age, and never married because he would not incur the
responsibility of children.

The 'Varia Historia' is the most noteworthy of his works. It is a
curious and interesting collection of short narratives, anecdotes, and
other historical, biographical, and antiquarian matter, selected from
the Greek authors whom he said he loved to study. And it is valuable
because it preserves scraps of works now lost. The extracts are either
in the words of the original, or give the compiler's version; for, as he
says, he liked to have his own way and to follow his own taste. They are
grouped without method; but in this very lack of order--which shows that
"browsing" instinct which Charles Lamb declared to be essential to a
right feeling for literature--the charm of the book lies. This habit of
straying, and his lack of style, prove Aelianus more of a vagabond in
the domain of letters than a rhetorician.

His other important book, 'De Animalium Natura' (On the Nature of
Animals), is a medley of his own observations, both in Italy and during
his travels as far as Egypt. For several hundred years it was a popular
and standard book on zooelogy; and even as late as the fourteenth
century, Manuel Philes, a Byzantine poet, founded upon it a poem on
animals. Like the 'Varia Historia', it is scrappy and gossiping. He
leaps from subject to subject: from elephants to dragons, from the liver
of mice to the uses of oxen. There was, however, method in this
disorder; for as he says, he sought thereby to give variety and hold his
reader's attention. The book is interesting, moreover, as giving us a
personal glimpse of the man and of his methods of work; for in a
concluding chapter he states the general principle on which he composed:
that he has spent great labor, thought, and care in writing it; that he
has preferred the pursuit of knowledge to the pursuit of wealth; that
for his part, he found more pleasure in observing the habits of the
lion, the panther, and the fox, in listening to the song of the
nightingale, and in studying the migrations of cranes, than in mere
heaping up of riches and finding himself numbered among the great; and
that throughout his work he has sought to adhere to the truth.

Aelianus was more of a moralizer than an artist in words; his style has
no distinctive literary qualities, and in both of his chief works is the
evident intention to set forth religious and moral principles. He wrote,
moreover, some treatises expressl