From Alpine Snows to Vulcano Fires

An engaging writer of the Antonine period, Aulus Gellius was a man of wide interests and great admiration for Greek culture. His Attic Nights is a collection of absorbing short chapters about notable events, words and questions of literary style, lives of historical figures, points of law, and philosophical issues that served as instructive light show more reading for the cultivated Roman. The work's title derives simply from the fact that Gellius began to write these pieces during stays in Athens. Variety adds to the charm of the miscellany: the author makes use of reminiscence as a literary form, dramatizations, character sketches, dialogues, extensive quotations from other writers (many from works now lost). He was long considered a model of the perennial humanist. show less