Questionable advice on questionable advice (4.5)

In Gellius’s “essays”, his engagement with another authority as he answers a ques- tion or discusses a topic can often signal a shift in register or focus for the piece, pointing the way for the reader to that “further study”. Noctes 4.5 neatly illustrates this tech- nique. I will show that Gellius’s treatment of what seems to be a single question — the origin of a common saying — reframes the question as one with multiple possible answers, adding a dimension to the discussion by offering an alternative answer and placing the decision between alternatives at the point of encounter with the original material.

4.5 offers to connect a story from the chronologically vague distant Roman past to an aetiology for a versesententia. It begins with a portentous event, and describes the treacherous deception of the Etruscans summoned to Rome to expiate it. At this point it has the tones of annalistic primary material, although Gellius provides no specific citation or quotation (as he does elsewhere when it suits him).45

statua Romae in comitio posita Horatii Coclitis, fortissimi uiri, de caelo tacta est. ob id fulgur piaculis luendum aruspices ex Etruria acciti inimico atque hostili in populum Romanum animo instituerant eam rem contrariis religionibus procurare atque illam statuam suaserunt in inferiorem locum perperam transponi, quem sol oppositu circum undique altarum aedium numquam illustraret.

At Rome, the statue located in the comitium of that boldest man, Horatius Cocles, was struck from the heavens. The haruspices summoned from Etruria for the sake of offering expiation for the lightning decided, because of their unfriendly and hostile attitude toward the Roman people, to administer contrary religion in the matter; they recommended incorrectly that that statue be relocated to a 45_{Frier 1979: 58 hopes it might be original. Cf 4.6.1-2, a collection of notes based on a question}

arising from the specific language of asenatusconsultumthat Gellius quotes verbatim. We should read the annalistic style of 4.5.1 as an authorial choice.

lower place, which, surrounded on every side by the obstruction of high buildings, the sun never illuminated. (4.5.1-3)

The sparse style is unlike Gellius and efficiently lends the passage an air of antiquity.46 The tale continues, without explanation or detail, as the treachery is exposed and punished, and the children of Rome express the moral of the story in a jingle.

tum igitur, quod in Etruscos aruspices male consulentis animadversum uindicatum- que fuerat, uersus hic scite factus cantatusque esse a pueris urbe tota fertur:

malum consilium consultori pessimum est.

Then, therefore, because their bad advice had been noticed and brought in pun- ishment against the Etruscan haruspices, it is said that this verse was knowingly conceived and chanted by boys all over the city:

Bad advice is worst for the adviser. (4.5.5)

Up to this point, the narrative bears all the hallmarks of exemplary discourse as, by making the Etruscans the subject of all verbs including their own death, the story focuses on them as ethical agents. The sententia that expresses the moral of the story is then seen to emerge as if from the collective ethical consciousness of the Roman people: even the children can see the Etruscans’ crime, and together they express it in a memorable Latin form. The story is pat and engaging, giving a colourful origin to what may well have been a common expression.47 But at the last minute, Gellius backs away from responsibility for its veracity (fertur).

Gellius’s citation on the story changes immediately into a further observation that casts doubt on the whole discussion, inviting his reader to see it in, as it were, three dimensions: to evaluate the tale as the product of one tradition, but not the only one, and to consider alternatives. Perhaps explaining the curious style of the Latin, Gellius

46_{Cf 4.6.}

notes that the story of the jingle’s origin is from the Annales Maximi and a book of Verrius Flaccus’s — but that it seems to him to have another origin entirely.

ea historia de aruspicibus ac de uersu isto senario scripta est in annalibus max- imis, libro undecimo, et in Verri Flacci libro primo rerum memoria dignarum. uidetur autem uersus hic de Graeco illo Hesiodi uersu expressus:

ἡ δἐ κακἠ βουλἠ τῷ βουλεύσαντι κακίστη.

This story about the haruspices and thatsenarius verse is written in theAnnales Maximi, in Book XI, and in the first book of Verrius Flaccus’s Res Memoria Dignae. However, it seems to be a verse-from-verse translation of that line of Hesiod’s:

Bad advice is worst for the advice-giver. (4.5.6-7)48

Verrius is cast here in the role of a ready reference work, likely more accessible than the Annales themselves.49 _{By arranging the material as he does, Gelliusimplies a narrative}

of reading and reflection, in which he encountered the Verrius version of the story, but had his own reaction to it; it also implies a version of Verrius’s reading in which the earlier author was insufficiently inattentive. The same processes played out in detail with Pliny the Elder (above, p121) here are present between the lines.

