Reading Cato’s Origins in Antonine Rome: fact and fiction in Gellius’ Attic Nights

Reading Cato’s Origins in Antonine Rome: fact and fiction in Gellius’ Attic Nights

This paper presents the findings to date of a project on the ancient transmission, reception, and circulation history of Cato’s Origins, with a focus on Gellius’ place within it. Gellius is our largest single source for the Origins, and he routinely quotes the work verbatim or engages closely with the text: FRHist’s 28 Catonian fragments deriving from the Noctes Atticae offer easily the most extensive and qualitatively the best access to the work we have available. In comparison with the ancient commentators on Vergil (our largest conglomerate source), Gellius can quote at far greater length, and he does so for a broader range of reasons. That he does so amounts to a tacit suggestion that he had direct access to the work—a questionable and an intriguing part of his self-construction.

One reason why that self-representation is questionable is that Gellius does not seem to have had equal access to all seven books of the Origins, as appears from the uneven distribution of his references. Of the 28 fragments he supplies, eight are from Book 4 and eleven from Book 5, with the other nine distributed in ones or twos among the remaining five books, and two fragments unassigned. Extensive reference is confined to two passages, one each from Books 4 and 5: (1) the description in Book 4 of the military tribune whom Cato compares to the Spartan Leonidas (F 76 = NA 3.7); and (2) Gellius’ dispute with Tiro on the merits of the Pro Rhodiensibus, as inserted into Book 5 (F 87–93 = NA 6.3). All other references besides these demonstrably derive at second hand from lexicographical or etymological collections originating in the late republic, which also supply the Vergilian commentators’ and the grammarians’ record of the Origins.

Gellius’ privileged access to the passages from Books 4 and 5 may have extended to these books in their entireties, but more likely is that he had access only to longer extracts from them: the most common ancient encounter with historical texts came in the form of purple passages, especially speeches, drawn from histories for the purposes of rhetorical training (Momigliano 1978, 1983; Nicolai). As a general principle, Gellius repeatedly uses what were evidently no more than slightly more extended excerpts of republican literature, on behalf of favored interlocutors, to trump the displays of other interpreters of the record, whose access was more curtailed (e.g., in the immediately adjacent passage at NA 6.2 [Elliott, 413, 422–3]; for the general dynamics, Howley, e.g., 169–73). The importance Gellius attaches to being able to outdo Tiro as reader at NA 6.3, not only in his judgment of Cato’s rhetoric but in being able to quote further from the Pro Rhodiensibus (Howley, 173–88), readily fits this pattern. This paper considers what was at stake for Gellius in the displays of knowledge in which the Origins played a part and shows how his unwittingly deceptive contributions to the record help shape our sense of the ancient reception Cato’s history enjoyed.