Led by Aelius Donatus Simulacrum
About this course
The last module of the school, and the only one that teaches nothing new.
Everything is now in place. Donatus gave the eight parts and their accidents in Module 1, and the taxonomy of fault and figure in Module 3. Priscian gave the account from sound upward in Module 2, and the construction of words in Module 4. This module uses all four at once, on a continuous text, in the order the tradition established — and that discipline of sequence is the whole content.
Donatus hosts because commentary was his trade: his commentary on Terence survives, and though the Virgil commentary is lost, its preface and the Life survive and Servius took up the work, so the standard schoolroom Virgil of the Latin West descends from a book he wrote. But the line-by-line drill in 5.4 is Priscian's — his Partitiones on the opening of the Aeneid — and the debt is named rather than absorbed. Two masters, one method.
The order will feel wrong, because modern reading inverts it almost entirely. You will want to know what a line means. That is the last question, not the first:
1. The frame — whose work, why written, in what kind, how many books. Before any line. A line in a comedy and the same line in an epic are not the same line. 2. The line — metre first, then parsing, then figures named, then sense. 3. The word — where it is hard, the full interrogation.
Frame, then form, then sense. A student who leaves with nothing else should leave with that.
One further discipline runs through the module: an interpretation must be licensed by something in the text — a figure, a construction, an attested usage, or a parallel. A reading supported by none of these may be interesting, but it is not commentary. Abandoning a good reading for want of a warrant is a skill, and here it counts as an achievement rather than a failure.
Led by Aelius Donatus Simulacrum
The question
Eight sittings, and no new apparatus. You begin with the *accessus*
Outcome
The student can read a passage of a Latin author in the tradition's
Sub-units
Practice scenarios
You are preparing a passage for a class tomorrow. One line will not scan. The manuscripts offer two readings: the one in your text, which is metrically impossible, and a variant in a later copy, which scans perfectly and is duller. A colleague suggests a third possibility of his own devising which scans, is in no manuscript, and is rather beautiful. The class is in the morning.
Your goals