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Nonius Marcellus

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Nonius Marcellus was a Roman grammarian of the 4th or 5th century AD. His only surviving work is the De compendiosa doctrina, a dictionary or encyclopedia in 20 books that shows his interests in antiquarianism and Latin literature from Plautus to Apuleius. Nonius may have come from Africa.[1]

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Late antiquity

Late antiquity

Late antiquity is the time of transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, generally spanning the 3rd–7th century in Europe and adjacent areas bordering the Mediterranean Basin. The popularization of this periodization in English has generally been credited to historian Peter Brown, after the publication of his seminal work The World of Late Antiquity (1971). Precise boundaries for the period are a continuing matter of debate, but Brown proposes a period between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Generally, it can be thought of as from the end of the Roman Empire's Crisis of the Third Century (235–284) to the early Muslim conquests (622–750), or as roughly contemporary with the Sasanian Empire (224–651). In the West its end was earlier, with the start of the Early Middle Ages typically placed in the 6th century, or earlier on the edges of the Western Roman Empire.

Antiquarian

Antiquarian

An antiquarian or antiquary is an aficionado or student of antiquities or things of the past. More specifically, the term is used for those who study history with particular attention to ancient artifacts, archaeological and historic sites, or historic archives and manuscripts. The essence of antiquarianism is a focus on the empirical evidence of the past, and is perhaps best encapsulated in the motto adopted by the 18th-century antiquary Sir Richard Colt Hoare, "We speak from facts, not theory."

Latin literature

Latin literature

Latin literature includes the essays, histories, poems, plays, and other writings written in the Latin language. The beginning of formal Latin literature dates to 240 BC, when the first stage play in Latin was performed in Rome. Latin literature would flourish for the next six centuries. The classical era of Latin literature can be roughly divided into the following periods: Early Latin literature, The Golden Age, The Imperial Period and Late Antiquity.

Plautus

Plautus

Titus Maccius Plautus, commonly known as Plautus, was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest Latin literary works to have survived in their entirety. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus. The word Plautine refers to both Plautus's own works and works similar to or influenced by his.

Apuleius

Apuleius

Apuleius was a Numidian Latin-language prose writer, Platonist philosopher and rhetorician. He lived in the Roman province of Numidia, in the Berber city of Madauros, modern-day M'Daourouch, Algeria. He studied Platonism in Athens, travelled to Italy, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and was an initiate in several cults or mysteries. The most famous incident in his life was when he was accused of using magic to gain the attentions of a wealthy widow. He declaimed and then distributed his own defense before the proconsul and a court of magistrates convened in Sabratha, near ancient Tripoli, Libya. This is known as the Apologia.

Africa (Roman province)

Africa (Roman province)

Africa was a Roman province on the northern African coast that was established in 146 BC following the defeat of Carthage in the Third Punic War. It roughly comprised the territory of present-day Tunisia, the northeast of Algeria, and the coast of western Libya along the Gulf of Sirte. The territory was originally inhabited by Berber people, known in Latin as Mauri indigenous to all of North Africa west of Egypt; in the 9th century BC, Phoenicians built settlements along the Mediterranean Sea to facilitate shipping, of which Carthage rose to dominance in the 8th century BC until its conquest by the Roman Republic.

Life

Little is known about Nonius. The full title of his work, Noni Marcelli Peripatetici Tubursicensis de Conpendiosa Doctrina ad filium, indicates that he was a Peripatetic philosopher from Thubursicum in Numidia. An inscription at Thubursicum dedicated by a certain "Nonius Marcellus Herculius" in 323 AD indicates that his family was based in that area.[2] Since Nonius does not mention Christianity and calls himself a peripatetic, he seems not to have converted.[3]

Nonius quotes Aulus Gellius and other 2nd-century compilers, and is himself quoted and praised three times by Priscian in the 5th century, and so must have lived between these dates.[4] According to the Cambridge History of Classical Literature, he was probably active in the first half of the 4th century,[5] although some scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries thought he might have lived later in the 4th or even in the 5th century.[6] More recently it has been argued that Nonius lived in the Severan period and can be dated to around A.D. 205–20.[7]

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Peripatetic school

Peripatetic school

The Peripatetic school was a philosophical school founded in 335 BC by Aristotle in the Lyceum in Ancient Athens. It was an informal institution whose members conducted philosophical and scientific inquiries. After the middle of the 3rd century BC, the school fell into decline, and it was not until the Roman era that there was a revival.

