Noctes Atticae

Gellius, Aulus

Gellius, Aulus. The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius. Rolfe, John C., translator. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press; William Heinemann, 1927 (printing).

On the philosophical question, what would be more proper on receipt of an order-to do scrupulously what was commanded, or sometimes even to disobey, in the hope that it would be more advantageous to the giver of the order; and an exposition of varying views on that subject.

IN interpreting, evaluating and weighing the obligations which the philosophers call kaqh/konta, or

duties,

the question is often asked, when some task has been assigned to you and exactly what was to be done has been defined, whether you ought to do anything contrary to instructions, if by so doing

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it might seem that the outcome would be more successful and more advantageous to the one who imposed the task upon you. It is a difficult question which has been answered both ways by wise men. For several have taken a position on the one side and expressed the decided belief that when a matter has once for all been determined, after due deliberation, by the one whose business and right are concerned, nothing should be done contrary to his order, even if some unlooked for occurrence should promise a better way of accomplishing the end in view; for fear that, if the expectation were not realized, the offender would be liable to blame and inexorable punishment for his insubordination. If, on the other hand, the affair chanced to result more favourably, thanks would indeed be due the gods, but nevertheless a precedent would seem to have been established, which might ruin well-laid plans by weakening the binding force of a command. Others have thought that the disadvantages to be feared, in case the order was not strictly obeyed, should carefully be weighed in advance against the advantage looped for, and if the former were comparatively light and trivial, while on the contrary a greater and more substantial advantage was confidently to be expected, then they judged that one might go counter to instructions, to avoid losing a providential opportunity for successful action; and they did not believe that a precedent for disobedience was to be feared, provided always that considerations of such a kind could be urged. But they thought that particular regard should be paid to the temperament and disposition of the person whose business and command were involved: he must not be stern,

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hard, autocratic and implacable, as in the case of the orders of a Postumius and a Manlius. [*](Titus Manlius Torquatus had his own son executed for disobedience to his father's command; see ix. 13. 29. A similar story is told of Postumius; see xvii. 21. 17; cf. Otto, Sprichw. p. 209.) For if an account must be rendered to such a commander, they recommended that nothing be done contrary to the letter of his order.

I think that this question of obedience to commands of such a nature will be more clearly defined, if I add the example set by Publius Crassus Mucianus, a distinguished and eminent man. This Crassus is said by Sempronius Asellio [*](Fr. 8, Peter.) and several other writers of Roman history to have had the five greatest and chiefest of blessings; for he was very rich, of the highest birth, exceedingly eloquent, most learned in the law, and chief pontiff. When he, in his consulship, was in command in [*](In the year of his consulship (131 B.C.) he was sent with an army against Aristonicus, who laid claim to the kingdom of Pergamum, which Attalus III had bequeathed to the Romans.) the province of Asia, and was making preparations to beset and assault Leucae, he needed a long, stout beam from which to make a battering-ram, to breach the walls of that city. Accordingly, he wrote to the chief engineer of the people of Mylatta, [*](The text seems hopelessly corrupt. We perhaps have a fusion of e)pa/rxwn a)rxitekto/nwn (Dittenberger3, 804. 5) and its equivalent magister( == praefectus) fabrumt. With a)rxite/ktona (Hertz), the meaning would be 'builder. With matgistrumn (Hosius), the chief magistrate, or perhaps a ship-captain (sc. navis). For the town, Bergk proposed Mytilene; Hosius, Myrina. The MSS. suggest Mylasa (Mylassa, Mylatta).) allies and friends of the Romans, to have the larger of two masts which he had seen in their city sent him. Then the chief engineer on learning the purpose for which Crassus wanted the mast, did not send him the larger, as had been ordered, but the smaller, which he thought was more suitable, and better adapted for

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making a ram, besides being easier to transport. Crassus ordered him to be summoned, asked why he had not sent the mast which had been ordered, and ignoring the excuses and reasons which the man urged, caused him to be stripped and soundly beaten with rods; for he thought that all the authority of a commander was weakened and made of no effect, if one might reply to orders which he received, not with due obedience, but with an unsolicited plan of his own.

What was said and done by Gaius Fabricius, a man of great renown and great deeds, but of simple establishment and little money, when the Samnites offered him a great amount of gold, in the belief that he was a poor man.

