In the face of the vast amounts of scholarly and literary material in the Roman Empire of the second century CE, a loose genre of miscellaneous literature proliferated that collected this amassed knowledge. This dissertation examines one Latin example of this form, the Noctes Atticae (NA) of Aulus Gellius, and analyzes its underlying strategies of composition to understand how a reader should approach the work. By reading miscellany critically as a literary endeavor, this dissertation reassesses how Gellius’ collection participated in its contemporary literary culture, and articulates the variable methods of reading miscellaneous literature. The intratextual relationships between the discrete chapters of the collection reveal Gellius’ fashioning of a prose poetics focused on the interplay of key words, sources, and characters that is intended to problematize the authority of previous miscellaneous works and to represent the NA as an innovative Latin literary form. The first chapter, following Genette’s formulation of paratextuality, explores the NA’s title, Preface, and Table of Contents; each device provides a complementary method of approaching the text that enriches the experience of reading the work. The second chapter adopts one approach encoded in the Preface to interpret the text’s internal structure, examining the effects produced by the order of the NA’s chapters and the relationships established between them. The third chapter draws upon this methodology to offer a reading of NA Book 3, in which Gellius creates a cognitive narrative by interweaving repeated references to authors and sources throughout the book. Through the complex structures of Book 3 Gellius produces meaningful resonances between different units of text, and the interplay of these units encourages exploration of the deeper themes of reading and learning in his work. Finally, the fourth chapter reintegrates Gellius into the Latin imperial prose tradition by examining several cycles of chapters that interact with earlier texts, especially Seneca’s Epistulae Morales, Tacitus’ Dialogus, and Pliny’s Epistles, in order to demonstrate Gellius’ mastery of this earlier tradition and to reveal his innovation in light of these predecessors.
DiGiulio, Scott J.,
"Aulus Gellius, the Noctes Atticae, and the Literary Logic of Miscellany Under the High Roman Empire"
(2015).
Classics Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0XK8CZF
