Why I (Sometimes) Teach Bad Latin
On Listening To and Learning from Millennial Students
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Last spring a student noticed that we weren’t planning to offer an advanced level Latin course in the fall, but he (and others) wanted to continue their study. Would I be willing to offer a course? The prospect of an overload never stirs my innermost soul, but when a gaggle of students are clamoring to read Latin … well, let’s just say I caved in. I told them that since the class was not part of our regular course offerings, they could choose the text, and they chose … Aulus Gellius.
If you are anything like me, you might have felt your heart sink at this moment. The last time I read any extended stretch of Gellius was probably in graduate school, and since then I have consulted him only when he has something pithy to say about language or meter or Roman life — that is, in some small excerpt from a book of the Attic Nights. This is the moment where I could have tried to steer them to a different choice, something that I was more comfortable with, something that was a “better” work of literature, something more canonical. But they had gone to the trouble to find Gellius, and so I would do my best to create a meaningful class experience for them. And so began my summer.
There are probably all kinds of reasons we don’t typically teach Gellius — he loves archaic forms, he offers no coherent narrative, the collection of extracts and meditations even within a single book seem random. Students don’t study the late 2nd century they way they do the late Republic and early Empire. Even the literary issues surrounding Gellius probably don’t seem terribly interesting to most of us. Instead we complain about the abundance of Cato the Elder, false etymologies, philosophical diatribes and snarky witticisms.
An intermediate or advanced undergraduate, you might think, would find Gellius a bore or would have trouble fitting these anecdotes into a historical framework. And there is so much of him! You can’t read all of Gellius the way you can read an entire comedy or oration. And when you’ve gotten to graduate school — even if you find yourself fascinated by the second sophistic — well, there are surely “better” authors out there, right?
As I tried to figure out how in the world I was going to teach this monstrous book that I had limited interest in, and that was always represented to me in my education as “lesser than,” I read a few things that made me curious if not eager to dip further into Gellius.
One, Wytse Keulen’s Gellius the Satirist, offered a way of thinking about Gellius as someone who writes not only for others, but also to fashion a sense of identity. Gellius’s emphasis on Rome gives him a way to put himself in the center of that story; his hobnobbing with Favorinus allows him to subtly curate his own identity. As a fan of George Plimpton’s sports writing, I could see how Gellius too reveals himself through his anecdotes without resorting to memoir. Call him a participatory encyclopedist, perhaps.
Erik Gunderson’s Nox Philologiae offered a real treasure, as Gunderson appears to write about Gellius while channeling his spirit. As a scholarly book it delights (not something that can be said of most), and part of the pleasure is the way that you can dip into it at almost any point, the way the order and layout and conceit of the volume surprises at every turn. Who expects an index in the middle of the book? Who bothers to preface each section of a chapter with a Latin epigram à la Gellius? Who writes three (but actually four) prefaces to his book? Gunderson, I should add, does all of this not (or not only) to cause consternation, but to immerse his reader into a Gellian sea. And as much as the experience is surprising and disruptive, it is likewise illuminating, exciting and joyous. Yes, joyous! To read scholarship about Gellius.
But these books ought — and do — return us to our object, the Attic Nights itself. Upon reflection, it is curious that instructors wouldn’t select a work that surprises and delights in turn. Surely, it’s intellectually stimulating to read not only the content of these volumes, but also to query what we can see of the mind behind it (even if it is a carefully curated self-representation). Moreover, we can plumb what Gellius himself says about his motivations for writing.
Gellius’s preface is both where I started my own reading and started the class, because he offers a rationale for his work and because he reveals so much of his persona in it already. In true Gellian fashion I offer here my favorite extracts:
On the rationale for the Attic Nights:
… so that similar kinds of recreation might be provided to my children, when their minds could be relaxed and indulged after they are given some break from their business.
For when I had taken up any book to hand, whether Greek or Latin, or when I had heard something worth remembering, I would make a note of what was so pleasing, no matter what kind it was, scribbling on whatever surface …
I yield to all the others also in the praise of the very titles of their works, just as I do in the care and elegance of the writing.
If you have never read the preface, you should race right out and do so now, for never have you read such a false bit of self-effacement. The Attic Nights is too slapdash to serve as a basis for liberal education (except that it does), it is not carefully collected and ordered (except that it is much more attentively planned than those of writers who include everything, especially those awful Greeks), and it may contain familiar selections (but it’s probably your problem if you find them trite) or unfamiliar anecdotes (but it’s probably your problem if you find them boring or useless). For me, in the end, it comes down to this moment in the preface in which Gellius speaks of collections that people don’t enjoy:
When reading them your mind will grow weary from old age and boredom before you find one or two things that are either a pleasure to read or edifying to have read or useful to remember.
