Nir Stern
The amount of knowledge in our world is amazing, staggering really. Knowledge of any kind is being developed and expounded by both professionals and amateurs. In universities and research centers knowledge is being created as it always has been. Take one look outside the window of your library, college, or faculty building and you’ll catch several “Departments of…” cultivating accepted wisdoms and creating new ones. On social media platforms and other online venues, knowledge and ideas are likewise created and shared amongst billions of people who discuss them, add to them, and mold them into something new. It is virtually an impossible task to keep abreast of this ever-growing body of knowledge. Even if we stick to data and facts alone, it is still too much for a single mind. Do you know (in varying degrees of difficulty) Who painted The Scream? What blockchain is? How many elements there are? When the Bible was composed? Who Indira Gandhi was? What makes the sky blue? or How many characters there are in the Chinese alphabet? (answers below). *
Some platforms offer means to navigate through this vast sea of knowledge without being shipwrecked: different channels on Youtube, websites such as Medium, which host many specialized blogs, or Aeon, which offers a space for professionals to publish on different subjects. In these media you can browse through ideas from different fields of knowledge that do not always have anything in common or any relation to what you do in your private and professional life. String theory and Latin poetry reside next to each other, with AI and Machine Learning as their neighbors. These platforms, though, have a common feature which goes against their explicit and implicit agenda of exposure to a wide range of topics:* they are all algorithm-based. Watch a video about Socratic philosophy and Youtube will offer you one about Aristotle. Read an article concerning “Human Capital” and you’ll find at the end of it further pieces tagged under “Economics”, “Politics & Government”, and “Work”. Indeed, users can outsmart the algorithm and personalize their feeds. But just as with the end result of the algorithm, this only means that you reduce the variety of topics in your feed, which again works against any attempt to expose yourself to as many interesting branches of knowledge as you can.
Alright, but what does a work from second-century Rome have to do with this?
The Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius is usually referred to as a miscellany. That is, a work covering a broad range of topics that either have nothing in common or share a somewhat general overarching theme (e.g., Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae or Favorinus’ Colorful History). The early imperial era is marked by a rise in works of such kind. This rise is often associated with a change in the concept of education. The learned, the pepaideuomenoi, had just too much material to cover, from Homer to Vergil, to Pythagorean mathematics, to Stoic ethics. An educated person was expected to know the canon of Greek and Latin literature, to be familiar with the teachings of, at least, the major philosophical schools, and to be able to comment smartly on themes ranging from plastic arts, language and linguistics to horticulture and farming. To this one should add historical, geographical (think Pausanias), scientific (à la Pliny), and mythological (an Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca) knowledge. This immense body of knowledge begged for compendia. And so, just as a Youtube channel on World History or Physics, works like the Noctes Atticae provided a means of educating oneself across a broad range of disciplines.
These miscellaneous troves of knowledge, then, are somewhat akin to our modern Youtube channels inasmuch as taking, for instance, Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca in your hands is similar to searching for ‘Greek mythology’ on Youtube. One obvious difference (among many, of course), is that the Bibliotheca was ordered by its author, while Youtube has no such strict guiding hand. But in both cases, whether by the authorial arbiter of wisdom or by Google’s latent algorithms, you are constrained to a certain field of knowledge.
It is here that the Noctes Atticae begins to differ from contemporaneous works. Variety is key in Gellius’ work, and this becomes even clearer when compared to works more varied than Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca.
Authors of miscellanies were aware of the wide range of topics covered in their works and tried to organize them in a way that made browsing simple. A good example is Pliny’s Natural History. This work extends from questions about the essence of the world, through descriptions of fauna and flora, to discussions of magic and medicine, before ending with precious stones and gems; indeed, variety is key here as well. Pliny knew that this encyclopedic work was not likely to be read cover-to-cover over a weekend (or scroll-to-scroll, as it were, over a Saturnalia). Rather, he understood it as a work to be consulted to learn about a specific branch of knowledge. To facilitate reading and navigation of the voluminous work Pliny added a table of contents. Interested in eels? No problem! Browse until you reach: Libro IX continetur aquatilium natura, then search for Anguillae, and you’ll be referred to chapter 39. You then only need to open the right scroll, read whatever you want and carry on happily with other concerns.
