is a
figment; Fronto's gout was plain fact, and in Keulen's own word
'notorious' (p. 41) even to those who had not read his correspondence,
since <greek>*Fro/ntwn o( a)rqritiko/s</greek> is sufficient
identification for Artemidorus (Oneirocritica 4. 20). Rather, Gellius
is adding a touch of verisimilitude.

It is certainly true that Gellius manipulates Fronto for his own ends,
bunching three of their five encounters in his penultimate book to make
the connection seem closer than it was. In the last of them, indeed,
Fronto is not at home and not supreme, but it is no dishonour to seek,
and receive, advice from one of Gellius' other heroes, Sulpicius
Apollinaris; to be sure disapproval is expressed of an author
(Laberius) whom Fronto admired, but if we were meant to know that, we
should also know that the purism displayed both here and in 19. 8 was
not Fronto's but Gellius' own, cloaked in a stolen authority. Likewise,
in 13. 29 Gellius makes Fronto, against the evidence of the letters, a
fellow-admirer of Claudius Quadrigarius and a fellow-reader of Varro's
Menippea; in doing so, Keulen supposes that he 'immortalises Fronto as
an arbiter of taste', yet calls his pretensions into doubt for not
relishing those authors. But when readers who knew the truth caught
Gellius wrapping himself in Fronto's authority, whose pretensions would
be called into doubt? The less was known about the real Fronto's
teaching, the safer he was; but in fact it is unlikely that either he
or Romans at large had access to the correspondence from which our
understanding of it is derived. It is therefore methodologically
unsound to compare Gellius' mock-modest representation of his studies
as lucubratiunculae and ineptiae with Fronto's own in letters aimed at
coaxing Marcus into a greater attention to verbal niceties neglected in
the press of business and philosophy. Such self-deprecation could
perfectly well have come to both authors independently, not least from
the same conventional politeness that makes Catullus terms his poems
meas . . . nugas.[[1]] Moreover, if Gellius was indeed, as Keulen
supposes, presenting himself to Marcus as the superior instructor, he
ought not to have misrepresented Fronto to the one man in the world
best able to detect the fraud.

Chapter 3, 'Saturnalian Licence and Socratic Irony', begins by
considering the relation of Gellius the grave auctor with Gellius the
breezy young man, then turns to 18. 4, where the adulescens is
attracted to Sulpicius Apollinaris for his Socratic skill in exposing a
pretentious ignoramus who misunderstands Sallust's use of stolidus and
uanus. However, this chapter too is made into a covert attack on Fronto
because the latter had used the two words in De orationibus. As Keulen
acknowledges (p. 75 n. 25), this requires Gellius to know a work
written for Marcus' eyes only; nor are we told that Fronto had
misinterpreted them as the boastful grammarian had done, only that he
used them self-ironically--as suited an attempt at putting his
sovereign to rights. But they somehow suffice to prove that Fronto is
described as 'a liar, a deceiver, an impostor, a disagreeable fellow, a
rogue, a boor . . .'. Keulen is not running with the ball, but letting
the ball run away with him.

Having made his distinction between the young and the mature Gellius,
Keulen takes it for granted that in 6. 17 Gellius is still the former,
though he does not say so. A grammarian, asked to explain the word
obnoxius, replies scornfully (section 3) that everyone knows it to be
eum cui quid ab eo cui esse obnoxius dicitur incommodari et noceri
potest et qui habeat aliquem noxae, id est culpae suae conscium,
someone who is liable to inconvenience or injury by the person to whom
he is said to be obnoxius and [the change to the subjunctive indicates
that the conjunction is used sensu composito] who has someone aware of
his noxa, i.e. fault; Keulen strangely relates this to the active
sense, equivalent to noxius, first found in Fronto, but surely it means
that the obnoxius is in the power of the person who knows his little
secret. Gellius sets out to demonstrate the inadequacy of this
definition, but reduces it (in section 9) to its last three words,
culpae suae conscium, so that the person is the victim of a guilty
conscience; and Keulen so interprets it at p. 84: 'In the
interpretation of obnoxius as "noxae, id est culpae suae conscium" (6,
17, 2 [recte 3]; 6. 17, 8) we may hear an echo of the Euripidean
<greek>cuneidh=| mhtro\s h)\ patro\s kaka/</greek>' (Hipp. 425)--and
therefore associate obnoxius with the shamefast silence of one who
cannot speak his mind like the man of true uirtus celebrated in the
same chapter by Ennius (Trag. 254-7 Jocelyn, from Phoenix). Then again,
we may not: even if Gellius happened to know the Euripidean
passage,[[2]] so far is he from offering or even accepting this
explanation of the word that he asks the grammaticaster who has
proposed it how it squares with the very words of Ennius that Keulen
takes to confirm it (6. 17. 10). But if aliae res obnoxiosae nocte in
obscura latent (v. 257) has for Gellius nothing to do with the
inhibitions of bad conscience, the entire edifice of speculation
crashes to the ground.

