Attic Nights
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"cohors antiquior vel oratorum vel poetarum" (classics would need to be of some antiquity).-- Attic Nights by Aulus Gellius |
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Attic Nights (Latin: Noctes Atticae) is a work by Aulus Gellius. Gellius's only work, it takes its name from having been begun during the long nights of a winter which he spent in Attica. He afterwards continued it at Rome. It is compiled out of an Adversaria, or commonplace book, in which he had jotted down everything of unusual interest that he heard in conversation or read in books, and it comprises notes on grammar, geometry, philosophy, history and almost every other branch of knowledge.
The work, deliberately devoid of sequence or arrangement, is divided into twenty books. All these have come down to us except the eighth, of which nothing remains but the index. The Attic Nights are valuable for the insight they afford into the nature of the society and pursuits of those times, and for its many excerpts from works of lost ancient authors.
One story is Androcles, which is often compiled into collections of Aesop's fables (but is not found there).
