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 verb quiesco, whether it should be pronounced with a long or a short e.

A FRIEND of mine, a man of much learning and devoted to the liberal arts, pronounced the verb quiescit (

be quiet
) in the usual manner, with a short e. Another man, also a friend of mine, marvellous in the use of grammatical rules as jugglers' tricks, so to say, and excessively fastidious
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in rejecting common words, thought that the first man had been guilty of a barbarism, maintaining that he ought to have lengthened the e, rather than shortened it. For he asserted that quiescit ought to be pronounced like calescit, nitescit, stupescit and many other words of that kind. He also added the statement that quies (quiet) is pronounced with the e long, not short. But my first-named friend, with the unassuming modesty which was characteristic of him in all matters, said that not even if the Aelii, the Cincii and the Santrae [*](Mentioned as typical grammarians. The gens Aelia included several famous jurists and men of letters; the reference here is to Lucius Aelius Stilo, the teacher of Varro and Cicero. Santra was a grammarian of the first century B.C.; the Cincii were less well known.) had decided that the word ought to be so pronounced, would he follow their ruling against the universal usage of the Latin language, nor would he speak in such an eccentric fashion as to be discordant and strange in his diction. Nevertheless he wrote a letter on the subject, among some exercises for his own amusement, in which he tried to prove that quiesco is not like those words which I have quoted above; that it is not derived from quies but rather quies from quiesco. He also maintained that quiesco has the form and derivation of a Greek word, [*](A fanciful derivation from Ionic e)/xw, e)/sxw.) and he tried to show, by reasons that were by no means without force, that the word should not be pronounced with a long e. [*](The e is however long; quiésco occurs in C.1.L. vi, 6250 and 25521.)

On a use by the poet Catullus of the word deprecor, which is unusual, it is true, but appropriate and correct; and on the origin of that word, with examples from early writers.

As we chanced to be strolling one evening in the

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Lyceum, [*](A gymnasium at Athens, the favourite resort of Aristotle and his pupils.) we were furnished with sport and amusement by a certain man, of the kind that lays claim to a reputation for eloquence by a superficial and ill-regulated use of language, without having learned any of the usages and principles of the Latin tongue. For while Catullus in one of his poems had used the word deprecor rather cleverly, that fellow, unable to appreciate this, declared that the following verses which I have quoted were very flat, although in the judgment of all men they are most charming: [*](xcii.)
  1. My Lesbia constantly speaks ill of me
  2. And ceases not. By Jove! she cares for me!
  3. How do I know? 'Tis just the same with me;
  4. I rail at, but by Jove! I worship, her.

Our good man thought that deprecor in this passage was used in the sense that is commonly given the word by the vulgar; that is,

I pray earnestly,
I beseech,
I entreat,
where the preposition de is used intensively and emphatically. And if that were so, the verses would indeed be flat. But as a matter of fact the sense is exactly the opposite; for the preposition de, since it has a double force, contains two meanings in one and the same word. For deprecor is used by Catullus in the sense of
denounce, execrate, drive away,
or
avert by prayers
; but it also has the opposite meaning, when Cicero In Defence of Publius Sulla speaks as follows: [*](§ 72.)
How many men's lives did he beg off (est deprecatus) from Sulla.
Similarly in his speech Against the Agrarian Law Cicero says: [*](ii. 100.)
If I do any
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wrong, there are no masks of ancestors to intercede (deprecentur,
beg off
) for me with you by their prayers.

But Catullus was not alone in using this word with that meaning. Indeed, the books are full of cases of its occurrence in the same sense, and of these I have quoted one or two which had come to mind. Quintus Ennius in the Erectheus, not differing greatly from Catullus, says: [*](128, Ribbeck3.)

