The last complete text of Priscian’s great sixth-century Ars grammatica was edited by Martin Hertz and published in volumes 2 and 3 of his Grammatici Latini by Heinrich Keil in 1855 and 1859. The Ars, in Hertz’s edition, occupies 974 pages of relatively small print. It was Priscian’s magnum opus in every sense; his lesser works include rather simpler introductions to grammar, including the Institutio de nomine et pronomine et uerbo and the relentlessly didactic Partitiones duodecim versuum Aeneidos principalium as well as treatises on meter and elementary rhetoric. Hundreds of manuscripts of Priscian exist; that is not surprising, as his works formed the basis of grammatical instruction for centuries. Nor is it surprising that nobody has produced a new critical edition of the Ars: it is just as well that Hertz, a pupil of Lachmann, was an extremely good editor who relied on good manuscripts (and included thirteen columns of corrigenda et addenda at the end of the text). But if Priscian’s work is too massive for any modern editor, it is also too important to ignore, for any number of reasons. For most students of Latin literature, Priscian is invaluable as the source of many quotations of otherwise lost archaic and classical texts. For students of Roman scholarship, Priscian’s Ars is the consummation of five or six hundred years of grammatical writing, and he is the first Latin grammarian to deal in any detail with syntax. For those interested in the relationship between Latin and Greek language and culture, Priscian is the only Latin grammarian to make extensive use of the Greek philological writings of Apollonius Dyscolus, the greatest of the Greek grammarians—and he is himself a Latin speaker from Mauretania, living and teaching in Constantinople, writing for both Greek- and Latin-speakers, explaining Latin grammatical quirks through Greek parallels and using Greek theory to explain Latin grammar. And, finally, there is what one looks for in the work of any great scholar (and Priscian certainly is one): the kinds of arguments he constructs, the problems he finds in his predecessors’ work, and how he responds to them. Broadly speaking, Priscian’s relationship to earlier philological scholarship matches that of his more-or-less contemporary Tribonian to earlier legal scholarship: a sweeping summary, incorporation, and interpretation of a very long tradition, showing mastery of both substance and method.
Over the last fifteen years or so, the Groupe Ars Grammatica—a slightly varying set of scholars led by Marc Baratin of the University of Lille—has produced a series of editions and translations of parts of the Ars.[1] Working backward from the two immense books on syntax (17-18) that conclude Priscian’s grammar, through the lesser parts of speech (Books 11-16), in their fifth volume they have now tackled Book 8, the first of the three books Priscian devoted to the verb. The format of the volumes is consistent: an introduction exploring major aspects of the grammatical content of the book(s) in question is followed by a detailed outline. The Latin text (verso) with facing French translation (recto) occupies the bulk of the volume; alphabetically ordered notes to the Latin text identify parallel passages in Priscian and other grammarians and identify textual problems in his quotations, while numerically ordered notes to the translation discuss, often in great detail, both interpretive and textual questions, with frequent reference to parallel (or conflicting) passages elsewhere in the Ars and to the editors’ own discussions in previous volumes.
Book 8 is, in terms of grammatical theory, the most important (as well as the longest) of the three books Priscian devoted to the verb: it begins with his definition and continues with his analysis of the eight accidents of the verb. In Priscian’s order and treated in sections of decreasing length, these are: significatio siue genus (more or less, voice), tempus (meaning both tense and the representation of time itself), modus (mood), species and figura (the former referring to derivative types such as frequentatives, the latter to simple and compound verbs), followed by three final morphological categories, coniugatio, persona, and numerus. The two books that follow deal in detail with verbal conjugations—and will presumably be treated by the editors in a subsequent volume. In their introduction to this volume, the authors place particular emphasis on Priscian’s treatment of voice and tense as well as on the twin morphological problems of derivation and compound words; they also provide a detailed and very important analysis of Priscian’s relationship to Apollonius Dyscolus’ lost treatise on the verb and consideration of his relationship to the earlier Latin grammatical tradition and medieval and renaissance adaptations of Priscian. Four indexes follow the text: quotations, forms and constructions discussed by Priscian, Greek and Latin grammatical terminology used in Book 8, and a French-Latin glossary of technical terms.
