This chapter illustrates the power of the animal story to challenge anthropocentric positions and ideas of human exceptionalism. It centres upon the famous story of Androclus and the lion (as told by Gellius and other ancient and modern authors) to show that anthropomorphizing is not merely a tool of human appropriation of the animal; it can also bring out real sympathies and correspondences between human and non-human creatures. With its particular focus on the capacity to experience pain as a shared feature of humans and animals, the story driving this chapter anticipates modern attempts to bring questions of sentience and suffering into the picture and to reimagine justice as extending beyond the human.

Although Gellius is fully committed to the fashion for pre-classical authors, admiring them as writers and not merely as quarries for striking words or exponents of sound morality, comparison of his quotations with Ciceros shows a shift in taste away from raw power towards greater sophistication. His understanding of the passages cited, in so far as the state of their texts allows us to judge, is generally sound; however, some comments need a closer examination.

‘Miscellany’ is not an ancient genre name. When scholars use the term, they are often vague about the definition and boundaries of the genre, and rely on well-known ‘examples’ that are treated as paradigmatic. Two scholars have sought to define the ‘miscellany’ more closely: Teresa Morgan gave a broad, inclusive definition grounded in the history of educational praxis; William Fitzgerald gave a narrower definition, focusing on the rhetorical characteristics of an elite, literary strand of miscellany-making. Fitzgerald's approach shall be our starting point as we investigate how and why Clement artfully deployed rhetorical tropes, imagery and metatextual observations to thematise his intentional participation in a wider discourse of learned literary miscellanism. But we must also situate his work in relation to particular examples of early imperial prose miscellanies, otherwise we risk lapsing into generalities about an irreducibly diverse group of texts. Plutarch’s Table Talk; Pliny’s Natural History; Gellius’ Attic Nights and Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists are introduced alongside Clement’s Stromateis,as appropriate for comparative study.

Why would Clement showcase his participation in the Classical discourse of literary miscellanism when writing a project for the formation of Christians in late second century Alexandria? This chapter sketches Clement’s social context in order to bring light to his and his audience’s relationship to Classical tradition. Then it considers aspects of the Classical culture of miscellany-making and indicates how they were shared or transformed in Clement’s Christian setting. This encourages us to imagine how Clement and his audience could have taken delight in the rhetorical aesthetics of miscellanism and could have been attracted or impressed by the social and intellectual lifestyle within which it was cultivated, such that they sought to inhabit it and make it their own. Miscellanism was neither peripheral nor boring in the lives of imperial literary men, but it took people to the heart of the friendship circles, activities and institutions that framed and supported the culture of the pepaideumenoi, such as the library and the symposium.