GELLIUS AND DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE

Adopting the proper attitude towards disciplinary expertise and knowledge concerns Gellius greatly. For many kinds of knowledge, Gellius weaves into the Noctes Atticae autobiographical reflections on formative experiences with those disciplines: tales of learning that kind of knowledge and learning about the nature of the discipline’s experts.

Gellius does not ever clearly articulate the turn toward juristic self­education (with the exception of Noctes 20.10, discussed below). However, an interesting and rare articulation of why a learned Roman might study the law can be found in Cicero’s De Oratore.^[19] There, part of Crassus’s case for the orator having mastery of the law (1.166 ff) is that it can be easily mastered even by an amateur (1.191-2) because its basic principles are part of everyday life and practice; and, moreover, the study of law is pleasant and stimulating because of the various kinds of interests it satisfies:

[...] plurima est et in omni iure civili et in pontificum libris et in XII tabulis antiquitatis effigies, quod et verborum vetustas prisca cognoscitur et actionum genera quaedam maiorum consuetudinem vitamque declarant.^[20] (De Oratore 1.193)

[...] there is in all the civil law and in the pontiff’s books and in the Twelve Tables an immense portrait of antiquity, as the ancient antiquity of words is mastered and certain kinds of legal formula reveal the customs and lifestyles of the maiores.

Political science, institutions of state, the Twelve Tables themselves - all this knowledge is yielded by study of law, of more value to those interested in ethics than ‘all the libraries of philosophers’ (1.193-5). By framing Roman law as a uniquely Roman cultural property, Crassus makes the study of law (and realisation of Roman superiority to Greece) a patriotic act that also brings pleasure through the pictures it paints of ancient mores.^[21]

Gellius makes a turn toward medical self-education that seems to echo these terms in important ways. As a youth in Athens staying at the country villa of Herodes Atticus (when and where, he tells us in his Preface, he began composing the Noctes),^[22] he was taken ill (Noctes 18.10). A doctor comes to check on him and, in the presence of Gellius’s teacher Taurus and various learned friends, gauchely mishandles the terms for veins and arteries (18.10.4-5), earning a careful rebuke from the philosopher Taurus (18.10.5­7).^[23] This sickbed experience leads Gellius later to an epiphany (18.10.8): that it is shameful (turpe) not to know even those things about one’s body (such as taking a pulse) which Nature has made clear and self-evident (in promptu... in propatulo). So he hunts up medical books and with a taste (attigi) of them he learns various such things relevant to the human condition (humanitatis usu non aliena).

Learning a little medicine helps one understand one’s body, but what is - to Gellius - the value of studying law? Here the problem of disciplinary authority is central: as Crassus says, law not only touches on all aspects of life, but its practice can involve a variety of methodologies. Law’s utility is in fact so ubiquitous that Gellius uses it to identify the limits of other disci­plines’ authority: so, in 12.13, Gellius recalls when as a young man, having been appointed iudex, he has a question about the terms of legal procedure and takes it to his preferred grammaticus, Sulpicius Apollinaris.

haec tunc Apollinaris scite acuteque dicere visus est. Set postea in libro M. Tullii epistularum ad Servium Sulpicium sic dictum esse invenimus [...] (12.13.20-1)

At that time, Apollinaris seemed to have said these things knowledgeably and acutely. But later I found the word used thus in a book of Letters of Marcus Tullius to Servius Sulpicius [...]

Gellius is always keen to appeal to Cicero, and it is only fitting that he is reading Cicero’s correspondence with a jurist friend.^[26] But he is also making explicit to the reader his discovery of Apollinaris’s limitations in this matter, and we might read it as Gellius’s ‘graduation’ from his devotion to grammati­cal studies when he finds that his teacher (1) does not have all the answers and (2) cannot offer answers directly relevant to Gellius’s professional needs.

The tension played out in this passage about the boundaries of utility and relevance between different disciplines is inherent to the nature of ancient disciplinary thinking. Gellius establishes a clear rivalry between the experts with a natural claim to a question by virtue of their title (iuris periti versus grammatici), but also points out the possibility of reading begun for one reason yielding an answer relevant to something else entirely. One’s private intellectual lifestyle is thus a place of active synthesis, in which wide reading and enquiry has unexpected rewards. And as Gellius turned to a grammaticus to help with the law, so he regularly finds that turning to the law helps with other things, including grammar.

A hallmark of Gellius’s regular forays into ‘archaic’ and Republican litera­ture is the frequent consultation of grammatical commentaries for assistance with the difficulties that old language presents.^[28] He represents an instinctive turn toward such commentaries with questions arise in reading, but also regular disappointment with them: so in 17.6 a group encounters an obscure phrase in a speech by Cato and immediately calls for the obvious commen­tary (17.6.2: libri statim quaesiti allatique sunt Verrii Flacci de obscuris Catonis). But Gellius rejects Flaccus’s answer and instead reports his own better one: so a story that relates a fact (the meaning of the phrase in question) also plays out a lesson about how such facts are found.

In a similar encounter, in Noctes 20.2, when the grammarian fails, it is not Gellius but the Republican jurist Ateius Capito who comes to the rescue. There, three words (siticines, liticines, tubicines) from a speech of Cato’s prompt confusion (20.2.1). Caesellius Vindex’s Commentarii Lectionum Antiquarum yields definitions of the latter two - lituus- and tuba-players, respectively - but Vindex, a regular target of Gellius, throws up his hands for the first.

nos autem in Capitonis Atei Coniectaneis invenimus ‘siticines’ appellatos, qui apud sitos canere soliti essent, hoc est vita functos et sepultos, eosque habuisse proprium genus tubae, qua canerent, a ceterorum tubicinum differens. (20.2.3)

However, I found, in the Miscellanies of Ateius Capito, that those are called sit­icines who customarily played in the presence of the ‘stored’ (siti), that is, the dead and entombed, and that they had a special kind of tuba, on which they played, differing from that of the rest of the tubicines.

Following Gellius’s scepticism about grammatici to its margins, then, has taken us over into the land of the jurists. Reasoning simplistically has led Vindex to a dead end, but Capito brings knowledge of ancient custom to bear on the problem and finds the answer: the bad grammarian knows only how to disassemble and reassemble words, but the good jurist knows far more than law, a clear contrast between those who restrict themselves to disciplinary boundaries and those who are truly learned (and happen to specialise or direct that learning toward a particular end). Jurisprudence, with its unique interests, has emerged to fill the cracks in another discipline’s expertise, and the reading of juristic literature provides knowledge one might not otherwise come across. To the elite gentleman who spends his otium on intellectual efforts, the jurists would seem to have something to offer.

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