The chapter ends with a discussion of 4. 1, in which Favorinus silences
another grammarian who had been holding forth on the gender and
declension of penus but proves incapable of defining it and does not
even know what definition is; for Keulen he does not emerge as
uncomplicatedly triumphant as we have seen Apollinaris (and Gellius)
do, since he merely supplants one form of pedantry with another--and is
defeated by Gellius himself, who appends juristic accounts of penus
that conflict with the one Favorinus cites from Q. Scaevola. This
assessment is contradicted by Gellius' own express statement in section
19 that Favorinus would draw sermones id genus communes away from
trifles to things more worth learning, after which Gellius' additions
continue the conversation; law occupied a far higher place in Roman
esteem than grammar.[[3]] Furthermore, Favorinus, though well informed
for a man of Greek culture on things Roman, is explicitly presented as
less than omniscient; it is more creditable to him that he knows what
he knows than discreditable that he does not know what he does not.
Neither irony nor subversion is needed to indicate that Gellius knows
more; indeed, the sillier Favorinus (or Fronto) looked, the less glory
Gellius would have in surpassing him.

Favorinus remains the chief subject throughout Part Two, 'Playing with
Reputations: "Rehabilitation" as Political Satire', which is divided
into four chapters, 'Favorinus as a Comic "Authority Figure"',
'Exposing his [= Favorinus'] Own Infamy: Avarice and Unmanliness';
'Demonstration and Refutation: "Investigational Rhetoric"', and
'Favorinus' Controversial Authority'. The persistent theme is that
Gellius at once defends Favorinus against his detractors and warns
against making him a role-model; but who, if not Gellius himself, was
presenting him as such?[[4]] Even on Keulen's own showing, Gellius
builds him up openly and pulls him down stealthily; could he really
count on readers' taking his subtle hints?[[5]]

These hints, moreover, are highly convoluted. Plutarch's slave in 1. 26
was identified by Barigazzi with the Onesimus whom Favorinus, as Galen
tells us, pitted in a dialogue against Epictetus, as if he had been
Plutarch's only intellectual slave. Phaedo of Elis was plausibly taken
by Rosetti for the ultimate source of Socrates' encounter with the
physiognomist Zopyrus, and Polemo less pausibly credited with having
retold the story (which would have undercut the premiss of his highly
boastful work), even though it is never found associated with him
outside the Arabic recasting that substitutes him for Zopyrus and
Hippocrates for Socrates. In 2. 18, on philosophers who were slaves,
Gellius mentions Phaedo as a male prostitute bought and freed at
Socrates' behest for his beauty and his brains; Menippus, imitated by
Varro in satires that Gellius relishes and is alleged to emulate
(though he does not break into verse); three philosophical slaves who
do not come into Keulen's argument; Diogenes the Cynic; and the
unforgotten Epictetus. In 17. 19 Favorinus quotes a Cynic-like
condemnation by Epictetus of wicked philosophers. Out of the cauldron
Keulen pulls a wicked and lustful Favorinus conformable to Polemo's
picture of him, who unlike his paragon Socrates has not overcome his
natural inclinations, and who moreover, when he quotes Euripides on
unbridled tongues, is really being represented as the idle chatterbox
that Galen called him. The head spins.

