The Roman miscellanist Aulus Gellius was the author of the Noctes Atticae (ca. a.d. 180"), a collection of mainly brief expositions, based on notes or excerpts he had made in the course of reading about particular topics in a variety of fields such as philosophy, history, and law, but above all, grammar as the Greeks and Romans understood it, the study of language and literature at large. Apart from preserving much information and many literary fragments that would otherwise have been lost, the work bears theoretical and practical witness to the so-called archaizing movement of the second century a.d. and has not lost its capacity to charm readers by its elegance and variety of exposition.

In late antiquity and the Middle Ages, Gellius was often known as "Agellius," an attested but very rare name; some humanists maintained that this form, not "A. Gellius," was correct. However, the...