Aelian

(c. 170 - c. 235)

The Roman author and teacher of rhetoric Aelian earned the epithet “Honey-tongued” because he spoke and wrote Greek so fluently. In addition to his well-known encyclopedic work on animals—On the Nature of Animals—he published Indictment of the Effeminate, an attack on the recently deceased emperor Elagabalus, and Rustic Letters, a compilation of twenty missives about Attic country life. Of bees he wrote that they “dislike foul odors and sweet perfume alike, just as modest young girls do.”