Nor, I fear, do I find more convincing other attempts at turning
Favorinus' words against himself, of which the most remarkable is
Keulen's assertion that Gellius accuses the philosopher of having a
small penis (pp. 125-6); unless he is confident that this was a matter
of common knowledge, or at least repute, he is putting his author in no
little danger of being presumed to know less innocently than by
observation at the baths. At 3. 19. 5 Favorinus derives the word parcus
'ab eo quod est parum et paruum'; according to Keulen (p. 125), eo is a
euphemism like Catullus' illud, as if id quod est were not Gellius'
constant phrase for citing a word, where Greek would use
<greek>to/</greek> and the Schoolmen ly.[[6]] Parum, of course, is made
to recall parum uir (1. 5. 2), which is polite for pathicus but says
nothing about dimensions. Furthermore, in 4. 1. 19 Favorinus is said to
draw the conversation away a rebus paruis et frigidis; that too (p.
133) is an allusion to mentular deficiency and erotic insensibility.
The latter is indeed a vice in the eyes of the man who used insubidus
as a metaphor for want of sophistication, but predicated of the man who
was reputedly <greek>qermo\s pro\s ta\ e)rwtika/</greek> (and whose
implement, whatever its size, was said to have satisfied a good many
people) it would have to mean that the common belief about him was
entirely wrong, which might therefore be taken as an enhancement of his
authority; whatever Martial might suggest about Roman attitudes, in the
classical Greek culture that Favorinus had made his own, a small penis
was the attribute of gods and decent men (see Aristophanes, Clouds 1014
with Dover's note). If Keulen must find Favorinus' penis in these
passages, he ought to make it barbarously big, so that 4. 1. 19 was a
hint at grander and hotter delights. In that way his Gellius could
undermine whatever authority the Gaulish Hellene may possibly have
possessed, and mine--if only I could accept the hidden meaning, and (as
I have no means of telling) if the suspicions he must have aroused were
justified[[7]]--to be fondly remembering another pleasure of his
master's company.

The fact is that Keulen sees irony and subversion almost everywhere
except where I do, in the Antonine moralism that he takes so seriously.
For all the admiring tributes to Old Cato, Musonius,[[8]] and
Epictetus, I detect hints that at least in the male sphere (he is
thoroughly Catonian in his view of women) Gellius finds the air of
Antonine Rome less congenial than the reign of Hadrian,[[9]] finds the
cult of masculinity (despite certain lip-service) somewhat irksome, and
places limits even on that of antiquity: in 15. 11. 3 the virtuous
ancestors are revealed as boorish philistines; nor is he on the side of
those amongst whom 'poeticae artis honos non erat' (Cato, Carmen de
moribus fr. 2 Cugusi and Sblendorio Cugusi, at 11. 2. 5).

But leave the ancient Romans out of the picture: even timeless Roman
values are not consistently upheld. Demosthenes is allowed to laugh off
his flight from Chaironeia (17. 21. 31) and Cicero his lie about a
property-deal (12. 12). Keulen says nothing of the former passage and
cites the latter only as a parallel to jokes by the less than fully
masculine about their own unmanliness (p. 116 n. 11), in particular
Hortensius' reply, when accused by the younger Torquatus of being as
feminine as the dancing-girl Dionysia, that that was better than being
a charmless boor who speaks beside the point, <greek>a)/mousos
a)nafro/ditos a)prosdio/nusos</greek> (1. 5. 3), where the last word
means both that Torquatus' insult has no bearing on the case in hand
and that, if Hortensius is like Dionysia, he is also like the
effeminate-seeming conqueror Dionysos. Game, set, and match to
Hortensius, and implicitly to Favorinus, whose rivalry with the
ultra-masculine Polemo Keulen and I are agreed in reading into this
chapter. But whereas I see the broader question as being for Gellius
whether we ought really to think the less of a man for allowing, or
grooming himself like one who allowed, another man to penetrate his
mouth and anus, Keulen takes it to be whether Favorinus, 'an effeminate
philosopher with a controversial (sexual) reputation' was 'to be
admired and followed as a model of behaviour in the contemporary arena
of Roman masculine performance' (p. 117); in other words, Keulen sees
Gellius deploying the social norms against Favorinus, I see him as
deploying Favorinus against the social norms. No-one comes off any
worse in the Attic Nights for being called a pathic; and of the two
assertions 'Favorinus was effeminate' and 'Effeminacy is not such a bad
thing', which in Antonine Rome needed to be said obliquely?

