We can go further.^4 ‘‘Burning the midnight oil’’ remains a contempor-
ary expression, but in second-century Rome thetoposof lucubration had
been long established as a mark of serious intellectual endeavor, including
especially writing poetry, oratorical study, and ‘‘scholarly’’ pursuits—as
we see from examples in Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, Pliny the Elder,
Quintilian, Tacitus, Juvenal.^5 The lucubration theme is a way of signaling
that the work is important, and involves immense and concentrated
effort. That effort, unusually, requires removal from others. But lucubra-
tion also typically signals work culled from leisure time, work done during
times like the evening so as not to interfere with the business of the day
(negotium, in Roman terms). At issue is the very valuation of leisure,
otium:whatshouldelite Romans spend their leisure hours doing? Strong
moralistic overtones come into play. Counterpoised in the Roman cul-
tural schematic is the other expected way to spend one’s evening, that is,
in entertainments with varying degrees of idleness or debauchery. The
anxiety to position the scholar’s nighttimeotiumas one worthy of a
dutiful Roman comes out in a variety of sources in the early empire
(such as the preface to Pliny’sNatural History,orEpistle8 of Seneca).
Gellius, who hardly mentions hisnegotiumotherwise, nonetheless feels
compelled to stress in the preface that he ‘‘made himself busy and weary
by rolling and unrolling many a bookroll in every break fromnegotium
in which I could steal someotium’’ (praef. 12; cf. 23). For archaizing
conservatives of Gellius’s era, lucubration took on associations with
hard work and duty, and it is no coincidence that these same elite chose
to overlook the elegancies of Augustan and Silver Age literature to con-
centrate on the hardy texts of the Republic. What at first seems a simple
case of a scholar needing to be alone to concentrate on reading and writing
turns out to be far more: a cultural construction ofotiumthat carries
with it essentialist notions of what it is to be ‘‘Roman.’’
READING IN THE GROUP
I have already remarked that in Gellius, reading and other text-centered
events commonly occur within social contexts, much more so than in our
own culture. A systematic presentation of evidence is not possible here,
but even a few further examples will serve both to flesh out that state-
ment and to delineate some characteristic behaviors.
- Far the best general study of the Romans’ cultural construction of reading by lamp
light is Ker 2004, on which this paragraph in part depends. - Writing poetry: Lucretius 1.142; Juvenal 1.51 on Horace; Tacitus,Dial. 9. Oratorical
study: Cicero,Cael. 45; Q. CiceroFam. 16.26.1; QuintilianInst. 10.3.25 27. ‘‘Scholarly’’
pursuit: VarroLing.Lat. 5.9; Cicero,Parad. praef. 5; SenecaEp. 8.1; PlinyNHpraef. 18, 24,
18.43.
324 Institutions and Communities