Criteria
The writing up of an Index Grammaticorum Latinorum, indipendent on the Index of the ThlL, serves a twofolded purpose. Its primary aim is to fulfill the need, widespread among the scholars who work on Latin grammarians, to update the Zitierweise of several grammatical texts, adequating the standard represented by the Index of the ThlL to the state of the art. Such updates concern the availability of more recent and better critical editions as well as, in some cases, the identification itself of authors and works. The second purpose of the Index is to establish a reference citation system also for the early medieval grammatical works (up to the end of the 10th century), for which none of the available lexica of medieval Latin provides a complete set of standard abbreviations, so that a variety (and confusion) of solutions dominates among the scholars who have to cite these works in their critical apparatuses or in secondary literature. Indeed, the Zitierweise of various Latin grammarians in the Index of the ThlL may look unsatisfactory to the experts in this field, but it remains undisputed that we need a standard reference system of the grammatical works – a need which is much more evident when we have to deal with medieval texts, for which nothing like the ThlL Index existed until now.
Thus, in agreement with other scholars of the network Latin Grammarians Forum, Michela Rosellini and I started in 2022 to review the available critical editions of the Latin grammarians and draw up an Index, whose final outcome we are presenting today. An intermediate version appeared in print a few days ago in the volume of the proceedings of the Latin Grammarians Forum 2021, published by Georg Olms Verlag as the first volume of the Supplementa to the series Collectanea Grammaticorum Latinorum. This printed version of the Index indicates the standard abbreviations and Zitierweise of each work along with a list of the reference edition(s) and eventual short adnotations in Italian. The final online version, edited by Andrea Consalvi, Michela Rosellini, and myself, as we will see in a moment, has been completed with the datation of authors or works and the explanations of the abbreviations and Zitierweise, following the model of the Index of the ThlL. In the online Index all the indications provided by the editors are in Latin, once again sticking to the model of the ThlL Index.
First of all, what is included in this Index. For the sake of brevity, we name it Index Grammaticorum Latinorum, but along with the grammatical works, it contains also the rhetorical and exegetical ones and the glossaries. In fact, rhetorical treatises as well as commentaries, collections of scholia, and glossaries provide often metalinguistic indications; at the same time, several grammatical texts comprehend one or more sections about rhetorical figures. This makes sensible to collect altogether the standard references to all the abovementioned textual categories.
As far as chronology is concerned, as I said in the beginning, the Index covers all the texts of the time-span taken into account by the ThlL and, additionally, all the grammatical works up to the end of the 10th century. Insular, southern-Italian, and Carolingian grammarians are often valuable sources of indirect tradition for ancient and late antique grammarians and at the same time they are witnesses to the evolution of Latin linguistic though at a time when Biblical and Christian texts were progressively replacing the pagan classics and the teaching of Latin took place in contact with other languages and alongside the evolution of Latin itself towards the romance languages. For this variety of reasons it happens often to deal at the same time with ancient and early medieval grammarians and it is ultimately convenient to establish a reference citation system which is common to both ages. However, in the digital Index we have set the possibility to filter works according to their age, selecting only those pertaining either to Antiquitas or to Medium Aevumor both. In the remaining time of my presentation I will leave aside medieval authors, in order to focus on the ancient and late antique ones, which might be more interesting for this audience.
As far as formalia are concerned, also to the items of the Index for which we diverge from the ThlL Index and to the Zitierweise of the medieval works we have tried to apply as much consistently as possible the citing ‘style’ of the ThlL Index. If available, we adhere to the internal subdivision of texts into books, chapters, and paragraphs; otherwise we cite page and line numbers (p. 000, 000 or 000, 000) of the editions or merely line (l. 000) numbers for texts bearing a continuous line numbering. Different works with an identical abbreviation are distinguished, again reproducing the ThlLconventions, by the names of their respective editors, for instance Frg. Bob. nom. Mariotti and Frg. Bob. nom. Passalacqua.
