Readers of Gellius' Nodes Atticae cannot fail to notice a pattern recurring in several of his episodes, in which an arrogant figure claiming to be an expert in some field fails to answer a question put to him by one of the interlocutors and is treated with disdain, being at times forced to leave the company in humiliation, at others allowed to evade answer by a feeble excuse. 1 To about ten episodes of this type we can add two similar scenes, one in which a young philosopher exposes his shallowness without the instigation of a knock-out question (1.2) and the other where a celebrated public pleader is described as having made a fool of himself by using obsolete and incomprehensible words in court (11.7. 3). Unlike the rest of the figures who take part in these scenes, the humiliated persons are never identified by name, but are normally introduced by an indefinite pronoun coupled with the type of their profession, and their status as experts is then established by referring either to their reputation in Rome (eg'celebri hominem fama et multo nomine', 20.10. 2) or to their self-proclamation (eg'praedicantem quendam a sese uno Sallustii historias intellegi',\% A. lem.). This seems to indicate that Gellius' motivation in depicting these scenes is an objection to professional scholars as a class rather than a grudge cherished against specific persons in his ambient society. Furthermore, though many of these anonymous experts are also teachers and may be classed as' professionals' in that they use their intellectual preoccupation to earn their living, these characteristics are not shared by all the figures exposed in these scenes. It appears, therefore, that we should take the proclamation of expertise as the only essential characteristic of the professores Gellius likes to put to shame.

The professionals exposed are in most cases grammarians, but the role is also assigned to a philosopher (1.2), a specialist in civil law (16.10), and a'uetus celebratusque homo in causis'(11.7. 3), whose reputation as an expert pleader allows us to include him here, though he is not strictu sensu a professional in Roman terms. 2 Gellius also represents a number of other scenes in which experts are derided (implicitly or explicitly) either by one of the participants, or in Gellius' authorial comments, but which do not involve public humiliation. 3 Here too grammarians are the most common target of Gellius'