Of course, once one is on the prowl for irony and subversion, it
becomes all too easy to find them. In 2. 5 (a chapter Keulen does not
consider), Favorinus says that changing a word in Plato affects the
style, in Lysias the sense; is Gellius subverting the philosopher who
bestows the higher praise on an orator, or that other philosopher whose
language is less precise than an orator's, or both, or neither?
Rhetoric, after all, played a more important part in traditional Roman
culture than philosophy; when in 17. 20 Gellius, having been addressed
by Taurus as <greek>r(htori/ske</greek> and bidden to look past Plato's
words to his thought, is stimulated instead ad elegantiam Graecae
orationis uerbis Latinis adfectandam, is that 'self-irony' (p. 64) or a
proper Roman response? At pr. 13 uirum ciuiliter eruditum, does the
adverb recall Cicero's advice to his son that he should learn the
teachings of the philosophers, but live like a decent citizen,
ciuiliter? Cicero, after all, had become a philosophical author only
when he had no scope for deliberative oratory. But against such an
interpretation stands the fact that Gellius did not plead causes and
relishes Cicero's use of language rather than his courtroom tactics
(AG2 206-8); his are the criteria of a reader, not a practitioner.

After a dizzying interpretation of the encounter between Favorinus and
Domitius Insanus in 18. 7, Keulen seeks to demonstrate that Gellius
found Favorinus inadequate as a model for the active life of a Roman
citizen. In doing so he runs up against 14. 2, in which the young
Gellius, as the judge of an upright citizen's unsupported claim for
repayment from a low-living scoundrel, dissatisfied with the advice of
more experienced persons to dismiss it, asks Favorinus what to do and
is told, on Cato's authority, to decide for the better man, but lacking
the courage to do so declares non liquet; for Keulen the advisers are
the unintellectual persons of pr. 10 and Cato is clearly right, but
Favorinus is still at fault for inculcating in Gellius a sceptical
indecision.[[10]] Since Favorinus did not deny the sceptic's ability to
serve as a judge (Philostratus, VS 491), this seems grossly unfair; if
Gellius failed to do the right thing, it is entirely his own fault, and
he has no business turning his teacher's general disposition against
his specific instruction.

Thus interpreted, rather than as a still-undecided
<greek>a)pori/a</greek>, the story detracts from his authority as a
would-be imperial adviser; yet that is the role for which Keulen casts
him in Part III, 'Gellius' Ideological Authority: The Charisma of
Antiquitas in a Sophistic Context', whose opening chapter is entitled
'The Imperial Context of Gellius' Authority'. We have already had a
glimpse of this context in ch. 2: when in 10. 25 Gellius lists the
names of weapons and of ships that he has found in ancient authors,
Keulen, denying that this is knowledge for its own sake, supposes that
'every single word is defined by a relationship to imperial conquest'
(p. 50), as if the Emperor were reviewing his troops and his fleet. Yet
the obscure words listed must have puzzled even Roman readers and do
not all belong to the sphere of war; nor has imperial conquest reached
the learned digression in section 3, where Naevius is cited for the
sake of a pun.[[11]]

To be sure, Gellius writes competitively against other miscellanists,
but Keulen's hypothesis suffers from the lack of a dedication to the
emperor; he therefore suggests that there may have been one in the lost
beginning of the preface (pp. 197-8). Comparison with Pliny's Natural
History suggests otherwise: a dedication to the emperor is not a
formality to be got out of the way in a perfunctory sentence or two,
but informs one's preface as a whole. Yet without such a dedication,
how should the otherwise preoccupied ruler of the orbis terrarum even
be aware of the work's existence, let alone read it? This implies an
author so conceited as to believe that Fame herself, with no assistance
on his part, would bring notice of his work within the palace walls--in
the company of an expert decoder to unravel his hidden meaning, for
conscientious emperors are busy men, who have no time to puzzle out
hinted messages by combining distant texts.

