Noctes Atticaework by Gellius

Latin author remembered for his miscellany Noctes Atticae (“Attic Nights”), in which many fragments of lost works are preserved. Written in Athens to beguile the winter evenings, the work is an interesting source on the state of knowledge and scholarship of his time. Both in Rome, where he studied literature and rhetoric, and in Athens, where he studied philosophy, Gellius’ teachers and friends included many distinguished men, anecdotes about whom he included in his book.

prominent Roman orator, rhetorician, and grammarian whose high reputation—equal in ancient times to those of Cato, Cicero, and Quintilian—was based chiefly on his orations, all of which are lost. His most famous lost speech is Against the Christians, which was answered in Minucius Felix’s Octavius.

Fronto was educated at Carthage and in Rome, where, under the emperor Hadrian, he rapidly gained considerable fame as an advocate. Emperor Antoninus Pius appointed him tutor to Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus; with the former he remained on terms of affectionate friendship. He became consul suffectus for July–August 143.

In addition to his orations, Fronto’s grammatical and rhetorical studies won him a number of followers, called the Frontoniani. Modern evaluations of Fronto’s mastery of language are based on the information contained in the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius, a member of Fronto’s circle; on a collection of Fronto’s letters (principally to Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus); and on miscellaneous pieces discovered with the letters in 1815 in the Ambrosian Library in Milan by the Classical scholar Angelo Cardinal Mai. The letters throw useful light on the Antonines and on Fronto’s judgments of earlier writers and his precepts about language and style.

Fronto tried to reinvigorate the decaying Latin of his day by reviving the vocabulary of earlier republican Roman writers. The resulting elocutio novella (“new elocution”) was often artificial and pedantic, but it had widespread influence and gave new vitality to Latin prose writing.

in general, an ancient Roman historian. The term is used in several ways by ancient and modern scholars. The earliest sources for historians were the annual “pontiff’s tables” (tabulae pontificum), or annales, which after about 300 bc listed the names of magistrates and public events of religious significance. The first work called Annales was the epic poem of Quintus Ennius (239–169 bc); in contrast to subsequent annalistic works, Ennius’s was composed in dactylic hexameter verse rather than prose, and it did not follow a year-by-year narrative. Later authors refer to the histories of Quintus Fabius Pictor and Cato as annales, although Cato’s Origines, at least, was not a year-by-year narrative. In the 2nd century and early 1st century bc, a number of historians, later used as sources by Livy, did follow a year-by-year presentation: Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi, Gnaeus Gellius, Valerius Antias, Gaius Licinius Macer, Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius, and Quintus Aelius Tubero.

Aulus Gellius, writing in the 2nd century ad, preserved in his Noctes Atticae (“Attic Nights”) a further ancient distinction, which had arisen in the late 2nd century bc: Sempronius Asellio, influenced by the contemporary Greek historian Polybius, distinguished between annals, which recount the past in a straightforward narrative, and histories, which tell of contemporary events and include serious critical analysis of events and motives. Historians in the 2nd and 1st centuries bc who followed Asellio include Gaius Fannius, Lucius Cornelius Sisenna, Sallust, and Gaius Asinius Pollio. From this distinction arose the habit in the 19th century ad of using the term annalist to refer to Livy’s sources, such as Valerius Antias and Claudius Quadrigarius, whom modern historians often despised as uncritical and even dishonest retailers of folktales and...