Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

education in the roman empire 859
in style and quality from teacher to teacher. However, some of the Latin
manuals permit a glimpse of what went on in the classroom. Donatus’ Ars
minor consists of a series of questions and answers designed to help teachers
formulate their teaching and test how much of it the students had memorized
and understood. Thus the section on the verb begins: Verbum quid
est? Pars orationis cum tempore et persona sine casu aut agere aliquid aut pati aut
neutrum significans. Verbis quot accidunt? Septem. Quae? Qualitas, coniugatio, genus,
numerus, figura, tempus, persona. Each of these features of the verb is then
defined and its subdivisions set out. 21
The other principal activity of the grammarian was the explication of
poetic texts. This has a long history, in Greek going back beyond the
Alexandrian grammarians to the schoolmaster in a fragment of
Aristophanes who quizzes his pupils on the meaning of Homeric words,
and in Latin to Probus (late first century a.d.) and ultimately to Varro. No
continuous commentary on a Greek poetic text survives from late antiquity.
But we do possess the commentary on Virgil by Servius, written in
the first half of the fifth century, and embodying much earlier material. 22
Servius follows ancient practice in commenting on Virgil’s text line by line
rather than discussing the structure of the poem as a whole or the place in
it of particular episodes or particular characters. His commentary is mainly
linguistic, and he only occasionally touches upon mythological, historical
or literary questions at any length. His main principles of explanation are
natura, auctoritas and usus, and he easily slides from linguistic description to
linguistic prescription. He is alert to ambiguities and to semantic change,
and often elucidates a Virgilian passage by quoting Lucretius or Horace or
Lucan. But he scarcely ever refers to the spoken language of his own day,
as Eustathios was to do in the twelfth century in commenting on Homer.
Though he was aware of the existence of variant readings, he never tries to
solve a problem of interpretation by emending the text of his manuscript
as a modern scholar might do. Fortified by the accumulated learning of his
predecessors, he interprets Virgil, not without complacency, in a hermetically
sealed world.
His commentary clearly reflects his teaching. But how? Few pupils would
have a text of Virgil. The grammarian presumably began his lesson by dictating
a passage of the Aeneid, which his pupils would copy. Then he would
go on to explain the passage, comment on its language and discuss its interpretation.
It must have been a slow procedure, not likely to give the pupil
a grasp of the larger structure of the poem or a sense of its grandeur. A
twelfth-century Greek commentator on Aristotle remarks that schoolboys
normally read about thirty lines of Homer a day, while only the brightest
21 On the relation between the teacher’s written text and his oral exposition cf. Holtz (1981) 75–100.
22 Thilo and Hagen (1881–7).
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