[Sidenote: Aulus Gellius.] A much younger man than Fronto, but like him, a man of books and an admirer of archaic phraseology, was Aulus Gellius, who was born probably about 125 A. D., studied under various masters at Rome and at Athens, and held some judicial position at Rome. His extant work, entitled _Noctes Atticæ_ (_Attic Nights_), received its title from the fact that it contains the results of the writer’s labors begun at Athens, when he used to read various authors and make extracts from them in the night. These extracts, with a variety of notes and comments, are arranged in twenty books, all of which are preserved except the eighth, of which we have only the table of contents, and the end of the twentieth. The subjects treated are language and literature, law, philosophy and natural history. Gellius quotes no contemporary authors, but introduces them as speakers, for parts of his work have the form of dialogues. There is no order in the arrangement of subjects, but things are put down as Gellius happened to find them in the works he read. No critical faculty is exhibited, nor has Gellius any marked literary skill. He is simply a diligent compiler, whose work is interesting and valuable to us merely because it preserves fragments of earlier works now lost and information about a variety of subjects. [Sidenote: Changes in Latin.] The Latin of the Golden Age was a more or less artificial language developed by the genius of the great writers from the common language of every-day life. The Latin of the Silver Age was a development from the literary Latin of the Golden Age, not directly from the popular speech. While literary Latin was thus passing through various phases, the popular speech was also developing along its own lines, and by the second century after Christ was very different from the literary Latin of the time as well as from any Latin, whether spoken or written, of the Ciceronian or earlier times. It had already entered upon the course of change which was in the end to lead to the birth of the Romance languages. Fronto, in his desire to infuse new life into the worn-out literary Latin of his day, went back to the writers before Cicero and adopted their words and phrases, at the same time exerting himself to arrange words in unusual order with the intention of giving piquancy to his expression. His precepts and example were followed by others, as, for instance, Gellius, and still more clearly, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus as they appear in their letters to their teacher. But Fronto, although he had great influence for a time, could not turn the stream of progress backward. If literary Latin was to develop anything new, it must be by adopting something from the living speech of the people. This course was followed, in a measure, at least, by Apuleius.