"Nox Philologiae": Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library by Erik Gunderson

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 451 "less only than Catullus" (uno sed tibi sim minor Catullo, 10.78.16). Mattiacci discusses both poems that explicitly mention Catullus (to whom Martial refers about twenty times) and epigrams that allude to his poetry. A particularly amusing example is Ep. 1.7, in which Martial pronounces Stella's "Dove" bigger than Catullus' "Sparrow": Stellae delictum mei columba, /Verona licetaudiente dicam, /vicit, Maxime,passerem Catulli. /tanto Stella meus tuo Catullo / quantopassere maior est columba. Mattiacci rightly observes that Martial combines here a reference to the Catullan passer (as title of his collection) with an allusion to C. 49, which is addressed to Cicero and famously concludes with the words tantopessimus omnium poeta / quanto tu optimus omnium patronus. Considering the huge role that the issue of size plays in this epigram (note also the name of the addressee!), it seems very likely that Martial is, in addition, making a joke based on the obscene meaning of passer (for this and other instances of Catullus' reception in Martial, cf. S. Lorenz's essay "Catullus and Martial" in the 2007 Blackwell Companion to Catullus, ed. by M. Skinner, 418-438); although she acknowledges this connotation in the case of other epigrams (e.g., 7.14), Mattiacci does not include it in her interpretation of this text. For the reader who is interested in a general overview of the anti-mythological polemics in Martial and earlier literature as well as the reception of neoteric poetics in post-Catullan authors, this book, with its large collection of material, will doubtlessly be of use. However, neither of the authors delves very deeply into the texts themselves; their (heavily footnoted) discussions are, for the most part, rather dry and schematic, listing one exemplum after another, without offering provocative new insights in matters of interpretation. University of Toronto Regina Hôschele NoxPhilologiae: Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library. By Erik Gunderson. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 2009. Pp. ix, 313. Erik Gunderson's first two books offered novel readings of rhetorical theory and declamation respectively.1 His latest venture takes on another marginal genre of Roman writing—antiquarianism, as exemplified by Aulus Gellius' Attic Nights. Its strategy is similar, in that it aims to take the Nights seriously as literature. Always difficult, often obscure and sometimes self-indulgent, Gunderson's Nox Philologiae nevertheless has much to offer those who persevere. It presses us to think harder about what it would take to "really read" Gellius—that "insatiable reader" (6), that "reader of readings" (31). It also pushes us to consider how his bookish project relates to our own scholarly pursuits. Are we more like Gellius than we think? Might he have something to teach us? Readers be warned: this is a provocative and difficult book. Gunderson himself warns off the uninitiated with an Aristophanic injunction borrowed from Gellius' preface: "to these I declare, and again insist, and verily a third time I insist that they keep clear of our mystic dancing" (47; cf. 40-42). Tht profestum et profanum volgus would do well to heed the warning. This book delights in breaking the rules of scholarly decorum. Among its many idiosyncrasies, it professes to be a new edition of an old and anonymous work, of which Gunderson is only the editor. He scrupulously appends "unassigned"—and even "spurious"—fragments. The book quotes itself and appears in its own bibliography (under 1E. Gunderson, Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric ofPerformance in the Roman World (Ann Arbor 2000) and id. Declamation, Paternity and Roman Identity (Cambridge 2003). 452 PHOENIX Anonymous). The index is in the middle. Gunderson's book also abounds in what one might call bibliographic allusions to its models. Like the Attic Nights, the book is divided into short chapters each with a Latin lemma. The preface even begins in mid-sentence. This playful perversity is at least-partly in earnest: it illustrates qualities that Gunderson wants us to see in Gellius; it also embodies some problems of authorship and authenticity that he believes are inherent in antiquarian discourse. The book's difficulty is partly the result of the complex ideas that it seeks to develop. But it is also a...

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