In the next chapter, 'Gellius' Symbouleutic Authority', Keulen
considers the Ennian model of 12. 4 for humble friends of the great; we
need not disagree that Gellius at some level applied it to himself,
whether as he was or as he wished he were, but that does not of itself
mean he expected Marcus to read it, let alone take the hint. He is also
right about Gellius' taste for harsh punishments (cf. AG2 314-15),
though rather than speculate on knowledge of Xenophon's story about
Cyrus as a judge he might have cited the no less pertinent story of P.
Crassus Mucianus at 1. 13. 9-13; but only an impractical sentimentalist
could have expected Marcus to restore the old ways.

The last two chapters are 'Comparative Judgments in Roman Sites of
Memory' and ditto for Greek; it is argued that Gellius seeks to put his
work on a par with the monuments, but also the monumental writers, he
discusses. We are thus enabled to pass from the inscription in Trajan's
forum to Old Cato, whom Keulen sees as the guiding spirit of the age,
and not merely for Gellius. When Hadrian withdrew from what was left of
Trajan's Eastern conquests, he did so, we are told (HA Hadr. 5. 3),
exemplo ut dicebat Catonis, who had spoken for leaving Macedonia free,
since it could not be held. The comparison was of course completely
spurious: after Pydna Rome had not abandoned Macedonia, but split it
into four pseudo-states that were eventually annexed outright; Hadrian
was cutting his predecessor's losses before hastening back to
consolidate his questionable position in Rome. However, Cato gave him
as much cover as he could hope for, though his reputation still
suffered; even so in 376 did Valens, compelled to let the Goths across
the Danube, set Themistius to justifying his action on high-minded
grounds (the speech was suppressed after Adrianople).[[12]] Keulen,
however, thinks that Hadrian's decision was actually inspired by Cato's
speech (p. 248), and that Fronto championed that orator as a model not
merely in style but in politics. Since Fronto never offers any advice
on a current public question, and in the private matter of Matidia's
estate urges Marcus not to be overscrupulous, some doubt will arise;
and when in the same letter Fronto commends the judgement Pius
extracted from the senate and Cato's indignation at Galba's acquittal
through pity for his nephews, the parallel seen by Keulen (p. 250) is
undercut by the adverb clementer, which was never Cato's way.[[13]] The
speech for the Rhodians is interpreted as a warning to Marcus against
indulging senatorial self-interest, and his criticism of Tiro as an
invitation to put freedmen in their place. By now one is wondering what
could not be represented as advice to the emperor.

The Greek sites of memory are those connected with Herodes Atticus,
whose faults were far graver than the peccadilloes that Keulen finds
mocked in Favorinus; how far Gellius was aware of them remains unclear,
but Marcus certainly was, and stood by him none the less. Naturally
when Gellius allows us to hear his defence against the charge of
excessive mourning, Keulen finds evidence 'that he viewed his identity
in accordance with the satirical image' (p. 271) in the use of dolor
once in the chapter, once in the heading, and once elsewhere in
Herodes' mouth, at 9. 2. 9, where dolori mihi et aegritudini est ('I am
distressed and pained') has no more to do with unmanly lamentation than
Cicero's Dolebam . . . et acerbe ferebam cited at 9. 12. 5--unless
indeed we are to suppose a sly hint at Cicero's own propensity to
immoderate grief, a trick that Keulen misses. He also misses the
trick--despite his notion that Gellius sets one intellectual against
another--of pointing out his praise of Herodes' enemy Peregrinus, whom
Lucian would have classed with the pseudo-philosopher of 9. 2.[[14]] In
that chapter, having refused to accept beard and cloak as signs of a
philosopher[[15]]--inviting the reader to ask, if a beard is not a
sufficient condition for philosophy, why it should be a necessary one
either, whatever Favorinus' enemies might say--Herodes contemptuously
gives him money; Keulen suspects that such indiscriminate generosity
made his bad reputation worse, without explaining why.[[16]] Of course
he is contrasted with Musonius, whom he quotes and who would certainly
not have approved of him; but what a poor figure Musonius cuts, if he
can be so effortlessly appropriated by such a man! But Keulen also sees
in Herodes a Hellenic threat to Gellius' Roman cultural programme,
marked off as non-Roman by his calling the ancient Athenians maiores
mei and merely knowing by hearsay (audio) a parallel Roman tradition
(section 11); what else ought an Athenian to say in Athens? More
interesting is his use of Harmodios and Areistogeiton, who set out to
kill the tyrant Hippias but (as Herodes does not say but Gellius knows)
killed Hipparchos; Keulen notes that Herodes himself had inherited the
name Hipparchos from his grandfather,[[17]] and like him was accused of
acting tyrannically. Is Gellius then undermining him? Marcus, for whom
Keulen supposes him to write, was fully aware of Herodes' local
reputation and had saved him from his enemies at Sirmium despite seeing
a far worse side of him than any that Gellius presents; other readers
may not have known, or at any rate taken it seriously ('any great man
has enemies, and Greeks are always squabbling'). Moreover, if, as
Keulen will have it (p. 305), the reader was meant to recall both that
the tyrannicides acted in response to unwelcome sexual attentions, and
that Herodes had had an erotic relationship (even if 'Socratic') with
Marcus, how was the latter likely to react?