  1. Who now win freedom by my own distress
  2. For those whose slavery I by woe avert (deprecor).
He means
I drive away
and
remove,
either by resort to prayer or in some other way. Similarly in the Chresphontes Ennius writes: [*](121, Ribbeck3.)
  1. When I my own life spare, may I avert (deprecer)
  2. Death from mine enemy.
Cicero, in the sixth book of his Republic, wrote: [*](2.2.)
Which indeed was so much the more remarkable, because, while the colleagues were in the same case, they not only did not incur the same hatred, but the affection felt for Gracchus even averted (deprecabatur) the unpopularity of Claudius.
Here too the meaning is not
earnestly entreated,
but
warded off
unpopularity, so to speak, and defended him against it, a meaning which the Greeks express by the parallel word paraitei=sqai.

Cicero also uses the word in the same way in his Defence of Aulus Caecina, saying: [*](§ 30.)

What can you do for a man like this? Can you not sometimes permit one to avert (deprecetur) the odium of the greatest wickedness by the excuse of the most abysmal folly?
Also in the first book of his second
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Arraignment of Verres: [*](ii. 2. 192.)
Now what can Hortensius do? Will he try to avert (deprecetur) the charge of avarice by the praise of economy? But he is defending a man who is utterly disgraced and sunk in lust and crime.
So then Catullus means that he is doing the same as Lesbia, in publicly speaking ill of her, scorning and rejecting her, and constantly praying to be rid of her, and yet loving her to madness.

Who was the first of all to establish a public library; and how many books there were in the public libraries at Athens before the Persian invasions.

THE tyrant Pisistratus is said to have been the first to establish at Athens a public library of books relating to the liberal arts. Then the Athenians themselves added to this collection with considerable diligence and care; but later Xerxes, when he got possession of Athens and burned the entire city except the citadel, [*](In 480 B.C.) removed that whole collection of books and carried them off to Persia. Finally, a long time afterwards, king Seleucus, who was surnamed Nicanor, had all those books taken back to Athens.

At a later time an enormous quantity of books, nearly seven hundred thousand volumes, was either acquired or written [*](i.e. copied from other manuscripts.) in Egypt under the kings known as Ptolemies; but these were all burned during the sack of the city in our first war with Alexandria, [*](In 48 B.C. By no means all of the Alexandrian Library was destroyed at that time, and the losses were made good, at least in part, by Antony in 41 B.C. A part of the library was burned under Aurelian, in A.D. 272, and the destruction seems to have been completed in 391.) not intentionally or by anyone's order, but accidentally by the auxiliary soldiers.

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Whether the expression hesterna nocte, for

last night,
is right or wrong, and what the grammarians have said about those words; also that the decemvirs in the Twelve Tables [*](viii. 12.) used nox for noctu, meaning
by night.
[*](See Macr. Sat. i. 4.)

TEN words pointed out to me by Favorinus which, although in use by the Greeks, are of foreign origin and barbarous; also the same number given him by me which, though of general and common use by those who speak Latin, are by no means Latin and are not to be found in the early literature.

IN what terms and how severely the philosopher Peregrinus in my hearing rebuked a young Roman of equestrian rank, who stood before him inattentive and constantly yawning.

. . . and saw him continually yawning and noticed the degenerate dreaminess expressed in his attitude of mind and body. [*](This fragment is preserved by Nonius, II, p. 121, 19, s. v. halucinari.)

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THAT Herodotus, that most famous writer of history, was wrong in saying [*](vi. 37.) that the pine alone of all trees never puts forth new shoots from the same roots, after being cut down; and that he stated as an established fact [*](ii. 22.) about rainwater and snow a thing which had not been sufficiently investigated.

ON the meaning of Virgil's expression caelum stare pulvere[*](The sky on columns of dust upborne,Aen. xii. 407, where the poet is describing the effect of an advancing troop of cavalry.) and of Lucilius' pectus sentibus stare. [*](The breast with thorns is filled, Lucil. 213, Marx. According to Nonius, p. 392, 2, stat means is full of. Donatus, ad Ter. Andr. iv. 2. 16 (69), quotes Lucilius for stat sentibus fundus, i. e., the farm is full of thorns (1301, Marx).)

THAT when a reconciliation takes place after trifling offences, mutual complaints are useless; and Taurus' discourse on that subject, with a quotation from the treatise of Theophrastus; and what Marcus Cicero also thought about the love arising from friendship, added in his own words. [*](Cf. i. 3. 10 f.)