Baratin and his colleagues have not made a new study of the manuscripts or constructed a new text; theirs is based on Hertz’s edition and has no apparatus criticus. Nonetheless, however, they have made (as in the previous volumes) significant improvements. They have changed the text itself in a few places (sometimes following Hertz’s second thoughts in his addenda), but in a dozen places they have restored passages that Hertz bracketed, they have improved orthography, punctuation, and capitalization, and, most important, they have in more than fifty places changed Hertz’s paragraphing. They have also made good use of typography (italics and quotation marks) to clarify Priscian’s meaning. And, of course, their careful translation, which includes section headings that mark the stages of Priscian’s presentation, makes Priscian far more comprehensible. As with the previous volumes, we now have a text of Priscian that can be read, understood, and studied far more easily than before. The authors have worked to make Priscian’s work accessible: the text is supplied not only with page and line numbers from Hertz’s edition but with paragraph numbers as well; it appears that the former references are used by classicists, the latter by medievalists. All Priscian’s quotations—and there are a great many—are given translations as well as references to modern editions of the texts quoted, and the editors are careful in their annotation to supply material that will be helpful to classicists, medievalists, and students of linguistics who may or may not know Latin well enough to read Priscian in the original. This is both a thoughtful and a useful edition.
It is the annotations—more than four hundred numbered notes to the translation—that raise this edition from valuable to invaluable. As mentioned earlier, there is more than one reason why scholars consult Priscian, and while the editors’ notes emphasize Priscian’s place in the history of linguistic theory, they pay extremely close attention too to his own writing. There are many notes discussing Priscian’s language, both as part of his style and as supplying connections to earlier Latin and Greek grammatical writing. In both the introduction and the notes, they attempt to explain Priscian’s originality and his debts to the tradition. They discuss the difficulties in Priscian’s presentation—those he inherited and those he created for himself. These include, notably, his problem with the categories of number and person as accidents of the verb, given the importance of impersonal and infinitive forms to which those categories do not apply; his difficulties (shared by all Latin grammarians) in naming and explaining gerunds and supines—and whether they, as well as participles and infinitives, should be considered nouns or verbs; and the tensions caused by his employing both formal and semantic categories of analysis—both necessary, but often conflicting.
In certain respects, the presentation is cumbersome: the French translation repeats the Latin text of quotations and examples as well as giving a translation of them and identification of the source text, while any textual annotations to these same quotations appear in the notes to the Latin text. Changes to Hertz’s text are listed on pages 85-87; as a reader of texts, I would have preferred to have them in an apparatus criticus, although as an editor of texts, I understand the wish to keep the page clear and comprehensible. The annotations and the introduction often give cross-references to corresponding parts of previous volumes in this series; the authors have made the (perfectly reasonable) decision not to repeat themselves excessively from one volume to another, but that means that the attentive reader will need to have all volumes available in order to get a full sense of Priscian’s linguistic approach and beliefs. The decision to edit Priscian back-to-front means that, when this series is happily completed in another decade or so, readers of Priscian Book 1 will be looking for illumination in the prefaces to Books 17 and 18.
All that is minor, however, in comparison with the extremely high quality of what Baratin and his colleagues have produced. I have spent a fair amount of time studying Priscian and other grammarians, but there is not a page in this volume from which I did not learn. What is more, almost every page increased my admiration for the ability of a group of distinguished scholars—many of whose individual works I have long known and respected—to collaborate so seamlessly on a joint project of such duration and importance. This is not a book for novices; it expects a degree of familiarity with at least some aspect of ancient grammatical theory. On the other hand, it is a book to be studied not just for its content but for its methods: it is a superb demonstration of genuine and profound scholarship.
Notes
[1] The previous volumes: Book 17 (2010); Books 14-16 (2013); Book 18 (2017); Books 11-13 (2020). I have seen the following reviews (one of which I wrote): Book 17, reviewed by A. U. Schmidthauser, CR 64 (2014) 173-75 and J. Zetzel, Gnomon 85 (2013) 700-03; Books 14-16, reviewed by M. Martinho, JRS 104 (2014) 206-7, B. Rochette, L’Antiquité classique 83 (2014) 307-8, W. P. Sullivan, BMCR 2014.06.21, and R. J. Cormier, Latomus 75 (2016) 230-31.