Элиан: Римский писатель и ученый II века н.э.

Roman author and teacher (c.175–c.235)

Claudius Aelianus (Κλαύδιος Αἰλιανός, Greek transliteration Kláudios Ailianós; c. 175 – c. 235 AD), commonly Aelian ('/iː//l//i//ən/), born at Praeneste, was a Roman author and teacher of rhetoric who flourished under Septimius Severus and probably outlived Elagabalus, who died in 222. He spoke Greek so fluently that he was called "honey tongued" (μελίγλωσσος meliglossos); Roman born, he preferred Greek authors, and wrote in a slightly archaizing Greek himself. His two chief works are valuable for the numerous quotations from the works of earlier authors, which are otherwise lost, and for the surprising lore, which offers unexpected glimpses into the Greco Roman world view. It is also the only Greco Roman work to mention Gilgamesh.

On the Nature of Animals (alternatively "On the Characteristics of Animals"; Περὶ ζῴων ἰδιότητος, Perì zṓōn idiótētos; usually cited by its Latin title De Natura Animalium) is a collection, He is more attentive to marine life than might be expected, though, and this seems to reflect first hand personal interest; he often quotes "fishermen". At times he strikes the modern reader as thoroughly credulous, but at others he specifically states that he is merely reporting what is told by others, and even that he does not believe them. Aelian's work is one of the sources of medieval natural history and of the bestiaries of the Middle Ages. The surviving portions of the text are badly mangled and garbled and replete with later interpolations. Conrad Gessner (or Gesner), the Swiss scientist and natural historian of the Renaissance, made a Latin translation of Aelian's work, to give it a wider European audience. An English translation by A. F. Scholfield has been published in the Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols. (1958 59).

Various History (Ποικίλη ἱστορία, Poikílē historía)—for the most part preserved only in an abridged form perhaps so that his readers will not feel guilty, but Jane Ellen Harrison found survivals of archaic rites mentioned by Aelian very illuminating in her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903, 1922). Varia Historia was first printed in 1545. The standard modern text is that of Mervin R. Dilts (1974). Two English translations of the Various History, by Fleming (1576) and Stanley (1665) made Aelian's miscellany available to English readers, but after 1665 no English translation appeared, until three English translations appeared almost simultaneously: James G. DeVoto, Claudius Aelianus: Ποικίλης Ἱστορίας (Varia Historia) Chicago, 1995; Diane Ostrom Johnson, An English Translation of Claudius Aelianus' "Varia Historia", 1997; and N. G. Wilson, Aelian: Historical Miscellany in the Loeb Classical Library.

Considerable fragments of two other works, On Providence and Divine Manifestations, are preserved in the early medieval encyclopedia, the Suda. Twenty "letters from a farmer" after the manner of Alciphron are also attributed to him. The letters are invented compositions to a fictitious correspondent, which are a device for vignettes of agricultural and rural life, set in Attica, though mellifluous Aelian once boasted that he had never been outside Italy, never been aboard a ship (which is at variance, though, with his own statement, de Natura Animalium XI.40, that he had seen the bull Serapis with his own eyes). Thus conclusions about actual agriculture in the Letters are as likely to evoke Latium as Attica. The fragments have been edited in 1998 by D. Domingo Foraste, but are not available in English. The Letters are available in the Loeb Classical Library, translated by Allen Rogers Benner and Francis H. Fobes (1949).