Roman student,
tourist,
jurist, and
bibliophile, born somewhere between 125-128, probably in a
colony somewhere in the
province of
Africa. He spent much of his youth touring the
Mediterranean, after finishing off his education with two years in
Athens. He later was appointed a
judge in
Rome, hearing mostly civil cases, though his interest in actual law seems to have been minimal.
He collected the notes, journals, and random musings of his student period into the twenty books of the work Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights, named for the cold and lonely nights in Attica during which he seems to have had nothing better to do), ostensibly as a tutorial for his son. Each chapter is usually rather short, and jumps from topic to topic (his idea of keeping a narrative interesting), from literary criticism to grammar to law to history and back again. I'm in the middle of the book now; might add more later when I finish and if I remember.