Keulen's conclusion, 'Constructing Cultural and Political Continuity',
summarizes the foregoing arguments, but also argues that Gellius, above
all in 9. 3, is bidding Marcus look to Commodus' education. Marcus did
indeed do so, but to no avail; if Gellius' real aim had been to
'creat[e] conditions for the political continuity between Marcus' and
Commodus' rule', then the Attic Nights are the work of a wasted life.
However, I cannot believe that Gellius wrote for the Emperor's eyes;
and though I find Keulen's reading of his text extremely stimulating as
a personal reaction, as an interpretation of what Gellius put there I
find its creative ingenuity not matched by plausibility. I can do no
other than turn aside out of the way like Balaam's ass, be it because I
am an ass, or have seen the angel of the Lord. Nemo iudex in causa sua.


------------------
Notes:


1.  They are nugae, not because they are light, but because they are
meae; if Nepos had written poems of his own, Catullus would not have
called them tuas . . . nugas however light they were.

2.  Attic drama, as opposed to its Latin imitations, was far from
occupying the place in the Roman culture of his day that it did in
Greek, or has done among classical scholars since the late eighteenth
century; at Holford-Strevens, Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and
his Achievement (Oxford, 2003, corrected pb. 2005), hereafter AG2, 203,
knowing of no ancient commentary on Ennius' plays, I surmise that
Gellius may have had the lines of Euripides' Hecuba translated in Trag.
172-4 Jocelyn from an anthology. Keulen's argument itself implies that
Gellius did not know the original <greek>*Foi=nix</greek>.

3.  Not indeed that Gellius is the man to disparage the latter:
Favorinus may not care about the gender or declension of penus, but his
pupil has already told us anyway, as if by a kind of retrospective
praeteritio.

4.  The disloyal pupils listed at p. 131 n. 46 operated openly. Of
course the pupil may overtly honour and covertly subvert his teacher:
that in the sixteenth century was the way in which the music theorist
Gioseffo Zarlino dealt with Adriaen Willaert. But Willaert was a great
name, and had been a formidable personality; Gellius had no need for
subterfuge in undermining Favorinus, had that been his plan, but why
undermine when he need not mention?

5.  Keulen is by no means the first scholar to take the miscellany
offered Gellius by a friend in 14. 6 for Favorinus' <greek>*Pantodaph\
*(Istori/a</greek>; since he rightly ignores the source-critics'
attempts to link the contents of the friend's miscellany with those of
Gellius' own work, his only evidence, the description doctrinae
omnigenus (not historiae), is no stronger than that for identifying it
with Sotion's <greek>*Ke/ras *)Amalqei/as</greek>, namely Copiae cornum
at section 2; nor could a work in twenty-four book-rolls be described
as librum grandi uolumine, which denotes a single fat one. To be sure,
Favorinus' title is included in the long list of Latin and Greek
miscellanies rehearsed in Gellius' preface; but it would have been a
discourtesy to leave it out when so many were mentioned, not all worthy
of the censure that Gellius bestows on 'most' at section 11.

