Once the stronghold of Teutonic Altertumswissenschaft, the grammatici latini have, in the last decades, been invested in with increasing success by scholars from Latin lands, especially Italy and France. Numerous editions have been and are being published; translations and studies continue to appear; and interest at large (seen from afar, at any rate) seems bubbling high. Yet the jewel in the set, Priscian's ars (traditionally – mistakenly – known as institutiones grammaticae), has not yet been translated, till now, nor re-edited, principally because of its size and the sheer mass of manuscripts – more than 500 – preserving it.
The Groupe Ars Grammatica (GAG) was launched in 2002 with the express aim of producing a full translation of the Priscianic ars. The first fruits of their work came in 2005 in the form of an annotated translation of Book 15, de aduerbio (now freely accessible at persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/revue/hel). A year later, GAG co-sponsored the first international conference on Priscian, at Lyons. A selection of the papers presented, plus a few additional ones, was published by Brepols in 2009 as vol. 21 in the series Studia Artistarum. Since CR did not notice the tome, let me just say that it is wide-ranging, in-depth, polyglot and, on the whole, excellent. (Disclosure: one of the 40 papers is mine.) And now, the first volume of the projected complete translation of the ars has appeared. It contains not the first but the penultimate liber of Priscian's work.
The book consists of a 60-page introduction, followed by text and a facing translation (with notes), select bibliography and four indexes of quotations, exempla ficta, Latin and Greek and French technical terms. This being the first volume of some eighteen, the introduction has to do double duty. It thus includes a section on Priscian's uita operaque, an enthralling account of the work's reception and a few general remarks on the text. Most of the introduction, however, is devoted to illuminating Book 17 from a variety of angles – discussed are, inter alia, its place in the work as a whole, its structure, sources, the principes d'analyse employed, the linguistic material discussed and the terminology used and newly coined.
While one may willingly forgive an author for singing the praises of ‘their’ work, some of GAG's eulogies are strikingly skewed – so much so, in fact, that it is difficult to do them justice in a few words. To take the most general point: everyone agrees, including GAG (p. 12), that Priscian followed Apollonius' lead most closely in the last two books. To GAG, the de constructione represents none the less the climax of the entire work (e.g. back cover). To arrive at such a startling conclusion requires that one look at Priscian from an exclusively Latin viewpoint. Yet why should one? Priscian was living in Constantinople, where everyone but the administration spoke Greek (pp. 12, 40). His intended public spoke Greek (p. 29). His understanding of Apollonius and of Greek grammatical science in general was as good as that of any Greek grammarian of his time. Even the question of Priscian's patria remains in my view open (p. 9 n. 1 should mention J. Geiger's paper in CQ 49 [1999], 606–17). These facts (and there are more) do not lend credence to GAG's assumption that Priscian is a grammarian who stands firmly and with both feet in the Latin tradition. They suggest, rather, that one view of him is as a grammarian who composed, in Latin, a Greek grammar of Latin, for Greeks – which further suggests that GAG's repeated praises of Priscian's originality in respect to the Latin tradition (e.g. pp. 11–12, 16) are simply beside the point. (Four minima menda: Stephanus Byzantius' work postdates Priscian's [p. 10]. There are seven references to Apollonius by name in Book 17, and twenty-one in the entire work [p. 15]. The proposition that Priscian knew Apollonius' treatise on verbs only through Macrobius is vacuous – and P. De Paolis, on whose authority the statement supposedly rests, should be read more closely since the Italian scholar says the opposite of what GAG attribute to him [p. 18]. The fact that two or more people have phonetically the same name does not entail that their names are not rigid designators [p. 35; see, e.g., S.A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (1980), p. 8].)
The Latin text is essentially Hertz's, from 1858. The differences are set out on p. 53. Some 25 deletions by Hertz have not been retained – mostly with good reason. (A cursory inspection showed the figures given to be somewhat unreliable: for example add 137.8 to the deletions rejected; 188.4 to the deletions accepted.) The text looks different. For example, object language expressions are italicised. Since readers are already provided with a translation, such assistance was perhaps not indispensable. More importantly, Priscian's Latin suffers when forced into these modern strictures. Surely the following makes no sense: ‘potest enim homo esse qui loquitur’ (117.16). In any event, if one adopts the italicising fashion, one should at least be consistent and adopt it universally, meaning also for the Greek: for Priscian sometimes switches metalanguage, writing, for instance, ‘quomodo apud Graecos ϲέ ἀπὸ τοῦ ϲόϲ’ (206.10–1). In addition, work titles are set in italics, too, as in ‘Terentius in Andria’ (194.10). That seems a mistake – it certainly has nothing to do with autonymie as outlined in the introduction (p. 53).
The translation is carefully crafted and eminently readable. To nitpick – sometimes one wishes that GAG were a bit more precise, such as at 149.14, where ‘materia’ is rendered by ‘objet’. Worthy of note is GAG's decision to translate the linguistic terminology not in a uniform, that is, biunique way: for instance, terms such as constructio, ordinatio and structura are rendered according to context by ‘syntaxe’, ‘construction’, ‘agencement’, etc. (pp. 56–7). GAG argue that Priscian himself uses the terms synonymously, which seems true. Yet is that reason enough to create a new, necessarily different web of concepts in one's target language? Another possibility – for the Latinless presumably more helpful – would be to express whenever possible quasi-synonyms by a single French term.
Both text and translation are equipped with footnotes. The notes to the text serve principally three purposes: (i) after an exemple d'auteur, to notice textual differences with respect to the traditional reading; (ii) in the same location, to catalogue Latin grammatical texts, including works by Priscian, that quote the same passage; and (iii) to provide cross-references to Priscian's main source, Apollonius' Syntax. Missing are: (a) the references to the citations – they have been incorporated in the running translation, an inconvenient choice for anyone who first reads the Latin; and (b) the critical apparatus – inexplicably, uu.ll., etc. have been exiled to the introduction (pp. 54–5). (That one, very long paragraph is, incidentally, a mixed bunch: countless entries deal with punctuation and the like, which few if any will deem useful, such as ‘entre parenthèses H [i.e. Hertz]’; but there are others one would have liked to see next to the text such as, at 136.8, R's ‘homine’.) The result is unsatisfactory – the wrong kind of material, presented in a confused fashion. As regards the notes to the translation, these are unfailingly interesting and full of insight. Some are unexpected: the use of nusquam, for instance, at 139.13, ‘est sans doute une touche d'humour’ (p. 137 n. 113). Sometimes GAG could have been more generous: for example, in the paragraph after the text just mentioned, a note would have been apropos since Priscian here is our sole witness for the claim that the Stoic ἀόριϲτα ἄρθρα included words such as τίϲ and ποῖοϲ, the grammarians' interrogative nouns. (GAG should also have mentioned that the passage is FDS 559.) The bibliography contains a number of misprints: for example, on a single page, ‘Hahnsche’, ‘Altertumswissenschaft’, ‘Interpretationen’ (p. 304). The indexes are helpful. A brief prosopographia grammaticorum, with dates, would no doubt have been of considerable help to non-experts.
Commendably inexpensive, the first volume of the new French Priscian deserves a spot on every scholar's shelf.
