Especially his edition of the erotic authors (Erotici Graeci, two volumes, Leipzig 1858–1859), his first edition Astrampsychi oraculorum decades (Berlin 1863), his two volume edition of Aelian (Leipzig 1864–1866) and the Epistolographi Graeci (Paris 1873) attracted attention.
Plutarch and Aelian rationalize the dogs' failure by explaining that the Gauls fed the siege-starved dogs and silenced them, while the geese called out excitedly.
Aelian |
He published also notes on Stobaeus, Euripides, Athenaeus and the Iliaca of John Tzetzes; translations of Aelian (History of Animals); many of the Greek romances (Philostratus); poetical versions of much of the Greek Anthology; miscellaneous essays on classical subjects; and some very successful school books.
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).
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Aelian's work is one of the sources of medieval natural history and of the bestiaries of the Middle Ages; in some ways an allegory of the moral world, an Emblem Book.