Thubursicum

Thubursicum

Khamissa, ancient Thubursicum Numidarum or Thubursicum, is an Ancient Roman and Byzantine archeological site, in Souk Ahras Province of northeastern Algeria.

Numidia

Numidia

Numidia was the ancient kingdom of the Numidians located in northwest Africa, initially comprising the territory that now makes up modern-day Algeria, but later expanding across what is today known as Tunisia, Libya, and some parts of Morocco. The polity was originally divided between the Massylii in the east and the Masaesyli in the west. During the Second Punic War, Masinissa, king of the Massylii, defeated Syphax of the Masaesyli to unify Numidia into one kingdom. The kingdom began as a sovereign state and later alternated between being a Roman province and a Roman client state.

Conversion to Christianity

Conversion to Christianity

Conversion to Christianity is the religious conversion of a previously non-Christian person to Christianity. Different Christian denominations may perform various different kinds of rituals or ceremonies of initiation into their community of believers. The most commonly accepted ritual of conversion in Christianity is through baptism, but this is not universally accepted among them all. A period of instruction and study almost always ensues before a person is formally converted into Christianity and becomes a church member, but the length of this period varies, sometimes as short as a few weeks and possibly less, and other times, up to as long as a year or possibly more.

Aulus Gellius

Aulus Gellius

Aulus Gellius was a Roman author and grammarian, who was probably born and certainly brought up in Rome. He was educated in Athens, after which he returned to Rome. He is famous for his Attic Nights, a commonplace book, or compilation of notes on grammar, philosophy, history, antiquarianism, and other subjects, preserving fragments of the works of many authors who might otherwise be unknown today.

Priscian

Priscian

Priscianus Caesariensis, commonly known as Priscian, was a Latin grammarian and the author of the Institutes of Grammar, which was the standard textbook for the study of Latin during the Middle Ages. It also provided the raw material for the field of speculative grammar.

Severan dynasty

Severan dynasty

The Severan dynasty was a Roman imperial dynasty that ruled the Roman Empire between 193 and 235, during the Roman imperial period. The dynasty was founded by the emperor Septimius Severus, who rose to power after the Year of the Five Emperors as the victor of the civil war of 193–197, and his wife, Julia Domna. After the short reigns and assassinations of their two sons, Caracalla and Geta, who succeeded their father in the government of the empire, Julia Domna's relatives themselves assumed power by raising Elagabalus and then Severus Alexander to the imperial office.

Works

The De compendiosa doctrina is one of the major sources for lost works of the Roman Republic, including the tragedies of Accius and Pacuvius, the satires of Lucilius, and the history of Sisenna. It consists of words, a short definition, and then quotations of authors using the word.[8] It has been printed under a number of titles, including De proprietate latini sermonis and De varia significatione Verborum. It is one of three major Latin dictionaries preserved from antiquity, along with that of Festus, which was an epitome of Verrius Flaccus' work De verborum significatu, and the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville.

The first twelve of Nonius's twenty books are organized grammatically around words or forms of words, and the remaining eight by subject matter such as clothing, weapons, food, etc. Each entry of either type consists of a brief definition and quotations from Republican-era writers, taken from 2nd-century sources, including Aulus Gellius and Fronto, rather than the original texts. "His ignorance and inattention," notes the Cambridge History of Classical Literature, "diminish but cannot destroy the value of his compilation."[9]

The research of W. M. Lindsay[10] and later of Strzelecki[11] has shown that Nonius obtained many of his lemmata (entries) and the first citation for each from earlier grammatical texts which are now lost. The remainder of the entries and the extra citations belong to 41 books which he either owned or borrowed from a local library. For each section (either a book or a letter entry within a book), Nonius worked through his 41 lists from 41 volumes in the same order, first to find the lead-citation, and then again in order for additional citations. Based on this methodology, it can be determined whether Nonius is quoting an author first-hand, or from a grammar which was full of errors.[12]

The Doctrina preserves fragments from early dramatists, annalists, satirists, and antiquarian writers. In arranging quotations from authors, Nonius always follows the same order, beginning with Plautus and ending with Varro and Cato. The grammarians Priscian and Fulgentius borrowed largely from his book, and in the 5th century a certain Julius Tryphonianus Sabinus brought out a revised and annotated edition.[13]

The Doctrina was edited with notes by J. Mercier in 1614 at Paris under the title De varia significatione Verborum.[14] The page numbers of the Mercier edition are used as a reference in later editions (e.g. 121 M. means "page 121 of the Mercier edition").

