A Most Amazing Conversation: The Social Contexts of Wonder-Telling and the Development of Paradoxography

Abstract

Wonder-telling thrived as an abiding element in Greek and Roman convivial gatherings. The burgeoning book culture of the Hellenistic period witnessed the emergence of paradoxographical works—compilations of reports on “marvels”—that offered another medium through which to experience wonder. This study surveys evidence that situates wonder-telling in the social sphere and suggests that the new genre adapted one of the joys of sympotic discourse in order to delight the solitary reader. In his Attic Nights, Aulus Gellius describes his first encounter with compilations now commonly referred to by scholars as paradoxographies. At a port in Brundisium, he recalls, he happened across a bookseller peddling bundles of filthy texts in Greek which he discovered were “filled with marvelous tales, things unheard of, incredible” (miraculorum fabularumque pleni, res inauditae, incredulae), and whose authors were “ancient and of no mean authority” (scriptores veteres non parvae auctoritatis, 9.4.3).1 After purchasing the texts for a pittance, Gellius spent the next two nights perusing them and making notes of reports which drew his attention. Despite his initial interest, he claims that he was ultimately “seized by disgust for such pointless writings, which contribute nothing to the enrichment or profit of life” (tenuit nos non idoneae scripturae taedium nihil ad ornandum iuvandumque usum vitae pertinentis, 9.4.12). Gellius’s description of the intellectual indigestion he suffered has been often repeated by nineteenth and twentieth century scholars to support negative judgments of the value of paradoxographies both in terms of their form and content. A quintessentially bookish genre developed during the Hellenistic period, paradoxography is a compilatory form, connected to both the natural sciences 1 Text and all translations of Gellius are provided by Rolfe (1927). All other translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Only two of the six authors Gellius goes on to name (Isigonus and Philostephanus, the likely reading for the manuscripts’ Polystephanos) wrote works that fall under the formal definition of paradoxography. The rest (e.g., Ctesias), as Delcroix (1996, p. 415) observed, nonetheless have interests or styles that can be understood under a broader definition of paradoxography. Scholars have noted that Gellius’s list of authorities replicates Pliny’s source acknowledgements in HN 7.9-26, though more names are included by the latter, on which see Delcroix (1996, pp. 419-424).