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).
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.
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.)
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.)