Nonius also wrote a volume of letters On the neglect of study, which is lost but to which he refers in the Doctrina.[15]

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Lucius Accius

Lucius Accius

Lucius Accius, or Lucius Attius, was a Roman tragic poet and literary scholar. Accius was born in 170 BC at Pisaurum, a town founded in the Ager Gallicus in 184 BC. He was the son of a freedman and a freedwoman, probably from Rome.

Pacuvius

Pacuvius

Marcus Pacuvius was an ancient Roman tragic poet. He is regarded as the greatest of their tragedians prior to Lucius Accius.

Gaius Lucilius

Gaius Lucilius

Gaius Lucilius was the earliest Roman satirist, of whose writings only fragments remain. A Roman citizen of the equestrian class, he was born at Suessa Aurunca in Campania, and was a member of the Scipionic Circle.

Lucius Cornelius Sisenna

Lucius Cornelius Sisenna

Lucius Cornelius Sisenna was a Roman soldier, historian, and annalist. He was praetor in 78 BC.

Etymologiae

Etymologiae

Etymologiae, also known as the Origines (Origins) and usually abbreviated Orig., is an etymological encyclopedia compiled by Isidore of Seville, an influential Christian bishop, towards the end of his life. Isidore was encouraged to write the book by his friend Braulio, Bishop of Saragossa. The Etymologies summarized and organized a wealth of knowledge from hundreds of classical sources; three of its books are derived largely from Pliny the Elder's Natural History. Isidore acknowledges Pliny, but not his other principal sources, namely Cassiodorus, Servius, and Gaius Julius Solinus.

Isidore of Seville

Isidore of Seville

Isidore of Seville was a Spanish scholar, theologian, and archbishop of Seville. He is widely regarded, in the words of 19th-century historian Montalembert, as "the last scholar of the ancient world".

Aulus Gellius

Aulus Gellius

Aulus Gellius was a Roman author and grammarian, who was probably born and certainly brought up in Rome. He was educated in Athens, after which he returned to Rome. He is famous for his Attic Nights, a commonplace book, or compilation of notes on grammar, philosophy, history, antiquarianism, and other subjects, preserving fragments of the works of many authors who might otherwise be unknown today.

Marcus Cornelius Fronto

Marcus Cornelius Fronto

Marcus Cornelius Fronto, best known as Fronto, was a Roman grammarian, rhetorician, and advocate. Of Berber origin, he was born at Cirta in Numidia. He was suffect consul for the nundinium of July-August 142 with Gaius Laberius Priscus as his colleague. Emperor Antoninus Pius appointed him tutor to his adopted sons and future emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus.

Lemma (morphology)

Lemma (morphology)

In morphology and lexicography, a lemma is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking are forms of the same lexeme, with break as the lemma by which they are indexed. Lexeme, in this context, refers to the set of all the inflected or alternating forms in the paradigm of a single word, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme. Lemmas have special significance in highly inflected languages such as Arabic, Turkish and Russian. The process of determining the lemma for a given lexeme is called lemmatisation. The lemma can be viewed as the chief of the principal parts, although lemmatisation is at least partly arbitrary.

Annalists

Annalists

Annalists, were a class of writers on Roman history, the period of whose literary activity lasted from the time of the Second Punic War to that of Sulla. They wrote the history of Rome from the earliest times down to their own days, the events of which were treated in much greater detail. Annalists were different from historians, in that an annalist was more likely to just record events for reference purposes, rather than offering their own opinions of events. There is, however, some overlap between the two categories and sometimes annalist is used to refer to both styles of writing from the Roman era.

Marcus Terentius Varro

Marcus Terentius Varro

Marcus Terentius Varro was a Roman polymath and a prolific author. He is regarded as ancient Rome's greatest scholar, and was described by Petrarch as "the third great light of Rome". He is sometimes called Varro Reatinus to distinguish him from his younger contemporary Varro Atacinus.

Cato the Elder

Cato the Elder

Marcus Porcius Cato, also known as Cato the Censor, the Elder and the Wise, was a Roman soldier, senator, and historian known for his conservatism and opposition to Hellenization. He was the first to write history in Latin with his Origines, a now fragmentary work on the history of Rome. His work De agri cultura, a rambling work on agriculture, farming, rituals, and recipes, is the oldest extant prose written in the Latin language. His epithet "Elder" distinguishes him from his great-grandson Cato the Younger, who opposed Julius Caesar.

Literature

Editions

Studies

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Christophe Plantin

Christophe Plantin

Christophe Plantin was a French Renaissance humanist and book printer and publisher who resided and worked in Antwerp.

