Led by Aelius Donatus Simulacrum
About this course
Donatus returns, and in a different book. Module 1 was the Ars minor — the catechism, the eight parts of speech, nothing else, because that is all a beginner can hold. This is the third book of the Ars maior, written for a reader who has finished the minor and can now be told the difficult things.
The subject is deviation from the rule, and the module rests on one observation: the same departure is a fault in a schoolboy and a figure in Virgil. Not a similar departure — the identical one. A syllable added where none belongs is a barbarism in an exercise and a metaplasm in a hexameter. What separates them is not the form but the agent, and whether the deviation was made knowingly and for a purpose.
Two consequences follow, and the module exists to install both. Name the deviation before you judge it — locate it, classify it, and only then ask whose it is. And neither direction of excuse is permitted: an author's authority makes a form a figure rather than correct, and a pupil may not cite an author to excuse an error he did not make on purpose.
Everything in the taxonomy is generated by a small grid — two levels (inside a word, or between words) and four operations (addition, subtraction, transposition, substitution). Build the grid and most of the names can be derived rather than memorised, including the twelve metaplasms, which are simply the addition and subtraction rows crossed with beginning, middle and end.
Why so many names? The same reason a physician names a disease: a fault you cannot name is a fault you cannot cure. "He got it wrong" tells a teacher nothing about what to drill next. And the same granularity, turned on a poet, is what separates criticism from admiration.
Led by Aelius Donatus Simulacrum
The question
Eight sittings on the *Ars maior*, Book III. You begin with the
Outcome
The student can locate any deviation from grammatical rule, classify
Sub-units
Practice scenarios
A junior master has marked a pupil's exercise. He has also, in the margin of the same page, corrected two lines of Virgil the pupil had copied as a model — a syncopated verb form and a construction that fails to agree. His corrections are accurate as grammar. He is proud of them and has shown the class that even the greatest poet may nod.
Your goals