Now I will briefly survey the types of modifications that we have introduced in the Index, as far as ancient authors are concerned, compared to the ThlL Index. Before I start, I would just like to underline that there is no criticism on our side. We understand that our aims are partially different: we are required to follow continuously the most recent progress of textual criticism in our field, whereas the ThlL seeks for continuity in the Zitierweise from one volume to another. Given these conditions, we have tried to adhere as much as possible to the ThlL and taken great advantage of all the items already listed in its Index.
1. Minor changes
For many texts we have simply adopted the same abbreviation and citation system of the ThlL Index (e.g. for all the commentaries and collections of scholia).
Among the minor changes that we have introduced compared to the ThlL Index the most frequent is the replacement of the abbreviation gramm. with GL, the one commonly in use among scholars outside the ThlL, for all the texts cited from the corpus of the Grammatici Latini edited by Heinrich Keil.
In a few cases, most noticeably for Donatus’ Ars maior, we have slightly simplified the citation system of the ThlLaccording to the most common Zitierweise in scholarly literature.
2. New editions
The ThlL Index cites now many grammatical works from editions later than those included in the corpus of the Grammatici Latini edited by Heinrich Keil in the second half of the 19th century, such as Ps. Palaem. reg. by Rosellini (2001), Ps. Cassiod. de orat. by Stock (2005), and most recenty my own Dub. Nom. (2020, which makes me very proud). Nevertheless as many newer and better editions have not yet been taken into account and this forces us to diverge from the ThlL Index. I can mention as examples Arus. by Di Stefano (2011), Cassiod. orth. by Stoppacci (2010), Ps. Prob. app., which appeared in several editions after Keil’s one (1864) and whose last editors, Stefano Asperti and Marina Passalacqua (2014), took advantage of the technological aids in the reading of the 7/8th-century Bobbio manuscript which transmits this work and marked significant progress in the reconstruction of the text.
Of course, recentiores non deteriores, but neither always potiores. We have not acritically accepted in our Index the newest edition of each text: some recent editions have not improved the text nor cast more light on the history of its transmission and do not deserve to become the reference critical editions of a given work. I mention three examples from respectively a grammatical, a rhetorical, and an exegetical work.
Phocas’edition by Casaceli (Napoli, Loffredo, 1974) is not better than Keil’s one in the fifth volume of the Grammatici Latini. See Gigliola Maggiulli’s review in «Maia» 29/30, 1977/78, 190-192.
Gualtiero Calboli’s recent edition (Berlin-Boston, De Gruyter, 2020) of the Rhetorica ad Herennium in three volumes is extremely valuable for the second volume, containing an impressively rich rhetorical, linguistic, and historical commentary, and perhaps for the third volume of indexes, but is extremely unsatisfactory under the point of view of thehistory of the manuscript tradition and the constitution of both text and critical apparatus (not to mention the fact that it lacks completely an apparatus locorum classicorum). It has seemed preferable to us to stick still on Marx’s edition (1894).
Finally, Servius’ commentary on Virgil’s works: after the edition by Thilo – Hagen, new critical texts of the commentaries on several Virgilian books have appeared and are appearing in the Harvard edition as well as for Les belles lettres. However none of these is yet complete and, most importantly, none is grounded on a thorough investigation of Servius manuscript tradition (which, alas!, means also Virgil’s tradition). The new editors have experimented many different criteria to typographically separate Servius’ text from the additions of the so-called Servius Danielinus, but none of this have sofar proven better (and more reader-friendly) than Thilo’s habit of printing Servius Danielinus in italics within Servius’ main text. For all these reasons we would not yet dare to indicated a reference edition other than Thilo – Hagen’s one, although we record of course all the later editions, which is convienent to consult for single passages.
3. Identifications of authors and works
One major issue that we had to deal with in the drawing up of our Index is that experts in Latin grammatical tradition need always a precise identification of authors and works, which is fundamental to inquiries about the relationships between different grammarians or between two or more works by the same author and therefore to the clarification of the ways in which linguistic knowledge was transmitted and adapted from one work to another. Therefore we had to diverge in some cases from the ThlL Index in order to provide individual works with individual abbreviations.
First of all, in the case of grammarians that are still to be read in Keil’s Grammatici Latini and are authors of more than one work (e. g. SERV.) we have also added the abbreviation of the title before GL, in order to identify each work as a separate item of the Index.