Lucian Müller

Lucian Müller

Lucian Müller was a German classical scholar.

Henry Nettleship

Henry Nettleship

Henry Nettleship was an English classical scholar.

Paul Monceaux

Paul Monceaux

Étienne-Paul-Victor Monceaux was a 19th-20th-century French historian. A professor at the Collège de France from 1907 to 1937, he was elected a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1912. His major speciality was Christian Latinity in the Roman provinces of North Africa.

Wilhelm Siegmund Teuffel

Wilhelm Siegmund Teuffel

Wilhelm Siegmund Teuffel, German classical scholar, was born at Ludwigsburg in the Kingdom of Württemberg. In 1849 he was appointed extraordinary, in 1857 ordinary professor in the university of Tübingen, which post he held till his death.

Martin Schanz

Martin Schanz

Martin Schanz was a German classicist and Plato scholar. He was a Dozent and Professor at the University of Würzburg from 1867 to 1912, and is especially known for his history of Roman literature and his ground-breaking, critical edition of Plato's dialogues.

Source: "Nonius Marcellus", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2023, March 14th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonius_Marcellus.

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Further Reading

Aulus Gellius

Valerius Maximus

Carmen Arvale

Gnaeus Naevius

Late Latin

Wallace Lindsay

Poems by Julius Caesar

Indigitamenta

De verborum significatione

Nonia gens
References
  1. ^ Matthew Bunson, A Dictionary of the Roman Empire (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 258.
  2. ^ CIL VIII 4878; W. M. Lindsay, Noni Marcelli, vol. 1, Teubner, 1903, p. xiii.
  3. ^ H. Nettleship, American Journal of Philology Vol. 3, No. 9 (1882), pp. 1-16. pp. 2–3: "His assumption of the title Peripateticus justifies us in concluding further that he was not a Christian; the contents of his book prove that he was an eager student of ancient and classical Latin. He may fairly therefore be classed, for literary purposes, among the non-Christian scholars and antiquarians of the fourth and fifth centuries; with Servius the commentator on Vergil, Macrobius, and the elder Symmachus."
  4. ^ W. M. Lindsay, Noni Marcelli, vol. 1, Teubner, 1903, p. xiii. Note 2 lists references to Nonius by Priscian in Inst. I, p. 35; I. p. 269 and 499.
  5. ^ Robert Browning, "Grammarians," in the Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. 2: Latin Literature, 1982, p. 769.
  6. ^ W. M. Lindsay, Nonius Marcellus, St. Andrews University Publications 1, Oxford: Parker (1901), p. 1.
  7. ^ Paul T. Keyser, Late Authors in Nonius Marcellus and Other Evidence of His Date, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 96 (1994), pp. 369–389. pp. 388–9: "The prevailing belief that Nonius must belong roughly to the fourth century A.D. is based on little more than the tendency to presume that an undatable Latin work associated with a Roman aristocrat dates from the fourth century A.D. ... The inference that Nonius is Severan is ... based on ... the otherwise isolated and inexplicable cluster of quotations of authors dated to ca. A.D. 160-210 in the context of Nonius' express preference for the auctoritas of Republican and Augustan authors. Furthermore, this is supported by some items of contemporary language he records, by his heavy use of rolls rather than codices, and by his designation as a Peripatetic. In the end, one can conclude that he is to be dated to ca. A.D. 205–20."
  8. ^ W. M. Lindsay, Nonius Marcellus, St. Andrews University Publications 1, Oxford: Parker (1901), p. 1.
  9. ^ Browning, Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. 2: Latin Literature, p. 769.
  10. ^ Nonius Marcellus' Dictionary of Republican Latin, 1901. Reference from Habinek.
  11. ^ Paulys Real-Encyclopadie 33.882-97. Reference from Habinek.
  12. ^ Thomas N. Habinek, The colometry of Latin prose (1985), pp. 115–6. Preview here.
  13. ^ 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica entry.
  14. ^ George Crabb (1833), Universal historical dictionary, volume 2, no page numbers, online here: "NONIUS, Marcellus, (Biog.) a grammarian and peripatetic philosopher and a native of Tibur, whose treatise, 'De varia significatione verborum' was edited by Mercer, 8vo, Paris, 1614."
  15. ^ W. M. Lindsay, Nonius Marcellus, St. Andrews University Publications 1, Oxford: Parker (1901), p. 1: "He published a volume of letters 'On the Neglect of Study,' from which he quotes a pompous sentence in illustration of the word meridies (p. 451 of Mercier's edition)."
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