JULIUS HYGINUS, in the sixth book of his work On the Lizes and Deeds of Famous Men,[*](Fr. 3, Peter.) says that a deputation from the Samnites came to Gaius Fabricius, the Roman general, and after mentioning his many important acts of kindness and generosity to the Samnites since peace was restored, offered him a present of a large sum of money, begging that he would accept and use it. And they said that they did this because they saw that his house and mode of life were far from magnificent, and that he was not so well provided for as his high rank demanded. Thereupon Fabricius passed his open hands from his ears to his eyes, then down to his nose, his mouth, his throat, and finally to the lower part of his belly; then he replied to the envoys:

So long as I can restrain and control all those members which I have touched, I shall never lack
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anything; therefore I cannot accept money, for which I have no use, from those who, I am sure, do have use for it.

What a tiresome and utterly hateful fault is vain and empty loquacity, and how often it has been censured in deservedly strong language by the greatest Greek and Latin writers.

THE talk of empty-headed, vain and tiresome babblers, who with no foundation of solid matter let out a stream of tipsy, tottering words, has justly been thought to come from the lips and not from the heart. Moreover, men say that the tongue ought not to be unrestrained and rambling, but guided and, so to speak, steered by cords connected with the heart and inmost breast. Yet you may see some men spouting forth words with no exercise of judgment, but with such great and profound assurance that many of them in the very act of speaking are evidently unaware that they are talking. Ulysses, on the contrary, a man gifted with sagacious eloquence, spoke, not from his lips but from his heart, as Hommer says—a remark which applies less to the sound and quality of his utterance than to the depth of the thoughts inwardly conceived; and the poet went on to say, with great aptness, that the teeth form a rampart to check wanton words, in order that reckless speech may not only be restrained by that watchful sentry the heart, but also hedged in by a kind of outpost, so to speak, stationed at the lips.

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The words of Homer which I mentioned above are these: [*](Iliad, iii. 221.)

When from his breast his mighty voice went forth

and: [*](Iliad, iv. 350, etc.)

What a word has passed the barrier of your teeth.

I have added also a passage from Marcus Tullius, in which he expresses his strong and just hatred of silly and unmeaning volubility. He says: [*](De Orat. iii. 142.)

Provided this fact be recognized, that neither should one commend the dumbness of a man who knows a subject, but is unable to give it expression in speech, nor the ignorance of one who lacks knowledge of his subject, but abounds in words; yet if one must choose one or the other alternative, I for my part would prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity.

Also in the first book of the De Oratore [*](i. 51.) he wrote as follows:

For what is so insane as the empty sound of words, however well-chosen and elegant, if there be no foundation of sense or sagacity?

But Marcus Cato in particular is a relentless assailant of this fault. For in the speech entitled If Caelius, tribune of the commons, should have summoned him, [*](See Jordan's Cato, xl. 1. The meaning of the title, which is uncertain, is discussed in his Prolegomena, p. lxix f. Se refers to Cato himself. By some the speech is regarded as identical with the one mentioned by Fronto, vol. i, p. 117, L.C.L., and by Plutarch, Cato ix. 7, vol. ii, p. 329, L. C.L.) he says:

That man is never silent who is afflicted with the disease of talking, as one in a lethargy is afflicted with that of drinking and sleeping. For if you should not come together when he calls an assembly, so eager is he to talk that he would hire someone to listen. And so you hear him, but you do not listen, just as if he were a quack. For a quack's words are heard, but no one trusts himself
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to him when he is sick.

Again Cato, in the same speech, [*](xl. 2, Jordan.) upbraiding the same Marcus Caelius, tribune of the commons, for the cheapness at which not only his speech but also his silence could be bought, says:

For a crust of bread he can be hired either to keep silence or to speak.

Most deservedly too does Homer call Thersites alone of all the Greeks a)metroeph/s,

of measureless speech,

and a)krito/muqos, [*](Iliad ii. 212 246.)

a reckless babbler,

declaring that his words are many and a)/kosma, or

disordered,

like the endless chatter of daws; [*](Iliad, ii 213.) for what else does e)kolw/a (

he chattered

) mean? There is also a line of Eupolis most pointedly aimed at men of that kind: [*](Fr. 95, Koch.)

In chatter excellent, unable quite to speak,

and our countryman Sallust, wishing to imitate this, writes: [*](Hist. iv. 43, Maur.)

Talkative rather than eloquent.

It is for the same reason that Hesiod, wisest of poets, says [*](Works and Days, 719.) that the tongue should not be vulgarly exposed but hidden like a treasure, and that it is exhibited with best effect when it is modest, restrained and musical. His own words are:

The greatest of man's treasures is the tongue,
Which wins most favour when it spares its words
And measured is of movement.

The following verse of Epicharmus is also to the point: [*](Fr. 272, Kaib.)