In the middle of September, we jumped into this terrible collection of bad Latin written by a tedious, pompous, long-dead man. For most of my students, this was their first reading course after finishing first-year Latin. And do you know what, gentle reader? They loved him.
They loved his personality, even if it is an annoying one (because I suspect most of us have an uncle or a teacher or a scout leader in our past who is pompous is just this way, but an excellent raconteur). They loved learning snippets of Roman history (and it gave students who love history a way to show off — not unlike Gellius himself). They loved the variety — a fable by Aesop might be followed by an anecdote about the censors, which might lead to a tale about the Sibylline oracle. Gellius took us to far-flung locations, back and forth in time.
There was something to delight everyone — the proto-psychologists, mathematicians, and scientists. You can dip in wherever you like, and hop out again if it fails to move you. If reading Aeneid 1 or the first Catilinarian is like listening to an album from beginning to end, Gellius is a randomized playlist, one that you can reorder to your heart’s content.
This is not to say that there is no cognitive work to be done when reading Gellius. Rather, the kinds of issues that my students grappled with were those that are, perhaps, critical for individuals who curate their lives on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. The entries in the Attic Nights, each with its summarizing (and sometimes tantalizing, sometimes obfuscating) epigraph, can be slipped into and out of with ease. The seeming randomness of the collection — like one’s news feed — proves itself not as random as one might think, though Gellius is an algorithm unto himself. Perhaps Gellius is the perfect Latin author for the digital generation.
That said, the work of the class had to be more than delighting in and being informed by Gellius’s choices for us. The real work was revealing the man behind the curtain, so that after each selection we had to ask ourselves what was his intention in including the selection and what does it reveal about him. Sometimes his message seemed too obvious (such as the tale of why sons aren’t allowed to go to the Senate with their fathers, I.23), and others were harder to puzzle out (the walls of the pomerium, XIII.14).
Looking at an entire book of the Attic Nights asked us to think about the sequencing, length and content of the selections (since we all agreed that his boast about the randomness of the excerpts was a fiction). We grappled with questions of audience, of intention, and of tone. And the temporal range of the sources for these extracts — the old-timey-ness of many of them — had to be emphasized many times (that the distance between Cato the Elder and Gellius, for example, was as great as that between Louis XIV or William Penn and themselves).
Their final assignment was to create their own collection, titled (of course) Kalamazoo Nights. Each had to curate a minimum of seven selections. They were asked to reflect on Gellius’s process — to collect selections with intention, to order them deliberately, to educate, to delight, and to provoke memory. Moreover, each student had to offer a preface in which she stated the rationale for the collection. The results were more than I could have hoped for. To entice you, behold this random selection of their epigraphs:
•A passage about my preparations for a Christmas gift exchange
•About what Henry Clay said regarding leisure and work
•This is a list of superstitions I grew up with
•How David Foster Wallace describes the feeling of being aware of oneself
•Why we have not encountered aliens yet
•The power of ridiculous online quizzes
• About the elephant, a remarkable animal
This is a short sample, but if you know anything of Gellius, you will see that these are not far off the mark. The kinds of things that delighted his readers — history, pithy sayings, oddities of language, philosophy, fortune telling and natural history — it is all here.
Did this assignment prove that they understood Gellius’s project? Without a doubt. They demonstrated it not only in their content, but in how they articulated their rationale for the order of their selections — to surprise, to delight, to educate, to leave me (their reader) with something vivid.
Yet, almost to a person, the assignment did much more. Just as Gellius revealed intentionally or accidentally what a persnickety cultural conservative he is, my students also took the opportunity to reveal things that lie at the core of who they are. Some struggle with illnesses that have shaped their lives — and their selections include texts that have sustained them. Others revealed personal heartbreaks and fortuitous encounters. Journeys, origins, diagnoses, political affiliations, pet causes — things that students might not willingly share with their teacher they were happy to explain now that I was their student. For one of the aspects of the preface that they returned to time and again was the notion that this was written for Gellius’s children. What would you share with your children if you wanted to educate and delight them? If you didn’t want it to be boring and exhaustive? I don’t know that I am my students’ ideal reader, but by god I was a grateful one.
When I agreed to teach Gellius to this group of millennials, I would have huffed at you that I was doing them a favor, shaken my head about the youth of today, and returned to my reading with a loud harrumph. But it turns out the youth of today know what they are about. I found myself delighted by Gellius’s archaisms, charmed by his tales, and falling in love with the ever-present cantankerous Cato the Elder. How much better to read something new, to follow my students in answering questions that matter to them, in hearing what they can teach me. Bad Latin? Boring author? Sign me up.
Elizabeth Manwell is a collector of no-knead bread recipes, furry animals and half-finished knitting projects. When she’s not sweeping up dog hair, she teaches classics at Kalamazoo College.
