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Aelian

Aelian

c. 175 CE–c. 235 CE · Rome

Claudius Aelianus, known as Aelian, was a Roman author of the late 2nd and early 3rd century CE who wrote in Greek and lived chiefly in Italy. He is best known for 'On the Nature of Animals,' a collection of curious and moralizing anecdotes about the animal world, and for the 'Various History,' a miscellany of historical and biographical curiosities. His works preserve much information drawn from earlier authors now lost.

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RomeרומאItaly

We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.

About Rome

Rome, on the Tiber in central Italy, grew from an Iron Age settlement into the capital of the Roman Republic and then of an empire that by the 1st century CE ruled the whole Mediterranean. Its Jewish community, attested from the 2nd century BCE, is among the oldest in Europe. Christian tradition holds that the apostles Peter and Paul died there, and the city became the seat of the popes. After the Western Empire ended in 476 it passed to Gothic kings, to Byzantium and then to papal rule as capital of the Papal States, until it became the capital of unified Italy in 1871. Vatican City, independent since 1929, lies within it.

In Rome at the same time

Aelius Herodianus, Aulus Gellius, Galen, Cassius Dio, Herodian, Geta

Across the traditions, in Rome at the same time

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In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Aelian’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

Across the traditions

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Aelian’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(4)