The uses of discourse

One of Gellius’s dialogues’ strongest links with that genre is the important function of aporeia. Though many scenes reach a conclusion, many also do not; as in some dialogues of Plato, and many stretches of the QC, no clear answer is found, but the process of seeking it is made no less important by that fact. 12.5, for example, cuts off even though Taurus had more to say.56 _{In 19.10, the group disbands without an answer}

to its question, but having successfully exposed in the course of seeking to answer it the worthlessness of the residentgrammaticus.57

Gellius’s interest in questions-that-stimulate is programmatic and well-documented.58

He delights in riddles, recalls a teacher’s vigorous defense of sophisms, and proudly re- ports another teacher’s praise of the kind of question he asked on one occasion.59 Good 56_{Cum haec Taurus dixisset uidereturque in eandem rem plura etiam dicturus, peruentum est ad}

uehicula, et conscendimus (12.5.15).

57_{Atque ita omnes relicta ibi quaestione verbi consurreximus (19.10.14).} 58_{Keulen 2009: 158f.}

59_{12.6; 7.13.7; 9.1.3. Cf 18.1. For literary delight in riddling, see Plutarch, Dinner of the Seven}

questions are thus to be treasured, while other questions of uncertain quality must be tested by attempting to answer them; the best have a beneficial value far beyond their factual answers. This is the animating spirit of problematic literature with which Gel- lius is acquainted — as he is with its didactic potential, observed in 20.4 when Taurus sends a selection of Aristotelian problemata for a student to reflect on (and so, it is hoped, mend his ways). It is noteworthy, in this context, that the Noctes is set up as one enormous question-and-answer session, with many of the entries in its table of contents presenting the passages they refer to in terms of questions.60 _{Sometimes, then,}

a listener/reader might be attracted to a conversation/account of a conversation by the question under discussion, while the value with which they are rewarded will have an uncertain relationship to the ostensible topic. Question and answer may not match.

Another attractive quality of speech or discourse might be the authority or titles of those involved. So in 19.13 Gellius is part of a separate party when he sees several learned men talking together and is moved to listen in on theirsermones:

stabant forte una in uestibulo Palatii fabulantes Fronto Cornelius et Festus Pos- tumius et Apollinaris Sulpicius, atque ego ibi adsistens cum quibusdam aliis ser- mones eorum, quos de litterarum disciplinis habebant, curiosius captabam.

They happened to be standing together in the fore-court of the Palatine, chatting, Cornelius Fronto and Postumius Festus and Sulpicius Apollinaris, and I (standing nearby with some others), sought to eavesdrop on their conversations that they were having about the discipline of letters. (19.13.1)

The scene that follows is a complex and careful role-play, in which respected authorities carefully negotiate their relationships to each other and courteously discuss a question of usage. Gellius, attracted by the authority of the participants, clearly comes away not just with witty quotations from them but having observed a model of the conversation of learned gentlemen.61 _{Although the conversation of learned men is occasionally a}

60_{Cf Riggsby 2007.}

61_{Kaster 1997: 60 discusses Gellius’s concern thatgrammatici should behave like “gentlemen”. Cf}

static source of information to be used later, it seems more valuable to observe their minds in action, responding to each other and various prompts.62 _{It is a medium of}

learning every bit as important as classroom lessons and lectures, a complementary relationship Gellius notes at 19.8.1.

This sort of learned discourse that attracts an audience may be prompted in a variety of ways. Sometimes characters confront each other aggressively; other times questions arise from things seen, like inscriptions, or — importantly — from passages that come up in social reading. Whether read or spoken, any bit of language can prompt a productive conversation that illustrates not just facts about the text in question but values of learnedness. This potential of discourse is represented by Gellius as a latent phenomenon to be drawn out by a keen teacher (in the tradition of Plato’s Socrates), a learned participant, or — in the case of a fictional conversation — the narrator himself. In 4.1, after Favorinus has turned a grammaticus’s boasts into a philosophically inflected (and juristically informed) lesson on the nature of language and definition, Gellius explicitly credits Favorinus with this Socratic ability to guide conversation for educational benefit:63

sic Favorinus sermones id genus communes a rebus paruis et frigidis abducebat ad ea, quae magis utile esset audire ac discere, non allata extrinsecus, non per ostentationem, sed indidem nata acceptaque.

In this way Favorinus would lead ordinary conversations of that sort from cold and trivial matters to those which it would be more useful to hear or learn, not things brought in from outside the subject (and not to show off), but rather things native to and discovered in the same place.(4.1.19)

The qualities of Favorinesermo are the very ones that cause Gellius to include things in the Noctes. Indeed, the idea of a conversation that is useful to hear or learn from underlies the Gellian approach to narrating discourse I have outlined above; Gellius, 62_{In 5.13 and 15.4 facts are attributed to anonymous old learned men, who are in complete agreement}

with each other.

as narrator, has the same responsibility as Favorinus. So at 14.5 he represents a con- versation between two famous grammatici which he explicitly identifies as not worth listening to further (14.5.4); it is only with his careful narrator’s guidance that we can be exposed to just enough of the conversation to understand why we would not wish to be exposed to it again.

It is of course to Plato that the ideas of both carefully guided discourse and use- ful fiction can be traced, but Gellius’s use of the strategies and engagement with its anxieties is distinctively Imperial. Where Plato’s lengthy dialogues examine professions and characters one by one, Gellius offers a constantly rotating cast of urban characters, ever-shifting, emerging unexpectedly and surrounded by reputation orsectatores, more attuned to the rhythms of Imperial Rome, serving needs less philosophical than social. Some scenes are set on the edge of legal or court space, or intersect with ever-shifting social orbits. Most interestingly, though we might identify the fictionalised-scene-for- teaching-purposes with Socrates’s “well-born lie” for the populace of his Republic (Re- public 414B-C), Gellius’s Imperial perspective fully embraces the anxieties that sur- round that fiction. The noble lie depends, unsettlingly, on its being accepted wholesale by most of the population, whereas Gellius seems to want his stories to be seen through, as it makes them all the more instructive. He is hardly alone in this approach to fic- tion.64 The anxiety of the noble lie is at the core of the dialogue, of course: to convey its message, does dialogue need to be accepted as literal truth by its reader? Clearly not, nor does the Aesopic fable’s power come from the reader’s actual belief in speaking animals, but rather from his or her attention being held by that image.

Dialogue must necessarily function on both levels simultaneously to be effective: the reader must accept the fiction of the scene insofar as it allows him or her to follow 64_{And see Gill 1993 for the problems generally of truth/falsehood/fiction discussion in antiquity. For}

a different perspective, on myth in Plutarch generally, see Hardie 1992. For the metaphor of eating cf CiceroDe Inv 1.25. In the Roman political context, fiction can have social implications; see Feldherr 1998: 74-5, Sailor 2006: 342.

the course of the internal dialectic, but must also be aware of the text’s fictionality enough to scrutinise that course. This is the quality with which Gellius imbues his dialogic episodes: he is participant enough to contribute, but his silent, internal re- flections represent a distanced, objective observer. Gellius’s narrated scenes give the reader a perspective that can see through the frauds and fake-outs of various unsavoury intellectual types; similarly, he challenges the reader to see through the stories, even while his or her attention is held by the inlecebra of its dramatic narrative or pressing question, to the more significant lesson it is illustrating. Critical to Gellius’s didactic programme, played out in various forms over the Noctes’s nearly-400 articles, is that the reader come to observe its dynamics at work. Critical reading and sensitivity to both the deceptions of surface presentation and the significance of deeper text thus scale in theNoctes from individual texts and people up to the Noctes itself.