Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 1 eBook
According to his ‘Varia Historia,’ Aelianus
Claudius was a native of Praeneste and a citizen of
Rome, at the time of the emperor Hadrian. He
taught Greek rhetoric at Rome, and hence was known
as “the Sophist.” He spoke and wrote
Greek with the fluency and ease of a native Athenian,
and gained thereby the epithet of “the honey-tongued”.
He lived to be sixty years of age, and never married
because he would not incur the responsibility of children.
The ‘Varia Historia’ is the most noteworthy
of his works. It is a curious and interesting
collection of short narratives, anecdotes, and other
historical, biographical, and antiquarian matter, selected
from the Greek authors whom he said he loved to study.
And it is valuable because it preserves scraps of
works now lost. The extracts are either in the
words of the original, or give the compiler’s
version; for, as he says, he liked to have his own
way and to follow his own taste. They are grouped
without method; but in this very lack of order—which
shows that “browsing” instinct which Charles
Lamb declared to be essential to a right feeling for
literature—the charm of the book lies.
This habit of straying, and his lack of style, prove
Aelianus more of a vagabond in the domain of letters
than a rhetorician.
His other important book, ‘De Animalium Natura’
(On the Nature of Animals), is a medley of his own
observations, both in Italy and during his travels
as far as Egypt. For several hundred years it
was a popular and standard book on zooelogy; and even
as late as the fourteenth century, Manuel Philes,
a Byzantine poet, founded upon it a poem on animals.
Like the ‘Varia Historia’, it is scrappy
and gossiping. He leaps from subject to subject:
from elephants to dragons, from the liver of mice
to the uses of oxen. There was, however, method
in this disorder; for as he says, he sought thereby
to give variety and hold his reader’s attention.
The book is interesting, moreover, as giving us a
personal glimpse of the man and of his methods of work;
for in a concluding chapter he states the general
principle on which he composed: that he has spent
great labor, thought, and care in writing it; that
he has preferred the pursuit of knowledge to the pursuit
of wealth; that for his part, he found more pleasure
in observing the habits of the lion, the panther,
and the fox, in listening to the song of the nightingale,
and in studying the migrations of cranes, than in mere
heaping up of riches and finding himself numbered among
the great; and that throughout his work he has sought
to adhere to the truth.
Aelianus was more of a moralizer than an artist in
words; his style has no distinctive literary qualities,
and in both of his chief works is the evident intention
to set forth religious and moral principles. He
wrote, moreover, some treatises expressly on religious
and philosophic subjects, and some letters on husbandry.
