by Scott McGill
He continues with a warning that the argument might become unclear (brevitate ipsa minus clarum [by its very briefness less clear]), but underlines the goal of his effort: diffusa substringere et prolixa breviare (to draw together what was diffuse and to shorten what was prolix). But although Lactantius addressed his audience in the preface, we cannot assume that his approach is representative for audiences in late antiquity. The question of the implied readership has been debated as vehemently as the question of sources. Sehlmeyer (2009) assumes that historical breviaria were written for members of a less‐well‐informed magistrature and bureaucracy who had to keep up as quickly and easily as possible with the cultural background expected of persons in high office. But, as demonstrated above, there have been various suggestions about the question of audiences from the Roman imperial period on. Most often we will have to refrain from attributing a special target readership to the new formats. More important is the overall cultural and pragmatic context, wherever it can be reconstructed. Sometimes the readers are explicitly informed in programmatic statements about the intended audience and purpose of a work. Whether such statements are part of the commonplace formula in prologues and epilogues is difficult to decide. Nevertheless, we have to keep in mind that, irrespective of such authorial comments, the creators of epitomai bring a literary intention to their work and engage consciously with the new form.
27.7 Conclusion
We have seen that there are various reasons for the development and flourishing state in late antiquity of the diverse genres that can be subsumed under the term “condensed texts.” Reading and using an organized library becomes more common. In addition, the Christian worldview leads to dehistoricization. This applies not only to the previous, pagan history but also to the history of the Christian world because of its teleological framework, in which man‐made history is secondary and under the authority of God’s will. In this changing intellectual context, readers were conscious of the vulnerability of transmission processes. The need for a reliable repertoire of references arose. These references are provided in the formats that have been discussed here: epitomai, handbooks, and florilegia. They, in particular, form the intellectual cosmos that preserved and organized, and sometimes reorganized, the treasury of knowledge and wisdom that tradition had entrusted to the cultural elites in late antiquity. Condensing a longer text can also be a means of evading or of obliquely addressing controversial topics, such as Christian dissent. The end of antiquity and the reorganization of the political and religious world meant, ironically, that these shifting and unstable products of condensing, compiling, and collecting texts consolidated and formed repositories of knowledge for centuries to come.
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Note
Translations are by the authors unless otherwise noted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Grammar
Alessandro Garcea
28.1 A Textual Typology for Latin Grammar in Late Antiquity
According to a well‐known, traditional classification best expressed in the late scholia to Dionysius Thrax’s tekhnê, “Grammar is constituted by four parts: textual criticism, reading aloud, interpretation, and judgment; it uses four tools: glossematical, historical, metrical, and technical” (GG 1/3,10,8–10; cf. also 164,9–11; 170,18–20). Technical grammar, meanwhile, was divided into three subunits, which were probably isolated by Asclepiades of Myrlea (end of second century BCE), quoted by Sextus Empiricus (M. 1.92): “The technical part is that in which they make arrangements concerning (1) the elements and the parts of a sentence, (2) orthography, and (3) Hellenism, and what follows from these” (trans. after D. L. Blank; see Barwick 1922, pp. 223–229, with the necessary updates by Blank 2000). This chapter will show how these fields evolved in late antiquity, giving some examples for each topic that they covered. It will also emphasize that in this period the teaching of Latin gave birth not only to already familiar, elementary “cahiers d’écolier” but also to complex “livres du maître,” including as many aspects of grammar as deemed necessary to represent Latin language and culture. This phenomenon is evident in the textual transmission through pre‐Carolingian and Carolingian encyclopedic miscellanies (De Nonno 2000; De Paolis 2003), as well as in the conception of the artes themselves. They tend to become polyvalent, encyclopedic works, not necessarily wri
tten inside the schools, as proved by authors like Consentius, uir clarissimus from a Narbonnaise gens, Macrobius, uir clarissimus et inlustris, or Mallius Theodorus, cos. 399, as well as by aristocratic addressees like the Iulianus consul ac patricius or Q. Aurelius Memmius Symmachus iunior, cos. 485, in the case of Priscian’s works (De Nonno 2009). By the presence of their names in the prefaces (Munzi 1992, pp. 110–116), they demonstrate that grammar acquired an organic and prestigious place in the cultural system of late antiquity. Thus, grammar could also become an essential feature in extensive works like the third book of Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, providing many inflectional paradigms (regulae nominum and canones uerborum), or the first book of Origines written by Isidore (560–636), bishop of Seville and Toledo, who inaugurated a Christianization of this discipline.
The first subunit of the technical ars grammatica reveals an “ascendant,” threefold structure, which, taken as a whole, represented the overall ancient conception of the language. So for example, following Varronian theories (GRF 237 Funaioli), Diomedes states:
[I] the first steps of the grammar are taken from the phonic units (elementa), the phonic units are represented by the graphophonic units (litterae), the graphophonic units are associated in the syllables (syllabae), the lexical unit (dictio) is formed by the syllables, [II] the lexical units are organized in the parts of speech (partes orationis), the speech resumes itself to the parts of speech, [III] virtue (uirtus) is an ornament of the speech and it is used not to make faults (uitia) (GL 1,426,32–427,2, my translation).
Teachers and students must recognize this method of progressively “boxing up” the linguistic units of the lower levels into higher‐level structures through their visual memory, which could limit itself to the internal, imaginative sight (oculi mentis) or be revealed by every kind of list and table, as medieval manuscripts show (Law 2000). The clearest example of this pattern is Donatus’s Ars maior (fourth century CE), which is preceded by a basic Ars minor, devoted only to the parts of speech and written in the catechetic form of a magister interrogating his pupils. These texts became the standard manuals in medieval and modern schools. Their influence has been enormous, even for the constitution of the grammatical categories of both modern Romance and non‐Romance languages (see Auroux 1994, pp. 82–85: “grammaire latine étendue”).
