depicted in Gellius, and so the whole of the scene has a richly represen-
tative feeling for Gellius’s readers.^2 Gellius comes in company with his
friend Julius Celsinus to visit Fronto, ill with gout. We are presented
with a fascinating tableau. Fronto reclines on a little Greek sickbed
(in scrimpodio Graeciensi) ‘‘surrounded on all side by men renowned for
intellectual capacity, birth, or wealth.’’ Fronto is busy with some builders,
discussing plans for adding a new bath complex. To a remark by one of the
builders, one of Fronto’s friends interjects a comment that, as it happens,
contains the expression,praeterpropter, ‘‘more or less.’’ Fronto stops all
conversation at once, looks at his friend, and asks whatpraeterpropter
means. The friend demurs, referring the question to a celebrated gram-
marian sitting nearby. The grammarian dismisses the question—honore
quaestionis minime dignum: ‘‘hardly deserving the honor of the inquiry’’—
because the word is an ‘‘utterly plebeian expression,’’ the idiom of work-
ers rather than of cultivated men. Fronto objects: how canpraeterpropter
be a lowly expression when Cato and Varro and other early writers use it?
Gellius’s friend Julius Celsinus now interposes the information that the
word is used in theIphigeneiaof Ennius, and asks that the bookroll
itself be produced. It is, and the chorus containing the word is read. The
defeated grammarian, sweating and blushing, beats a hasty exit to the
loud laughter of many; whereupon a general exodus ensues.
Note how swiftly the social scene shifts, by catalysis from some chance
remark, into a literary event. The movement from social converse to book-
ishness to actual reading is seamless. When we unpack the event, we see
the following elements. The marked social group is composed generally
of powerful men, but as a matter of course includes the intellectually
powerful. A topic, introduced serendipitously, immediately leads to a
philological challenge: what exactly does a given word mean? The challenge
is passedalongtoa specialist—presentbecausethesocialgroup isconstructedin
that way—who is then able to assert his expert knowledge. But the expert
falls prey to the superior knowledge of the master, Fronto, and his aristo-
cratic friend, Celsinus. As final arbiter, the literary texts themselves are
ushered in: first, by reference and then literally (as the text of Ennius is
summoned to be read). The bookroll itself delivers the decisive evidence.
The episode now over, the group breaks up—which signals indirectly that
the literary event, fortuitous though it was, wasthe reason why the social
group was constituted. In Gellius’s world, elite society seems to exist
for literary events of exactly this type: this is what the crowd of distin-
guished men is waitingforas they watch Fronto deal with his builders.
- Philological quibbles in group settings abound inNA; for more specific elements,
cf., for example, for the motif of the intellectualposeur, 1.2, 4.1, 9.15, 13.20, 13.31, 17.3
(and in similar vein 1.10, 5.21, 6.17, 7.16, 8.10, 8.14, 13.20, 15.9, 16.6, 18.4, 19.10, 20.10);
for the motif of deploying a book to settle a dispute, 1.2, 13.31, 17.3, 19.1, 19.8. A more
exhaustive treatment of these and other typical scenes will appear in Johnson (forthcoming).
322 Institutions and Communities