Then, for authors of multiple works that we cite from a more recent edition than the Grammatici Latini, we have established an individual abbreviation for each work (of course no longer followed by GL). This is the case of PRISC.: his Ars will be cited according to the forthcoming new edition (whose first two volumes, edited by Rosellini, have already appeared). In the new edition the text will be divided into books, chapters, and paragraphs (where chapter numbers correspond to those in Krehl’s edition, printed also by Hertz in the margin of his text). For the minor works, reedited by Passalacqua in 1987 and 1999, we use individual titles and the page and line numbers of the most recent edition, whereas the ThlL Index relies still on Keil’s edition for all the minor works, cited together with the Ars grammatica under the cumulative abbreviation gramm., except from the praeexercitamina, cited from Halm’s edition in the RhLM.
Our efforts in the individuation of single texts apply also to anonymous texts, fragments, and excerpts. In the case of grammatical scraps like these, the ThlL uses sometimes a cumulative abbreviation, that we have ‘unpacked’ in several individual abbreviations. This is the case of the short texts about metrical theory edited in GL VI 273-277 and 630-646 and cited under the collective abbreviation GRAMM. VI, which we have subdivided into eight different items.
Other times anonymous minor works are cited in the ThlL Index together with the major texts with whom they are either transmitted or edited. An example of this typology is represented by the lists of idiomata generum: whereas the ThlL adopts an individual abbreviation for the anonymous idiomata casuum transmitted by the ms. Par. Lat. 7530 and published in GL IV (IDIOM. cas. gramm. IV), the various collections of idiomata generum have not gained as much fortune. One collection is cited as part of Charisius’ Ars grammatica, to which it is connected in both manuscript transmission and in Barwick’s edition; two other collections from Goetz’s Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum under the general abbreviation GLOSS. A fourth collection is trasmitted within the grammatical compilation of the so-called Anonymus Bobiensis, EXC. BOB. gramm. I in the ThlL Index, whereas we cite the Bobbio compilation as Ars Bob. with page and line numbers of De Nonno’s new edition (1982). For each list of idiomata generum we have established an indipendent abbreviation, partially going back to the ThlL’s previous habit of citing at least the Charisian idiomata generum as a separate item, abbreviated as IDIOM. gen. gramm. IV 584, 64
4. Fake attributions
Other modifications that we have introduced compared to the ThlL Index concern works falsely attributed to a specific author.
In the cases of ancient grammarians whose (authentic) works no longer survive, but to whom later works were attributed at some stage of their transmission, the ThlL avoids the distinction between authentic and spurious texts, applying the abbreviation of the name of the ancient author also to the texts that are certainly later, as it happens for CAPER and PROB. For the same reasons that I have explained about our need for a precise identification of each surviving grammatical work and in order not to discourage, especially among scholars of other fields, the perpetuation of some enduring wrong attributions, we have separated the authentic fragments of the aforementioned ancient grammarians from the spurious works and placed the last ones under an abbreviation starting with PS.
A perhaps different case occurs when we reject a false attribution, that is still partially debated, as it is the case of the Regulae transmitted under Augustine’ name, which the ThlL lists among Augustine’s works, whereas we indicate as inauthentic, following the recent investigations by Rosellini and Martorelli.
Again a different case is represented by the treatise De verbo transmitted by the ms. Napolitanus Latinus 1 (ff. 1r-8r) and edited by Passalacqua (1984). Following Keil’s wrong definition as Macrobii excerpta Bobiensia, the ThlL Indexconsiders this work as a kind of alternative version of the excerpta from Macrobius’ De differentiis et societatibus Graeci Latinique verbi, transmitted in two collections by the mss. Napolitanus Latinus 2 (ff. 157-158) and Parisinus Latinus 7186 (ff. 42-57). The treatise De verbo in the Napolitanus Latinus 1 is instead an indipendent and later work, identified as such also by the dedication to a Severus (whereas Macrobius’ treatise is dedicated to Symmachus), and stems from the Eastern side of the Empire, possibly from Priscian’s school (as various scholars starting from Cameron in 1967 have demonstrated).
Elena Spangenberg Yanes (Sapienza Università di Roma)