Noctes Atticae

* * * other more entertaining writings may be found, in order that like recreation might be provided for my children, when they should have some respite from business affairs and could unbend and divert their minds. But in the arrangement of my material I have adopted the same haphazard order that I had previously followed in collecting it. For whenever I had taken in hand any Greek or Latin book, or had heard anything worth remembering, I used to jot down whatever took my fancy, of any and every kind, without any definite plan or order; and such notes I would lay away as an aid to my memory, like a kind of literary storehouse, so that when the need arose of a word or a subject which I chanced for the moment to have forgotten, and the books from which I had taken it were not at hand, I could readily find and produce it.

It therefore follows, that in these notes there is the same variety of subject that there was in those former brief jottings which I had made without order or arrangement, as the fruit of instruction or reading in various lines. And since, as I have said, I began to amuse myself by assembling these notes during the long winter nights which I spent on a country-place in the land of Attica, I have therefore given them the title of Attic Nights, making no attempt to imitate the witty captions which many other writers of both languages have devised for works of the kind. For since they had laboriously gathered varied, manifold, and as it were indiscriminate learning, they therefore invented ingenious titles also, to correspond with that idea. Thus some called their books The Muses, others Woods one used the title Athena’s Mantle, another The Horn of Amaltheia, still another Honeycomb, several Meads, one Fruits of my Reading, another Gleanings from Early Writers, another The Nosegay, still another Discoveries. Some have used the name Torches, others Tapestry, others Repertory, others Helicon, Problems, Handbooks and Daggers. One man called his book Memorabilia, one Principia, one Incidentals, another Instructions. Other titles are Natural History, Universal History, The Field, The Fruit-basket, or Topics. Many have termed their notes Miscellanies, some Moral Epistles, Questions in Epistolary Form, or Miscellaneous Queries, and there are some other titles that are exceedingly witty and redolent of extreme refinement. But I, bearing in mind my limitations, gave my work off-hand, without premeditation, and indeed almost in rustic fashion, the caption of Attic Nights, derived merely from the time and place of my winter’s vigils; I thus fall as far short of all other writers in the dignity too even of my title, as I do in care and in elegance of style.