Attic Nights

and a few [passages] where the author's name appears, in Vopiscus, Lactantius, Servius, Augustine, Priscian, and very many where the author himself is concealed—so that he may be the more plundered—in Apuleius, Nonius, Ammianus, the glossographers, and others. Those who follow in their train from the 9th century onward—Einhard, John of Salisbury, Vincent of Beauvais, Adam of Balsam, and not a few others—are of no value for restoring the text and were to be removed from this smaller edition. In one place, X 17, I have transcribed Vincent, where he brings forward things other than and more than Gellius; although I think he knew this from another source, just as John of Salisbury in I 14 suggested more things from Fronto than the Gellian Hyginus ¹), nevertheless I did not wish to suppress it entirely.

When Gellius proposed a gathered forest of resources, he filled his notebooks with the most famous names of antiquity, so that anyone who peruses his book without being warned by anyone cannot help but be amazed by the large store of learning. Yet, those inquiring more accurately into his sources cannot fail to notice that Gellius did not amass these treasures by his own work alone, but that he enriched himself no less with fruits that grew in the fields of others. In this matter, however, he stands far above most writers of those ages. For he did not, in their customary manner, plunder the desks of authors he did not even name, but for the most part ²) he candidly does not defraud them of the praise they are due.