ABSTRACT
Those leading scholars who, like Varro, defined the various duties of the ‘grammarian’ in the treatment of authors, or, like Dionysius Thrax, divided his subject into its component parts, produced a brief classification, in which reading (anagnosis, lectio) stood first, and was separated from exposition (exegesis, enarratio), which came next. [1] But in actual teaching practice there was no such sharp distinction between them, for the one merged into the other. When giving individual tuition in reading, more especially to the younger boys in his school, the grammaticus constantly had to provide, or elicit, a ‘construe’, in order to ensure proper understanding. Likewise, he had constantly to draw attention to syllabic quantity, in order to ensure proper pronunciation. Consequently, at this stage, most teachers felt that they might as well use this opportunity to find out how their pupils had assimilated the ‘technical’ part of the course by making them parse and scan. [2] Both processes were known as ‘partition’ (merismos, partitio), because, whether one analysed the sentence and classified each word grammatically, or distinguished the metrical feet, one had to divide the line into several sections. [3] The practice was undoubtedly an old one, going back at least to the time of the late Republic, and Quintilian approved of it, provided that it played only a subsidiary role. The general method (though carried to excessive lengths) may be seen in the handbook of Priscian, called Partitiones, published in the sixth century A.D. Here the author takes the opening line of each book of the Aeneid, and, proceeding by the favourite method of question and answer, requires boys both to scan and to classify grammatically, and discourses at great length, word by word. [4] Obviously, Quintilian, whilst approving of the general approach, would have deprecated, even disdained, such expansion of what he considered a subsidiary matter (illa minora). On this scale, the ‘grammarian's’ lessons would have become exceedingly dull, and the amount of reading covered would have been drastically reduced. Instead, Quintilian wished to take matters further at this stage, and encourage boys to detect forms of words and expression which contravened the rules of correctness which they had been taught, always provided that it was explained that they were allowable by poetic license, and often due to the exigencies of metre. The teacher, he added, certainly should not use them to censure, and diminish confidence in, the poets, but should call them ‘remouldings’ and ‘reshapings’. The purpose of all this, as Quintilian observed, was to recall the technical rules, (artificialia), that is, the strictly grammatical part of the course. [5]
