The crisis in scholarly publishing

Public Interest, Fall, 1997 by William C. Dowling

Ancient culture

One could not look for a better example than Aulus Gellius, the subject of Holford-Strevens's study. For the author of the Noctes Atticae wrote long after the great age of Livy and Horace and Virgil, and, even among scholars who take a serious interest in authors of the Antonine period, he has not been seen as a commanding figure. The Noctes Atticae is itself a collection of occasional pieces, composed, as Gellius tells us, during the winter evenings when he was staying in a villa with a friend outside Athens. The work consists of anecdotes and chatty observations, remarks on books and Greek and Latin grammar and curious points of natural history, little glimpses of Graeco-Roman life as it settled gratefully into a long calm after the terror and insanity of Caligula and Nero and Domitian, the incest and murder and capricious tyranny of the Julio-Claudian and Flavian years as one reads about them in Tacitus or Suetonius.

To anyone drawn to the Noctes Atticae, a great part of the attraction has always no doubt lain in the way they permit a modern reader to bask, as Holford-Strevens says, in the afternoon sun of ancient culture, to dwell with Aulus Gellius and his friends in a Roman intellectual milieu that was beginning to turn backwards to its own earliest roots and, beyond that, to the enormous debt to Greek literature, philosophy, and political theory on which so much of the Roman civic and literary achievement was based. Modern scholarship has done a great deal to recover the details that make this picture so compelling - the large-scale absorption of provincials into Roman administration, so that the empire becomes gradually and peacefully a homogenous entity; the completion and perfection of the road system that allowed one to travel easily from one end to another of its vast extent; the hundreds of cities of the empire that became "little Romes," with their amphitheaters and their baths and libraries - but it is only in works like the Noctes Atticae that we are permitted to hear the voices of the age.

Yet those voices are conversing in Latin and Greek, which is no doubt why books like Aulus Gellius, even given the great attractions of what one scholar calls the Antonine golden age, could hardly be expected to sell a thousand copies in the 1990s. In practical terms, this means that Holford-Strevens must assume on the part of his readers at least enough Greek and Latin to make sense of the world - to a very large extent, a world of books, of phrases echoing earlier poetry and drama and philosophy - that it is his business to recreate. So, for instance, we have the scene in which Gellius, who has just made the sea passage from Greece to Brundisium, comes ashore and takes a stroll around the marketplace to regain his landlegs. He comes across a bookstall in which a great number of old Greek books are for sale. They are in battered condition, but they are cheap. He buys the lot, and then spends the next two nights reading them, copying into his commonplace book their tales about strange people in faraway places, cannibals, and one-eyed humans - we are in the immediate vicinity here of Othello's "Anthropophagai, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders" - and tribes who are able to kill by uttering praise.