Gellius’s innocent observation about the origins of the uersus are a challenge to Verrius’s authority as a guide to the relationship between Rome’s present and its antique past. The shift here is jarring, reminiscent of (or perhaps foreshadowing) the end of Noctes 18.5, where Antonius Julianus’s authoritative claims to autopsy are later found to be the stuff of notebooks. The line was, Gellius suggests, translated verbatim from a Greek γνώμη.50 In narrating his recognition of this fact (uidetur), Gellius stages

48_{Gellius typically follows several items on a topic with an authorial intrusion about other relevant}

items, e.g. 1.13.9, 2.3.5, 6.11.6, 12.4.3, 14.4.5. For closing with an alternate detail, 3.7, 6.4, 10.27, 6.19, 7.7, 9.10, 10.27. Cf 9.11.1.

49_{Rawson 1991: 15.}

50_{Hesiod,Works and Days266. Morgan 2007: 84-90 on “gnomai” generally. uersus... de... uersu ex-}

pressusrecalls the expressionuerbum de uerbo expressumat 11.16.3, which refers to literal translation, perhaps suggesting a pun; and indeed here the word orders closely match.

his encounter with the uersus and seems to invite his reader to imagine Verrius’s own (failed) encounter. With only this briefest gesture to the moment of encounter with the central element of this inquiry, Gellius destabilises the rest of the passage, breaking the simple aetiological inquiry out of its normal frame. 4.5’s capitulum promised it would relate the story that is told about the haruspices, and the fact that the uersus had its origins in that story.51 _{By the end of the article, Gellius has framed its central}

anecdote not as an authoritative or exclusive account, but as just one of several possible accounts.

This engages with several programmatic aspects of Gellian reading.52 _{Perhaps most}

destabilising to this very Roman exemplum is Gellius’s suggestion that its resultant uersus is not natively Latin but a mere translation from Greek, an interpretation that echoes Gellius’s approach elsewhere to understanding canonical Latin literary works.53 Gellius’s recognition of this fact depends both on his Greek literacy (advocated through- out the Noctes) and on his particular, Plutarch-derived style of reading, which — as discussed in the previous chapter — emphasises the identification, extraction and dy- namic later recall of important material. Plutarch himself extracted the line from Hesiod and invokes it twice in the Moralia.54 Some or all of the language of 4.5 may be from the Annales, or from Verrius, but its overall form, approach and message are Gellius through and through. It reflects Gellius’s awareness that Rome’s past pervades its present, and that behind every piece of the modern landscape (whether of the city or the language) there is a story. It also shows that background to be subject to evalu- 51_{cap.4.5: Historia narrata de perfidia aruspicum Etruscorum; quodque ob eam rem uersus hic a}

pueris Romae urbe tota cantatus est: “malum consilium consultori pessimum est”.

52_{Although Morgan forthcoming’s discussion of evidence for the use of moralising compendia —}

mostly in the form of related sententiae quoted in proximity or series — might suggest what truly underlies this passage.

53_{Vardi 1996 describes the Gellian understanding of literary influence and tradition, specifically as}

regards Latin emulation and imitation of Greek. Other parallel anecdotes: 1.5, 1.17, 3.25, 4.1 (esp.), 6.14.6-7, 11.18. Other parallel translations: 1.8, 2.27, 13.28, 16.8.4-6, 17.10, 19.11, 20.5. Cf more general parity, above p72.

ation, the product of a tradition; that tradition’s authority is shown to be conditional on its author’s credentials as a reader. Gellius, in this very brief essay (almost a single note unto itself), models an interest in and an ability to research and discuss antique Rome, but also an ability to say, in response to the usual account of such a topic, “I think you’ll find it’s more complicated than that”, authorising his command of the everyday stuff of Roman rhetoric and knowledge.

Finally, it is worth noting the self-reflexive undertones in 4.5, which comes after a series of articles that refer to consulting jurists for authoritative explanations.55 _Verrius

Flaccus is, here and elsewhere, cast by Gellius in the role of an authority a reader might turn to for advice in reading. The tale’s exempla-style focus on the ethical agency and ultimate fate of the Etruscans in their role as advisers may be an oblique gesture to the fate of Verrius’s authority. The Romans turned to the Etruscans as religious authorities, but that customary authority was undermined by these Etruscans’s deceptive and spiteful nature, which led them to give bad advice. Bad advice, the story says, is always found out, and has consequences. In the Noctes, Verrius gives bad advice, but Gellius notices it, and makes a point of undermining the earlier writer’s authority.56 Both Plutarch’s philosophical reading programme and Roman exemplary thinking oblige the reader of a story to examine its ethical implications in context and apply them to other circumstances.57 Gellius would be satisfying both approaches in using this story of unreliable authorities to provide his reader with an examination of the nature of authority.

55_{In 4.1, Favorinus and Gellius demonstrate their recall of juristic definitions of penus. 4.2 is the}

story of an obscure provision in the curule aediles’ edict, as a result of which theiure consulti ueteres

inquired into the meaning of key terms. 4.3 and 4.4 cite the jurist Servius Sulpicius on divorce; 4.3 ends with a vocabulary note: ut pleraque alia, ita hoc quoque uocabulum de Graeco flexum est (4.3.3).

56_{By which no one should be impressed (17.6.4-5, discussed above, p.174)} 57_{Langlands 2008.}