Nox Philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library

Book Four: Index of Names

I Aesopus autem et Roscius famosissimi comoediarum fuerunt. Ac per hoc [Horatius] ostendit stultos homines, qui non merito ac uirtute ii, sed tantum modo personarum auctoritate moeantur. My lemma is taken from Porphyrio’s commentary on Horace’s Epistles.1 I have chosen a commentary on dramatic characters to open my commentary on characterization in Gellius. Porphyrio is explaining a passage from Horace. Horace, though, is writing a letter to Caesar. The letter is about literature and literary value: everything the busy chief civil authority needs to know in 270 verses. Horace compares Greeks and Romans. Horace builds a canon: Ennius, Plautus, and the rest are all here. Horace also, though, carves out a space for new literature and contemporary greatness. Horace asks as well whether one might today speak critically of past literature : “Shame is dead, scream nearly all the aristocrats (patres), since I attempt to chastise those roles that stately Aesopus, that learned Roscius performed.”2 These Saturnian fathers are willing to devour their sons and to prevent the new from ever growing into rivals. iam Saliare Numae carmen qui laudat et illud, quod mecum ignorat, solus uolt scire uideri, 166 liber qvartvs 7 Index Nominum uel Dramatis Personae 1. Those for whom the much-supplemented ii is a cause of anxiety will be reassured by the following lemma: INGENIIS NON ILLE. Hoc sensu uult ostendere huius modi homines, qui non merit ac uirtute stili, sed tantum modo personarum auctoritate mortuis faueant, [s]e, quod est peius, inuidos, qui uos contra meritum oderint (2.1.lemma 85). 2. recte necne crocum floresque perambulet Attae | fabula si dubitem, clament periisse pudorem | cuncti paene patres, ea cum reprendere coner, | quae grauis Aesopus, quae doctus Roscius egit (Horace, Episutlae 2.1.79–82). ingeniis non ille fauet plauditque sepultis, nostra sed inpugnat, nos nostraque liuidus odit. The man who praises the Salian poem of Numa and alone wants to seem to know that which he knows no better than me, he favors not genius, his applause is for the dead and buried, he assails my works, out of spite he detests me and my art. —horace, Epistulae 2.1.86–89 The patres with their antiquarian tastes praise Numa’s Salian hymn without understanding it. The past becomes its own inscrutable authority. The present lives a stunted life in its shadow. Horace begs to differ. This is not, he says, literary criticism; it is mere ill-will. Porphyrio’s text presupposes that Horace is an authority. It also assumes that Horace may well be inscrutable. Horace’s allusions have become as opaque as the Salian verses. Porphyrio offers his readers a knowledge that can no longer be taken for granted. But he does not just tell us who Aesopus and Roscius were; Porphyrio shows us what Horace meant to show us by evoking them, namely, that stupid people are fooled by showy authority. The masks of power deceive, says Horace says Porphyrio. But why am I going on about Horace? Why, indeed: Gellius mentions him but once and then only for a choice obscurity pertinent to the question at hand.3 Even if Horace formulates what for us are canonical rules and attitudes of “classical” aesthetics, the archaizers of the Antonine age have little or no time for him. Fronto calls him “memorable,” but Fronto then makes it clear that Horace is chiefly memorable in his case because of Maecenas’s gardens: Fronto is their current owner.4 The authoritative scholarly persona eschews performances of Horatian authority. Horace is either omitted entirely, or, when he does reappear, his name is not associated with a vindication of the possibilities for contemporary genius. Instead, Horatian authority lies dormant until someone like Porphyrio declares him to be authoritatively obscure, that is, useful according to the logic of antiquarianism. But then “the authority of ancient Horace” displaces the contents of Horace’s own critique of the authority of the past. And yet the arrogation of power for the contemporary world written into Horace’s poem has been retained even as it is inverted: it is now the selfauthoring power of contemporary erudition. Index Nominum uel Dramatis Personae 167 3. Favorinus cites him in the discussion of winds (2.22.25). 4. Fronto, Ad M. Caesarem et inuicem 2.2.5. II Gellium audiui hoc dicere: se usum esse circumlocutione quadam poetica. The various characters who parade before the footlights of...