INTRODUCTION

Aulus Gellius, the Antonine chronicler of his own and others’ reading, knew a thing or two about the hazards of misjudging the contents of a book.^[13] Among the books he describes reading in his Noctes Atticae are many works of Republican and early Imperial jurists, preserving fragments of them for modernity.^[14] It is often assumed that his reading was connected to his occasional service as a judge, despite his lack of interest in reconciling his reading of older material with his own contemporary legal situation.^[15] If we consider the Noctes as simply the product of scholarly efforts, then we are left to conclude that he finds jurists’ work an interesting source of facts for his project.

What I offer here is a brief tour of that material. I am interested not in the legal content of Gellius’s juristic reading, or even the jurists themselves, but rather how he describes and represents the reading of them; I thus am interested here to interpret and characterise narrative technique rather than analyse legal substance. I take the Noctes as a strongly protreptic text: under­standing its narration of its author’s reading as a careful and intentional pro­gramme of self-representation (rather than mere documentary fact), designed to emphasise and prompt reflection on certain elements of an intellectual lifestyle, will allow us to take its use of narrative, rhetoric, and juxtaposi­tion as a valuable illustration of an imperial Roman who was thinking and talking about his own mind. In short, if we let it, the Noctes can begin to help us situate juristic literature along more ‘mainstream’ disciplines on the intellectual landscape - or at least elite bookshelves - of Antonine Rome.

Jurists feature regularly in a kind of narrative moment important to Gellius’s project: he turns towards an authority figure. I will examine the various questions that Gellius turns to a jurist to answer, and the other authorities who are present when a jurist has something to offer. Gellius frames encounters with juristic literature as an important part of learning about the mos maiorum and the language of the ancient Romans, carefully inte­grating jurists into enquiries alongside other kinds of authoritative source. He emphasises the studiousness and curiosity of good juristic writers which lead them to provide accounts of customs and words that can supplement or even supplant those of more commonly-encountered writers of antiquitates.^[16] As he excludes juristic reading from his judicial duties, he also emphasises the broad range of other kinds of knowledge and literature whose authority can speak to questions that arise from actual legal experience.

The effect is twofold: we are reminded that when we answer legal ques­tions, it is important to be well read, but we are also encouraged to make jurists part of our wide reading, for purposes that go well beyond the legal. Juristic knowledge, for Gellius, is both culturally mainstream in its antiquar­ian methodology, and uniquely complementary to the other genres and modes of books and enquiry available to the curious Roman intellectual.

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