Gellius

Aulus Gellius was born around 125 AD, probably in Rome. He studied rhetoric and philosophy in Rome and Athens, practised law, and served as a judge. His single surviving work, the Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights), written in twenty books (one is almost entirely lost), takes its name from the long winter evenings in an Attic villa where he began composing it.

The Attic Nights is a miscellany — a collection of notes, anecdotes, discussions, and excerpts on grammar, etymology, law, philosophy, history, and natural science. The topics range from the meaning of obscure Latin words to the dietary habits of the Pythagoreans to the proper way to address a magistrate. Gellius writes with warmth and personality: his teachers, friends, and dinner-table conversations come alive, and his intellectual curiosity is infectious.

The work is invaluable for its quotations from lost authors — Gellius preserves fragments of early Latin writers (Ennius, Cato, the Twelve Tables) and Greek philosophers that survive nowhere else. His discussions of Latin grammar and usage are fundamental sources for the history of the Latin language. And unlike many ancient miscellanists, Gellius is genuinely good company.