then of Petronius's Trimalchio; the one is a figure cut out in paper, the other a living man. The inconsistencies of the sixth satire might be defended in a humorist; he would be in his right in saying that a licentious wife or an over-virtuous wife are equally objectionable. But this ground is not open to the moralist, who is bound to defend virtue against all cavil.

In fact, Juvenal is at his best not when he is lashing vice, but when he is in the vein of grave and simple moral expostulation. The tenth satire is perhaps too declamatory to be taken as a specimen of his best work: the thirteenth and fourteenth are better, defaced by none of the faults which I have mentioned, and carrying the reader along from point to point with sweetness and dignity.

The style of Juvenal, the influence of which is so familiar in modern literature, is, so far as we know, new in satire. While Persius imitates Horace, and makes at least a clumsy attempt to preserve the form of a dialogue, Juvenal, in most of his pieces, throws this entirely aside, and casts his ideas into the mould of the Vergilian epic. Fingimus haec altum satira sumente coturnum Scilicet, et finem egressi legemque priorum Grande Sophocleo carmen bacchamur hiatu Montibus ignotum Rutulis caeloque Latino (6. 634). Taking these words out of their context, we might accept them as a description of Juvenal's manner, which, like all we know of the man, is elevated, serious, and unbending. He is a perfect master of his metre, a perfect master of expression within the limits of his ideas. But his ideas, and the way in which he marshals them, are those of the poetical declaimer, not of the poet. Facit indignatio versum: verses, yes; but not poetry. It would be difficult to quote from Juvenal one really poetical line. But he is a great metrist, a master of points, a rhetorician inspired by the love of his calling. His arrangement is often bad: it is his glittering language which arrests attention. It is this, far more than the coherence or truthfulness of his workmanship, which has won and will maintain his position in literature. There is a genuine and passionate rhetoric which

seems almost to reach the strain of poetry; this is the gift of Juvenal, which we should do ill to underrate. But we should do equally ill to mistake it for anything higher than it really is, or to put too much confidence in a writer honest indeed, but soured by poverty and disappointed ambition, who, with whatever brilliancy of detail, does not pass beyond the bounds of a somewhat narrow experience, mingles righteous anger with much personal irritation, and gives, after all, an exaggerated picture of a peculiar phase of ancient life.

[NOTE TO PAGE 118.

The ancient lives of Juvenal have been collected by Julius Dürr, Das Leben Juvenals (Ulm, 1888).

It may perhaps save trouble to print here the unpublished life of Juvenal to which Mr. Nettleship alludes on p. 118, though it is of no real value, being almost identical with Jahn's third life, still more so with Dürr's IV A. It occurs on the first page of MS. Canon. Lat. xxxvii :

Iuuenalis iste Aquinas fuit i. de Aquino oppido temporibus Claudii Neronis imperatoris: prima aetate siluit: in media fere aetate declamauit; unde quasi diu tacens ab indignatione cepit, dicens 'semper ego auditor tantum.' Idem fecit quoddam in Paridem pantomimum, qui tunc apud imperatorem plurimum poterat (?): hac de causa venit in suspitionem quasi ipsius imperatoris tempora notasset. Sicque sub autentu militiae pulsus est urbe: ita tristitia et languore periit.]

VI.

THE STUDY OF LATIN

GRAMMAR

AMONG THE ROMANS IN THE

FIRST CENTURY A.D.1

('JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY,' VOL. XV. (1886).)

THE history of Latin Grammar in antiquity demands a new chapter in the record of Latin literature. The seven volumes of Keil's edition of the Grammatici Latini appear to contain a large number of independent grammatical treatises, which bear different names, and are often quoted as the works of independent authors. A nearer study of them soon reveals the fact that they consist, in large part, of matter nearly or quite identical; that the same rules, lists, and instances served as the stock in trade of a great number of different professors at various times and in distant places: and that the whole mass might probably be so sifted as to reduce the bulk of original work to a comparatively small amount, and enable us to refer it to the authorship of probably less than a dozen scholars, none of them later than the age of the Antonines.

