Abstract
The present volume offers a view into the world of the "Second Sophistic" through the translation of two literary testimonies: the "Attic Nights" of Aulus Gellius and the correspondence of future emperor Marcus Aurelius and his tutor, the rhetor Marcus Fronto. The "Attic Nights" offer a seemingly chaotic (yet, rather programmatically "anti-systematic") excerptions and memoirs of Aulus Gellius, one of the Roman pupils of Athenian professors.
Several strata interact in the "Attic Nights": The stratum of "Golden Age" of classical Athens, with its literary and philosophical giants, represented in quotations and the biographical anecdotes - and the stratum of Gellius's professors, the stars of contemporary academic life (Herodes Atticus, Calvisius Taurus and others). The stratum of "dry" excerptions from classical texts - and the stratum of vivid descriptions of academic everyday life.
Finally, the stratum of Athens - and the stratum of Rome, where Gellius continued his personal studies, with the Roman "Second Sophists" (Favorinus, Marcus Fronto and others). The same Marcus Fronto made his carrier as a tutor of a future emperor Marcus Aurelius and his (late) literary fame as his epistolary partner.
Unlike "Meditations", the literary work of a mature Marcus Aurelius - these letters, a work of a youthful prince, are being still underestimated due to "lack" of a serious philosophical or political topic. On the other hand, the letters offer a unique insight into the mentality of the "Second Sophistic".
Both literary works have been translated into Czech for the first time. The translation contains about a half of "Attic Nights" and the crucial part of the correspondence of the two Marcuses, namely the main letters from the years of their literary "love affair" (139-146 c.e.).
Correspondingly with the spirit of the "Second Sophistic", a detailed care is devoted to the style. In the "Attic Nights", several historical strata of Czech language shall mirror the historical strata of texts, quoted by Gellius, and his own memoirs.
In the lettres of the two Marcuses, the handy cultivated style of Marcus Fronto has been differentiated from the style of the teenage prince Marcus Aurelius, wavering all the time between over-exaggerated affectation and a spontaneous colloquiality.