Thou art not skilled in speech, yet silence cannot keep,

and it is from this line surely that the saying arose:

Who, though he could not speak, could not be silent.

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I once heard Favorinus say that the familiar lines of Euripides: [*](Bacch. 386.)

Of unrestrained mouth
And of lawless folly
Is disaster the end,

ought not to be understood as directed only at those who spoke impiously or lawlessly, but might even with special propriety be used also of men who prate foolishly and immoderately, whose tongues are so extravagant and unbridled that they ceaselessly flow and seethe with the foulest dregs of language, the sort of persons to whom the Greeks apply the highly significant term kata/glwssoi, or

given to talk.

I learned from a friend of his, a man of learning, that the famous grammarian Valerius Probus, shortly before his death, began to read Sallust's well-known saying, [*](Cat. v. 4.)

a certain amount of eloquence but little discretion,

abundant talkativeness, too little discretion,

and that he insisted that Sallust left it in that form, since the word loquentia was very characteristic of Sallust, an innovator in diction, [*](It is true that Sallust was fond of new words, but the best MSS. of Sallust are unanimous for eloquentiae. Besides this passage of Gellius, L. and S. cite loquentia only in Plin. Epist. v. 20. 5, Iulius Cordus . . . solet dicere aliud esse eloquentiam, aliud loquentiam.) while eloquentia was not at all consistent with lack of discretion.

Finally, loquacity of this kind and a disorderly mass of empty grandiloquence is scored with striking epithets by Aristophanes, wittiest of poets, in the following lines: [*](Frogs, 837 ff., Rogers (L. C. L.). The epithets are applied to Aeschylus!)

A stubborn-creating, stubborn-pulling fellow,
Uncurbed, unfettered, uncontrolled of speech,
Unperiphrastic, bombastiloquent.

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And no less pointedly did our forefathers also call men of that kind, who were drowned in words, "babblers, gabbllers and chatterboxes."

That those words of Quadrigarius in the third book of his Annals,

there a thousand of men is killed,

are not used arbitrarily or by a poetic figure, but in accordance with a definite and approved rule of the science of grammar.

QUADRIGARIUS in the third book of his Annals[*](Fr. 44, Peter.) wrote the following: "There a thousand of men is killed," using occiditur, not occiduntur. So too Lucilius in the third book of his Satires,

From gate to gate a thousand of paces is.
Thence to Salcrnum six, [*](v. 124, Marx, who has exinde for sex inde and supplies sumus, mus profecti.)

has mille est, not mille sunt. Varro in the seventeenth book of his Antiquilies of Man writes: [*](xviii, fr. 2, Mirsch. )

To the beginning of Romulus' reign is more than a thousand and one hundred years,

Marcus Cato in the first book of his Origins, [*](Fr. 26, Peter.)

From there it is nearly a thousand of paces.

Marcus Cicero has in his sixth Oration against Antony, [*](Phil. vi. 15.)

Is the middle Janus [*](The middle Janus was the seat of money-lenders and bankers. As a district it extended along the northern side of the Forum Romanum. The Janus itself was near the basilica Aemlia, perhaps at the entrance to the Argiletum.) so subject to the patronage of Lucius Antonius? Who has ever been found in that Janus who would lend Lucius Antonius a thousand of sesterces?

In these and many other passages mile is used in the singular number, and that is not, as some think, a concession to early usage or admitted as a neat figure of speech, but it is obviously demanded

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by rule. For the word mille does not stand for the Greek xilioi,

thousand,

but for xilia/s,

a thousand

; and just as they say one xilia/s, or two xilia/des, so we say one thousand and two thousands according to a definite and regular rule. Therefore these common expressions are correct and good usage,

There is a thousand of denarii in the chest,

and

There is a thousand of horsemen in the army.

Furthermore Lucilius, in addition to the example cited above, makes this point still clearer in another place also: for in his fifteenth book he says: [*](506 ff., Marx, who punctuates with a comma after succussor, with a slight change in the meaning, taking nullus seqetur in the sense of non sequetur. On the Campanian horses see Livy, viii.11.5 and xxvi.4.3, 6; Val. Max. ii.3.3.)

This horse no jolting fine Campanian steed,
Though he has passed him by one thousand, aye
And twain, of paces, can in a longer course
Compete with, but he will in fact appear
To run the other way.

So too in the ninth book: [*](327, Marx.)

With sesterces a thousand you can gain
A hundred thousand.