The Noctes Atticae, though, differs from its counterpart miscellanies. Indeed, it is also a work of encyclopedic nature and, like Pliny’s Natural History, also parades a table of contents. Alas, whereas Pliny attempted to make the life of his readers simple, Gellius seems to have deliberately made them difficult. Browsing through the table of contents you’ll find out that the chapters appear in a completely random order (and only at the beginning of the work). The first book opens with the story about how Pythagoras was able to calculate the height of Hercules,* follows with a bit of contemporary Stoic wisdom, and moves on to a discussion of friendship by using the example of Chilo the Lacedaemonian. We move between topics, times, and places. This is a deliberate avoidance of the systematic debate of a given issue. The readers will quickly understand that they can do one of two things: either follow the non-order by reading the work from start to finish or open it up at random places and read a chapter or two. Either way, they will be exposed to different bits of learning from different branches of knowledge. Moreover, to add to this lack of a system, each chapter (there are around 20 in each of the five books) is of different length and style. A somewhat long dialogue-like section can follow a discussion of a literary quotation, which is preceded by a story from Gellius’ own life.
So, did Gellius suffer from a severe case of ADD or is there sense to this mess?
Perhaps you would not be surprised to find out that there is. Gellius’ choice of this haphazard style was suggested by his agenda of anti-professionalism. The vast sea of knowledge that an educated reader had to be familiar with meant to Gellius that one could not (and should not) specialize in a specific field. If one were to focus on philosophy one might miss out on rhetoric. If people read only history, how would they know mathematics? Moreover, what about those less leisured? Those who spent most of their day in the courts, the senate, or were otherwise engaged with daily business did not always have the time to invest in reading. If they wished to be able to partake in civilized discussion, to appear to be a man of civilized education (vir civiliter eruditus), they could not afford specialization. They needed to be able to make smart comments in table talks, conviviae, and recitationes that were part of their daily lives and for that they required a broad learning. The Noctes Atticae was the kind of work that would expose them to a plethora of disciplines, topics, and gems of knowledge, in a piecemeal, random fashion.
In a way, this anti-professionalism can be described as a fight against the algorithm, against the authorial power that constricts the audience’s knowledge to an ever-narrowing field and feeds it information in an arranged order. If by watching two Youtube videos about modern art the algorithm will bombard the user’s feed almost solely with videos about art, then how can she talk about Bitcoin? If the user’s page is personalized to show articles about the humanities, how will he learn about thermodynamics?
Not every chapter in the Noctes Atticae is relevant to our lives today. However, as a whole, its educational program very much is. In our busy lives, in the vast sea of knowledge and the ever-increasing speed of its development, Gellius and his Noctes Atticae suggest that we ought to dismiss the algorithm, avoid letting it make the choices for us, and fight against the machine so that we may be able to become truly educated.
Notes
* Almost one-line answers: Edvard Munch, 1893. A digital ledger in which transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are recorded chronologically and publicly. 118. (The Hebrew Bible) sometime between 2nd c. BCE to 2nd c. CE. First and, to date, the only female Prime Minister of India (1966-77), who was assassinated in 1984. Sunlight reaches Earth’s atmosphere and is scattered (Rayleigh scattering): the wavelength of blue light is the shortest and is therefore scattered the most, and this is why we see a blue sky most of the time. Somewhere in the tens of thousands area, but you can read Chinese even if you know only 3000-4000 characters (祝好运!).
* ‘Medium taps into the brains of the world’s most insightful writers, thinkers, and storytellers to bring you the smartest takes on topics that matter. So whatever your interest, you can always find fresh thinking and unique perspectives’: (https://medium.com/about).
* It was believed Hercules built the stadium in Olympia which was larger than other ones. Pythagoras made his calculation by comparing the size of the stadiums and extrapolating to the ratios of the human body.
* Websites mentioned: www.youtube.com; www.medium.com; www.aeon.co.
* Works consulted: Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae (the preface is a highly recommended reading); Vardi, ‘Why Attic Nights? or What’s in a Name?’, CQ 43 1 (1993), 298-301; Vardi, ‘Gellius against the Professors’, ZPE 137 (2001), 41-54; Holford-Strevens, Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and his Achievement, 2003; Holford-Strevens and Vardi, The Worlds of Aulus Gellius, 2004; Oikonomopoulou, ‘Miscellanies’, in Richter and Johnson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook to the Second Sophistic, (Oxford: 2017), 447-63.