Aulus Gellius

c. 125 CE–c. 180 CE · Rome

Aulus Gellius (c. 125 - after 180 CE) was a Roman writer and antiquarian, active in the age of the Antonine emperors. He is remembered for a single surviving work, the "Attic Nights," a sprawling collection of short essays and notes on grammar, law, philosophy, history, and curious points of language that he gathered from his reading and conversations. Because it preserves many quotations from authors whose own works are now lost, it is a valued source for the literary and intellectual life of the ancient world.

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Stop 1 of 1125–180Lived

RomeרומאItaly

What they did here

Roman author of the Attic Nights.

Rome in this era

Under the emperors (from Augustus, 27 BCE) Rome was the capital of an empire stretching from Britain to Syria, a city of perhaps a million people. Greek-speaking philosophers, physicians, rhetoricians and historians came to teach and write there; Domitian expelled philosophers from the city around 93-95 CE, and in the 3rd century Plotinus taught in Rome (244-270).

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

Epictetus, Juvenal, Florus, Lucius Annaeus, Favorinus of Arelate, Appian of Alexandria, Aelius Herodianus

Across the traditions, in Rome at the same time

See other sages who lived in Rome→

In the same place & time

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

Across the traditions

In the same tradition

Epictetus, Juvenal, Florus, Lucius Annaeus, Favorinus of Arelate, Appian of Alexandria, Aelius Herodianus, Galen, Lucius Verus, Cassius Dio, Herodian, Aelian

The world in their lifetime

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