Parenting & Family Quote by Aulus Gellius

Gellius lands a sly double move here: he gestures toward a venerable poetic authority, then immediately admits he can’t recall the poet’s name. The joke isn’t just self-deprecation. It’s a demonstration of how “truth” actually travels in the world he’s describing: not as a pristine, perfectly sourced object, but as a hand-me-down idea carried by imperfect memories, overheard lines, and secondhand citations. In a culture that prized erudition, “whose name has escaped my memory” is a controlled stumble, a wink that even the learned are subject to time’s erosion.

The aphorism he salvages, “Truth the daughter of Time,” also does quiet rhetorical work. It flatters patience and positions truth as something that emerges, slowly, under pressure: facts clarified by distance, reputations sorted out by posterity, rumors sifted by repetition and contradiction. That fits Gellius’s wider project in Attic Nights, a miscellany built from notes, conversations, and reading scraps. He’s not writing a single grand argument; he’s curating the process by which knowledge accretes.

Subtextually, the line is both comforting and evasive. Comforting because it promises that time will eventually vindicate reality; evasive because it excuses the present from having to be right on schedule. Gellius is old-fashioned and modern at once: he reveres tradition, yet he shows how tradition is made - by people misremembering, quoting anyway, and letting time do the authorial cleanup.