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.
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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.
Throughout his life he corresponded with continental scholars, by whom he was much esteemed, as evidenced by Gronovius's dedication to Ellys of his edition of Ælian's Varia Historia, and the Wetsteins' edition of Johann Caspar Suicer's Thesaurus Ecclesiasticus, to which he had contributed the use of a manuscript.