Editorial Principles

The corpus of texts known as the Grammatici Latini comprises the Latin grammars written between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD and edited by Heinrich Keil in Leipzig, from 1855 to 1880. Keil’s philological criteria are now to some extent outdated; his selection and collation are incomplete and not always reliable; some works are represented only partly or simply by a specimen. Therefore, in our corpus, we replaced Keil’s edition by the most recent ones, whenever available, and works that were published in an incomplete form in Keil have been integrated in complete editions; when only partial modern editions exist, we did not include them in the corpus.

(1) Main text : extracts from Macrobius’ treatise de uerborum Graeci Latinique differentiis uel societatibus made by a 'Iohannes' and found in MS Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), Lat. 7186, second half of 9th c.
App. crit. : extracts from the same treatise found in MS Napoli, Biblioteca Nazionale, Lat. 2 (olim Vindobonensis 16), 7th-8th c.

The textual choices of these editions are faithfully reproduced. Nevertheless, we provide an autonomous text, which is the result of a systematic work of ‘pre-edition’. As Valeria Lomanto (‘A Concordance to Keil’s Latin Grammarians’, Computer and the Humanities 24, 1990, 429-430) wrote, ‘The pre-edition consists of a number of operations which aim to make the texts homogeneous from the point of view of form and to insert information which, while not present in the actual texts, may be gathered from the philological and exegetic tradition’.

For the sake of general coherence, titles, attributions and structure of some texts have been modified. Thus, for example, the pseudo-Fronto in GL 7,515-532 (= 387-403 Barwick) and the anonymous de idiomatis generum in GL 4,573-584 (= 450-463 Barwick) have been put under Charisius’ name; Marius Victorinus sections in GL 6,31,17-173,31 + 174,1-184,14 are found under Apthonius’ name.

Orthography and punctuation have been made uniform:

1. consonantal and vocalic “i” and “u” are not distinguished
2. the use of capitals is restricted to proper names (divinities, people, ethnica and their derivates, toponyms and the names of months and festivities)
3. the accentuation of Greek has been modified whenever it fails to conform to standard practice
4. certain aberrations in punctuation, especially in Greek passages, have been removed
5. parentheses are no longer marked by dashes but by round brackets in the case of whole phrases, and by commas in the case of single words
6. to enable the collation of parallel passages all abbreviations have been expanded (proper names, the initials of words forming quotations, abridged writing etc.).

Greek and Latin quotations have been identified, marked and attributed to their authors. The references to modern editions of literary works and collections of fragments appear in the form of footnotes. In the case of authors whose quotations are not published in any existing collection, we have referred to the articles of the Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (RE) or to recent studies, whenever available. Concerning the formal aspects of the quotations:

1. the titles of literary works quoted by the grammarians appear in italics
2. the literary quotations appear within the text in italics instead of being distinguished by inverted commas, indents, character spacings etc. The inverted commas recurring in some editions have also been eliminated when they single out isolated forms that are meant to illustrate a grammatical rule
3. every change of speaker in dialogues is indicated by a double colon.

The system of metrical scansion is unified through the use of dots which replace division of the words or subscript signs. All accents have been eliminated.

All references external to the text itself have been eliminated, namely:

1. the numbering of books, chapters and paragraphs
2. the single or double slash which mark the end of pages in previous editions
3. all references both within a work and to other works
4. isolated dashes or those which oppose an incorrect form to a correct one or which indicate the transition to another topic or which replace a word
5. all textual variants given in brackets.

The following conventional diacritic signs are used:

• { } for deletions
• ‹ › for insertions (replacing the italics of the oldest editions)
• ( ) for expanded forms
• * for lacunae (replacing dots or formulae such as aliquid desideratur, deest folium unum etc. in the oldest editions)
• † for loci desperati.

For lists of relevant examples, see:
– Grilli A., N. Marinone, V. Lomanto et al. (1979), ‘Concordanza dei Grammatici Latini’, Suppl. Atti dell’Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, Cl. sc. mor., st. e filol., 112.
– Lomanto V. (1983), Concordantiae in Q. Aurelii Symmachi Opera, Hildesheim, Olms, vii-ix.
– Lomanto V. – N. Marinone (1994), ‘Philologie et informatique: résultats et projets’, Revue Informatique et Statistique dans les Sciences Humaines (RISSH) 30, 55-74.