American Journal of Philology

A close reading of Domitius Insanus' encounter with Favorinus and Gellius at Noctes Atticae 18.7 shows that he was not merely a contentious grammarian or a crypto-Cynic academic but a dissatisfied member of the intellectual milieu of the High Empire and a colleague of these two litterateurs. His metaphor of the funeral of the past provides a wry comment on the contemporary conceit of the learned banquet and on the literary world of Gellius and Favorinus, and it exposes fundamental anxieties about the literary pursuits of his contemporaries in the Second Sophistic.