Lucilius wrote milli passum instead of mille passibus and uno milli nummum for unis mille nunmis, thus showing clearly that mille is a noun, used in the singular number, that its plural is milia, and that it also forms an ablative case. Nor ought we to expect the rest of the cases; for there are many other words which are declined only in single cases, and even some which are not declined at all. Therefore we can no longer doubt that Cicero, in the speech which he wrote In Defence of Milo, [*](§53.) used these words:

Before the estate of Clodius, where fully a thousand of
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ablebodied men was employed on those crazy substructures,

not

were employed,

as we find it in less accurate copies; for one rule requires us to say

a thousand men,

but another,

a thousand of men.

The patience with which Socrates endured his wife's shrewish disposition; and in that connection what Marcus Varro says in one of his satires about the duty of a husband.

XANTHIPPE, the wife of the philosopher Socrates, is said to have been ill-tempered and quarrelsome to a degree, with a constant flood of feminine tantrums and annoyances day and night. Alcibiades, amazed at this outrageous conduct of hers towards her husband, asked Socrates what earthly reason he had for not showing so shrewish a woman the door.

Because,

replied Socrates,

it is by enduring such a person at home that I accustom and train myself to bear more easily away from home the impudence and injustice of other persons.

In the same vein Varro also said in the Menippean Satire [*](Varro's Menippean Satires, in 150 books, based to some extent on the Speudoge/loion of Menippus, a Cynic philosopher of the third century B.C., treated in a mixture of prose and verse a great variety of moral and serious topics in a playful and sometimes jocose manner. For other titles see Index under (M.) Terentius Varro, and for the fragments, Bücheler's Petronius, 3d. ed., Berlin, 1882, pp. 161 ff.) which he entitled On the Duty of a Husband: [*](Fr 83, Bücheler.)

A wife's faults must be either put down or put up with. He who puts down her faults, makes his wife more agreeable; he who puts up with them, improves himself.

Varro contrasted the two words tollere and ferre very cleverly, [*](For a similar play on two meanings of tollere, cf. Suet. Aug. xii.) to be sure,

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but he obviously uses tollere in the sense of

correct.

It is evident too that Varro thought that if a fault of that kind in a wife cannot be corrected, it should be tolerated, in so far of course as a man may endure it honourably; for faults are less serious than crimes.

How Marcus Varro, in the fourteenth book of his Antiquities of Man, [*](Fr. 99, Agahd. In the lemma, or chapter heading, Varro's statement is wrongly reffered to the Antiquities of Man, the other division of his great work Antiquitatum Libri XLI, treating the political and religious institutions of the Romans. Only scanty fragments have survived.) criticizes his master Lucius Aelius for a false etymology; and how Varro in his turn, in the same book, gives a false origin for fur.

IN the fourteenth book of his Divine Antiquities[*](Fr. 99, Agahd. In the lemma, or chapter heading, Varro's statement is wrongly referred to the Antiquities of Man, the other division of his great work Antiquitatum Libri XLI, treating the political and religious institutions of the Romans. Only scanty fragments have survived.) Marcus Varro shows that Lucius Aelius, the most learned Roman of his time, went astray and followed a false etymological principle in separating an old Greek word which had been taken over into the Roman language into two Latin words, just as if it were of Latin origin.

I quote Varro's own words on the subject:

In this regard our countryman Lucius Aelius, the most gifted man of letters within my memory, was sometimes misled. For he gave false derivations of several early Greek words, under the impression that they were native to our tongue. We do not use the word lepus ('hare') because the animal is levipes ('light-footed'), as he asserts, but because it is an old Greek word. Many of the early words of that people are unfamiliar, because to-day the Greeks use other words in their place; and it may not be generally known that among these are Graecus, for which they now use (/Ellhn, puteus ('well') which
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they call fre/ar, and lepus, which they call lagwo/s. But as to this, far from disparaging Aelius' ability, I commend his diligence; for it is good fortune that brings success, endeavour that deserves praise.

Tis is what Varro wrote in the first part of his book, with great skill in the explanation of words, with wide knowledge of the usage of both languages, and marked kindliness towards Aelius himself. But in the latter part of the same book he says that fur is so called because the early Romans used furvus for ater (

black

), and thieves steal most easily in the night, which is black. Is it not clear that Varro made the same mistake about fur that Aelius did about lepus. For what the Greeks now call kle/pths, or

thief,

in the earlier Greek language was called fw/r. Hence, owing to the similarity in sound, he who in Greek is fw/r, in Latin is fur. But whether that fact escaped Varro's memory at the time, or on the other hand he thought that fur was more appropriately and consistently named from furvus, that is,

black,

as to that question it is not for me to pass judgment on a man of such surpassing learning.