6.  Also written li; it is the nominative singular masculine of the Old
French definite article.

7.  Certain academics have had reputations, justly or not, for engaging
in sexual relations with students; if, while memories survived, such an
academic were cited by a former pupil of the appropriate gender as a
formative influence and friend, a suspicion would be aroused that not
to dispel would be taken as confirming, and to dispel might still seem
to confirm by overprotesting. This being all the truer of Gellius
writing in Rome about a public figure, I concluded at AG2, 105-7 that
since the Ciceronian dictum on amor amicitiae cited in 8. 6 must have
been Tusc. 4. 70, Gellius was confronting the suspicions (such as not
even Aristotle could escape; see Theocritus of Chios, SH fr. 738
Lloyd-Jones and Parsons) that his association with the notorious
philosopher invited--and in whose light the still-remembered 8. 2 would
symbolically suggest that the roles of penetrator and penetrated had
been shared between them--in order, I suggest, to deny their truth;
whether he was, or ought to have been, believed is beyond conjecture,
but if we were to adopt Keulen's method, we might read rather more into
the interest in words both active and passive displayed in 9. 12 and
12. 9.

8.  In 5. 1 Musonius Rufus condemns the applause that follows
philosophical lectures, but at 9. 8. 3 Favorinus delivers a well-turned
<greek>gnw/mh</greek> inter ingentes clamores; does that as Keulen
supposes (p. 149) detract from Favorinus' authority, or show up
Musonius as the unworldly doctrinaire that Tacitus thought he was
(Hist. 3. 81. 1)? After all, his dictum remittere animum quasi amittere
est (18. 2. 1) was hardly mainstream, even if Gellius assures his
readers, with tongue in cheek one suspects, that he abided by it;
Musonius, like other teachers of morality throughout the ages, is a
statue on a pedestal, to be saluted and passed by.

9.  AG2313-14; Erik Gunderson, Nox Philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the
Fantasy of the Roman Library (Madison, WI, 2009), 84-8.

10.  Keulen here differs from other modern readers, and not only those
from a common-law background, who fault Gellius for not dismissing the
case out of hand; see e.g. Ludovic Legre, Un philosophe provenc,al au
temps des Antonins : Favorin d'Arles, sa vie -- ses oeuvres -- ses
contemporains (Marseille, 1900), 245-6; Constantin St. Tomulescu, 'An
Aristocratic [sic] Roman Interpretation at [sic] Aulus Gellius', Revue
internationale des droits de l'Antiquite/, 17 (1970), 313-17.

11.  At most the framea, first mentioned to our knowledge by Tacitus
(Germania 6. 1) as a German weapon with a German name, and very
unlikely to come from an ancient author, may have been slipped in as a
topical allusion to Marcus' German wars like the Hermunduli, or rather
Hermunduri, of 16. 4. 1; to this extent, the statement on 10. 25 at AG2
19 needs modifying. For the Hermunduri see ibid., n. 18. On framea see
Gustav Must, 'The Origin of framea', Language, 34 (1958), 364-6; but
its first use in the sense of 'sword' is in the translation of Ps. 149:
11 (rendering <greek>r(omfai/a</greek>) used by Augustine at Enarr.
149. 6.

12.  Peter Heather, Goths and Romans 332-489 (Oxford, 1991), 130-4.

13.  Nor does Fronto, an admirer of Cicero's letters, observe Pliny's
law against changing the topic.

14.  Peregrinus is mentioned at p. 270 n. 6, where Lucian suppresses
his criticism of Herodes as too creditable; did Gellius do so for the
opposite reason?

15.   See AG2 141 n. 59. Keulen (p. 289) quotes as a parallel a passage
from Marcus' Meditations that does not exist, citing as source a work
not listed in his bibliography.

16.  Gellius does not say at 13. 17. 1 that it is vulgar, but that most
people misuse humanitas to mean <greek>filanqrwpi/a</greek>; promiscam
need not be pejorative (see pr. 2, 2. 24. 7, 7. 14. 8), but even if it
were (cf. 11. 16. 8) Herodes clearly shows due discrimination in the
manner of his giving.

17.  But it had remained an acceptable name at Athens (it was borne by
a comic poet), perhaps because not till after his murder had Hippias
turned truly oppressive. Keulen also attempts to see in Herodes'
Athenian demotic <greek>*Maraqw/nios</greek> an attempt to associate
himself with Militiades and Kimon; but demotics were hereditary, and
his main estate lay in Marathon.