Attic Nights

The author's name and often the title of the book are frequently cited. Indeed, in other places, we see his honesty and trustworthiness as if struggling with his desire to show off his own learning. Although he does not keep silent about his sources, he mentions them as if placed behind a screen, so casually that they do not appear unless one looks with intent eyes. Sometimes, however, he proceeds by silence and concealment so far that, with the actual and immediate source suppressed, he calls upon a witness who is in reality foreign to him. This happens especially if he has drawn from contemporaries whose conversation and learning he is not reluctant to use, yet he rarely wishes to seem indebted to their books.

Therefore, although there is greater trustworthiness in Gellius regarding the citing of sources than in almost all others, there are still obstacles in investigating his true sources. For although it cannot be denied that he read all those most ancient writers—Livius, Naevius, Ennius, Laevius, Cato, Tubero, Quadrigarius, and others—nevertheless, the passages upon which he discourses learnedly and at length he very often took not from their own writings, but from the commentaries of interpreters and the arts of grammarians, to which he added here and there one or another example from his own notebooks. The same thing happened in the works of grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, and jurists, where, not infrequently, he disdained the sources of true antiquity and found it sufficient to approach those closer to him and to pluck from them things that might offer the appearance of ancient learning, so that, while he seems to be wise himself, he is skilled in nothing but the genius of another. Yet, mindful of our own custom, we shall more willingly grant him pardon—if a man of another age, and with different customs and laws in literary matters, needs pardon—when he uses things he read in some commentary as if discovered by himself, after having consulted the author himself. For we, too, very often, warned by the annotation of some interpreter or lexicographer, do not hesitate to use these for our own benefit, provided that we have inspected the passages cited and have understood them to be true and suitable, standing with the primary source. Thus, what he reports in I 11 about the custom of the Lacedaemonians and others...