Latin Grammar for Greeks and Goths

For about two decades now the Latin grammarians have been enjoying a lively second renaissance. Their first followed in the wake of Keil's Grammatici Latini (1855-1880), with the work of Bolte, Jeep, Tolkiehn and Barwick, culminating in the latter's Remmius Palaemon of 1922. There is no mistaking the nature of that enterprise: an energetic Nekyomanteia. The extant texts were meticulously dismembered, and the gobbets fed to the ghosts of lost grammarians, famous names or hypothesized Q's. All could then be organized into genealogies where offspring were ideally never more than the sum of their parents : any residue in an extant text was liable to be called ' interpolation ', a metaphor whose implications rarely needed to be faced, since most of this Quellenforschung was conducted in articles and monographs rather than editions. Nonetheless, it was of course fundamental work: it mapped out the main traditions in Latin grammar up to the fourth century and beyond, and provided guidelines by which the mass of overlapping published and unpublished material could be analysed. After a gap of forty-odd years, the new renaissance has built on these foundations with rather different aims. The focus is now on the extant texts, their individual character and shape, the needs which they served both when they were compiled and later; in other words, on the surviving grammars as historical documents in their own right. Not accidentally, this approach goes hand in hand with editions and studies of MS transmission. Both Keil and Barwick's edition of Charisius (1925)—markedly ' conservative ' as against the implications of his earlier work—foreshadowed this interest; and from B. Lofstedt's Malsachanus (1965) to L. Holtz's monumental Donat et la tradition de i'enseignement grammatical (1981) we have had a spate of new editions, both of unpublished texts, and of ones last edited by Keil or others in the last century. In the latter category come the two works under review, offering fresh editions of four short texts, each surviving only in a single witness, preserved in that sanctuary of Latin grammar, Bobbio. But between them they can illustrate a fair range of the questions in this field of study. Both editors give a brief summary of previous work on the texts, a description of the relevant MS with some account of its orthographical features, a text and apparatus based on fresh collation, an apparatus of parallel passages in other grammars, and an index of the classical quotations in the texts. In addition, De Nonno devotes 18 pages to a two-part ' Appendice ' on the text of Charisius, interesting, but frankly quite irrelevant to the text he has edited. Keil's edition of all the texts was based on the report of the MSS made by Eichenfeld and Endlicher in their editio princeps of 1837. Not surprisingly, given the technical and scholarly aids now available, each editor has been able to correct about 100 slips in that report; the result is hardly dramatic, but cumulatively worthwhile. In the constitution of the text, De N. is quick to emend or excise individual words, but quakes at anything bigger, like a mislocated paragraph (cf. n. 1 below). He has now corrected a number of mistakes in his edition (RFIC m (1983), 233 n. 1), but several remain (e.g. in the text 2. 5 gentilicis, 38. 22 adverbis, 51. 22 constititi ?), as well as scatterings of inaccurate references. Passalacqua is loth to adopt any new emendations (e.g. De N.'s at 6. 22, 13. 7, clearly right), but follows Keil even where it is far from clear why (e.g. 12. 11, 22. 26, and 22. 27 where one should surely read Latiaris); her ' elenco esauriente ' of orthographica (xxv-xxvii) is neither inclusive nor exclusive of the preceding lists and the app. crit., and jumbles phonetic features like b/v with purely graphic slips like eum for cum, verum for rerum, so that the reader must labour to get any use from it. Although both MSS are in CLA (HI, 397a and 388), a full page plate would not have come amiss. However, both books are a distinct improvement on Keil in the report of the MSS and in general layout.