Gellius’s reading community is, then, exclusionary in some special
ways. The group is not the elite-at-large, but a self-selected collection of
the ambitiously bookish. Theraison d’eˆtreof the group seems to be to play
a particular sort of learned game, in which the participants make com-
ments on language and literature with reference to antiquarian texts and
their commentators before an appraising but largely unparticipating
crowd. The masters both participate in and act as final authority for
these interactions, which are frequently in the mode of challenges to
knowledge. That the textual material be abstruse is an important criter-
ion. Those uninterested in these texts, or uninterested in the game played
with these texts, or not educated in the particulars necessary to appreciate
the interactions, are excluded from the group. Implicit is a ‘‘crowd’’ that
works hard at gaining the knowledge necessary to have even marginal
understanding of the esotericism that here plays out.
READING ALONE
To us, the scholar’s acquisition of knowledge is constructed as a solitary
activity. The world of Gellius maps differently—we have already had a
glimpse of how intermeshed scholarly reading and society can be, and we
will see more just below—but for Gellius, too, the scholar alone with his
studies is clearly a defining image. The very title,Attic Nights, refers to the
winter nights that Gellius spent as a student creating the knowledge set
necessary to participate in this erudite community. In the preface, Gellius
defines the invited readers of his work as ‘‘those who find pleasure
and keep themselves busy in reading, inquiring, writing and taking
notes, who spend wakeful nights in such work’’^3 —an image that recurs.
Sociologically, reading alone does different duty from working with texts
in the context of the group. At 14.6, afamiliarispresents to Gellius ‘‘a fat
bookroll overflowing with every sort of knowledge’’ (librum grandi volu-
mine doctrinae omnigenus praescatentem) as a resource in writing his
Nights. Gellius eagerly takes the book and shuts himself deep within the
house (recondo me penitus) in order to read itsine arbitris—‘‘without any
onlookers,’’ that is, without the distracting presence of the peer group.
Gellius’s emphasis on lucubration in the preface is, then, not simply an
issue of concentration, but a reflex of the need to protect himself from
onlookers, that is, from the competitive pressures of the supporting
society. Implicit in this is the assumption that literate events like reading
and writing commonly occur within deeply social contexts. In Gellius’s
depiction, removal from the group appears the less usual,markedcircum-
stance for reading—exactly the inverse of our society.
- Paraphrasing praef. 19; cf.hibernarumvigiliarum, praef. 10,lucubratiunculas, praef.14.
Constructing Elite Reading Communities in the High Empire 323