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).
WHAT we have learned and know of the nature and character of memory from Aristotle's work entitled Peri\ Mnh/mhs or On Memory; and also some other examples, of which we have heard or read, about extraordinary powers of memory or its total loss. [*](See Nonius, s.v. meminisse, p. 441. 4, M.)
MY experience in trying to interpret and, as it were, to reproduce in Latin certain passages of Plato.
How Theophrastus, the most eloquent philosopher of his entire generation, when on the point of making a brief speech to the people of Athens, was overcome by bashfulness and kept silence; and how Demosthenes had a similar experience when speaking before king Philip.
A DISCUSSION that I had in the town of Eleusis with a conceited grammarian who, although ignorant of the tenses of verbs and the exercises of schoolboys, ostentatiously proposed abstruse questions of a hazy and formidable character, to impress the minds of the unlearned.
Would wish a lying scoundrel. [*](Whether these words, from Nonius, II., p. 120, 12, M., belong here is uncertain.)
THE witty reply of Socrates to his wife Xanthippe, when she asked that they might spend more money for their dinners during the Dionysiac festival.
ON the meaning of plerique omnes, or
almost all,in the early literature; and on the probable Greek origin of that expression.
THAT eupsones, a word used by the people of Africa, is not Phoenician, but Greek.
A HIGHLY entertaining discussion of the philosopher Favorinus with a tiresome person who held forth on the double meaning of certain words; also some unusual expressions from the poet Naevius and from Gnaeus Gellius; and further, some investigations of the derivation of words by Publius Nigidius.
How the poet Laberius was ignominiously treated by Gaius Caesar, with a quotation of Laberius' own words on that subject. [*](See Macr. Sat. ii. 7.)
A pleasant and remarkable story from the books of Heracleides of Pontus. [*](This heading, of uncertain number, is quoted in Grammatici Latini ii. 246, 6, K, and attributed to Agellius, Noctium Atticarum viii., or according to the greater number of MSS., viiii.)