There are signs that a list of parallelisms containing quite lengthy citations of republican works in prose and all kinds of verse, as well as remarks highly critical of Virgil, provided the material of Saturnalia 6. 2, Saturnalia 6. 3, and Saturnalia 6. 1. 55–65.1 Whereas Macrobius transmits the uersus parallelisms practically without comment, the locus parallelisms have a certain amount of discussion clustered at the beginning and at the end. This is for the most part neutral and matter of (...) fact but in 6. 2. 33 the harsh tone of an obtrectator makes itself heard: nee Tullio conpilando, dummodo undique ornamenta sibi conferret, abstinuit. The original list was excerpted very carelessly: in 6. 2. 29 the Virgil citation ought to continue for two more verses; in 6. 2. 7, 9, and 24 the Lucretius citations are likewise defective. (shrink)

From the scholarly activity of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. stem several collections of scholia to the poems of Virgil, most of which make copious reference to prose and verse composed in Latin before Virgil's time. The authors of these scholia were the last of a long line of commentators whose labours began soon after Virgil's death. Just as Virgil walked in the tracks of Theocritus, Hesiod, Aratus, Nicander, Homer, and Apollonius, so did his students in the tracks of (...) the great Alexandrian expositors of the Greek poets. They sought to explain Virgil not only through Virgil himself, but also through the poets and prose writers, Greek and Latin, whom they imagined Virgil to have read. Thus we have scholia citing early republican literature in order to parallel words uncommon in or absent from the fourth-century classical syllabus, as well as unclassical usages, inflections, and constructions; in order to demonstrate ‘imitations’ on the part of Virgil; and in order to elucidate the structure of episodes of the three poems where Virgil appears to depart from the most commonly known versions of myth and history. Argument concerning the text or interpretation of a disputed passage is frequently based on appeal to the usage of Virgil's Latin predecessors. (shrink)

In the period between Constantine's reunification of the Empire in 324 and the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 M. Valerius Probus enjoyed a large reputation as master of all areas of the ars grammatica. The commentary on Terence attributed to Donatus and the commentary of Servius on Virgil cite him more often than they do any other ancient authority. His fame persisted through the Dark Ages. Eugenius of Toledo set him with Varius and Tucca against Aristarchus, the greatest of (...) the Alexandrian students of Homer. Modern writers on the history of Roman scholarship have estimated in widely different ways his quality as a textual critic, the level of his reputation during the century after his death and the influence which his activities had on the transmission of the Latin classics. That he ‘annotated’ at least some of these in the manner of an Aristarchus is not in dispute, but everything about the nature of his ‘annotation’ is. This paper will treat afresh a famous statement about Probus in Suetonius' De grammaticis, two lists of notae associated with Probus’ name in a late eighth-century manuscript from Monte Cassino, cod. Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat. 7530, two references to such notae which have been detected in Virgilian scholia and a number of statements in these scholia which appear to give Probus’ reasons for affixing notae. The results of my study are largely negative but may help to control general discussion of the history of a number of Latin texts. (shrink)

Most of the commentaries on Greek authors which circulated in the towns of Egypt during the late Ptolemaic and early Imperial periods ignored the critical and colometrical problems which had engaged the attention of the great Alexandrian grammarians. A few, however, based themselves on texts equipped with signs, included the signs in their lemmata and offered explanations. Such commentaries must be the source of the scattered references to signs in the older marginal scholia in Byzantine manuscripts of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar (...) and the Attic dramatists. The only Byzantine manuscript to transmit a pagan text still equipped with a large number and a variety of signs, namely cod. Venice, Bibl. Marc. gr. 454, is also the only one to transmit scholia with lemmata retaining prefixed signs. Just as texts and scholium-lemmata lost their signs in the course of transmission, so too did references to signs within scholia either disappear or become garbled. At best, a statement about the reasons for affixing a sign would turn into one about the content or style of the verse in question. The few mentions made of the great Alexandrians give no cause for thinking that we ever have a verbatim quotation of an πόμνημα written by one of them in order to explain his own signs. Time and again it is demonstrable that an explanation of a sign's presence against a particular verse goes back to some writer like Aristonicus. What survives of the ancient discussion of Latin literature is exiguous in comparison with the Greek material. (shrink)

Two minuscule codices carrying collections of grammatical and rhetorical treatises and extracts from such treatises, one written at Monte Cassino between A.D. 779 and 796 ), the other at Benevento towards the middle of the following century, contain among their uncial tituli the three words INCIPIT THVESTES VARII. There follows in both codices a twenty-four-word sentence stating the full name of Varius, the literary character of the Thyestes, an aesthetic judgement on the work, the date of a public performance in (...) a Roman theatre, and the price paid: Lucius Varius cognomento Rufus Thyesten tragoediam magna cura absolutam post Actiacam uictoriam Augusti ludis eius in scaena edidit pro qua fabula sestertium deciens accepit. (shrink)