The work of analysis will certainly be tedious beyond expression, but it will be worth going through, and indeed must be gone through before the history of Latin literature is complete. I can personally claim to have done no more than attempt an but they

1 [Prof. Nettleship left a few notes for the revision of this essay, were far too fragmentary for another hand to use.]

account of the labours of Verrius Flaccus, and make a beginning in the way of investigating the sources of Gellius's Noctes Atticae and the De Compendiosa Doctrina of Nonius. The present essay will be devoted to an extension of these enquiries. It may fairly be said of this troublesome piece of research, as Quintilian says of grammar in general, plus habet operis quam ostentationis. As far as I know, there is no continuous work in which the subject is dealt with with anything like thoroughness. Much has been done towards the investigation of particular points by several scholars in Germany, as by Alfred Schottmüller in his monograph De C. Plinii libris grammaticis, by Casimir Morawski's Quaestiones Quintilianeae and analysis of the first part of Charisius's Ars Grammatica, by H. F. Neumann's essay De Plinii Dubii Sermonis Libris Charisii et Prisciani fontibus, and by Schlitte De Plinii Secundi Studiis Grammaticis (Nordhausen, 1883). These treatises, none of which exceed the length of an ordinary dissertation for the degree of doctor of philosophy, are, with some German reviews upon them, the only aids which I have been able to procure 1.

It will perhaps be convenient that I should divide my subject into two parts; giving, in the first place, a short account of the scholars who wrote upon grammar during this period, with a sketch of their works, and in the second place endeavouring to ascertain the contents of these works, and mark the progress of the science, if any, recorded in them.

I. It would be impossible to gain anything like an intelligent. idea of the progress of grammatical study in the first century without taking notice of the labours of Marcus Terentius Varro, on which, to a large extent, though perhaps not to so large an extent as has sometimes been supposed, the work of succeeding scholars was based.

Varro, then, composed neither a regular Ars Grammatica, nor a lexicon. But he treated grammatica as one of the

1 Dr. J. W. Beck has kindly presented the writer with his Quaestiones Novae de M. Valerio Probo (Groningen, 1886) since these sheets were sent to press. See p. 169 n.

and ever afterwards in the history of Latin Grammar, that of Remmius Palaemon of Vicenza1. This vain, arrogant, talented, luxurious and immoral man was born, it is probable, during the last years of Augustus's reign. He was originally a slave, by trade a weaver, and learned the rudiments of literature while accompanying his master's son to and from school. Having obtained his freedom, he took to teaching grammar at Rome. Although there was no vice with which he was not commonly charged, although both Tiberius and Claudius openly stated that he was the last man to whom the education of youth ought to be committed, his long memory, his readiness as a speaker, and his power of extemporizing verses, enabled him to distance all his competitors. Nor was his school his only source of emolument, though it brought him in £4000 a year. He made a considerable profit from clothes-shops, and succeeded to a marvel in the cultivation of the vine.

Palaemon's Ars Grammatica, or handbook of grammar, seems to have been the first exclusively scholastic treatise on Latin Grammar. For the section on Grammatica in Varro's Disciplinae was, in all probability, no more a school-book than Freund's Triennium Philologicum, or Iwan Müller's Handbuch der klassischen Philologie. Varro and Verrius Flaccus had taken the trouble to collect stores of material; our able pedagogue knew how to turn their labours to his own profit. was he in the least grateful to the scholar who was no doubt indirectly responsible for much of his success. Terentius Varro he called a pig, and boasted that letters had been born and I would die with himself.

Nor

The Ars of Palaemon, which gained its author considerable celebrity in his day, contained, as we learn from Juvenal, rules for correct speaking, instances from ancient poets, and chapters on barbarism and solecism 2. When it was published is not

1 Suetonius De Grammaticis 23.

2

Juvenal 6. 452 Odi Hanc ego, quae repetit volvitque Palaemonis artem, Servata semper lege et ratione loquendi, Nec curanda viris opicae castigat amicae Verba: soloecismum liceat fecisse marito. Ib. 7. 215.