Little is known of the man Atilius Fortunatianus: his very existence had been forgotten until a manual attributed to him, De metris Horatianis, was rediscovered in 1493 among the texts preserved in the Bobbio library. Heinrich Keil oversaw the first revision, and included the short work in Book VI of the Grammatici Latini, among the metrical treatises (he later produced a second edition, Halis 1885); later, Consbruch prepared a profile of the obscure metricologist for the Real-Encyclopädie (1896). Other studies, from Kaster to Giuseppe Morelli’s most recent inquiries, have since attempted to reconstruct the main lines of Fortunatianus’ biography. These are principally, and nearly exclusively, drawn from what the author reveals about himself in certain parts of his manual, beginning with the proem. A citation of Sallust at the end of the proem ([…] sed, ut ille ait, carptim, uti quaeque memoria digna videbantur [cf. Sall. Catil. 4, 2], de multis auctoribus excerpta perscripsi)  effectively dates Atilius Fortunatianus’ activity between the second half and the end of the 4th c. CE. This is because Servius’ De centum metris contains numerous coincidences with Fortunatianus, both in the chapters that introduce the exposition of the prototype metres and in Servius’ reuse of the adverb carptim, which leads us to consider Fortunatianus’ work as a source for the De centum metris itself. This work is dated to the beginning of the 5th c. and therefore becomes a kind of terminus ante quem (Morelli 2012). Kaster has also suggested the possibility that its earliest form dates before the 4th c.: he bases this on the importance that it attributes to the office of praetor in relation to the mastery of the art of rhetoric (59. 6-7: quid enim pulchrius disertissimo praetore? Aut quid sublimius eloquentissimo consule?), a connection that is consistent with a political and cultural period prior to the 4th c.

            The cognomen “Fortunatianus” suggests that he may have come from the province of Africa, like the other metricists Juba, Terentianus Maurus, and Marius Vittorinus (Consbruch). The proem, alongside the other sections of the text, reveals the text’s origin. It was dedicated to a Roman aristocrat, whose identity remains as yet unknown, but who was engaged in the study of rhetoric, and who was rising toward senatorial rank  (59.1-5: etsi scio te omni studio atque virtute in hoc maxime laborare, ut oratorem te perfici velis […] ut eloquentia senatoriam cumules dignitatem). The dedicatee had been a student of Fortunatianus, as the author mentions, thereby recording the standard work of a grammaticus (60.8-9: cum artem grammaticam et intellexeris apud me et memoriae mandaveris diligenter), and he had long ago requested from his old teacher a handbook on metre, particularly Horatian metre, to help him in his own poetic interests  (60.10-11: praesertim cum satis meminerim me tibi omnem summam metrorum brevitate pollicitum). Fortunatianus responds by producing this lively text, in which the explanation of lyric metres is preceded by a description of the basic features of prosody and metre, fulfilling his promise of a summa metrorum.

            Camillo Morelli’s hypothesis (1915) that the young disciple might be identified with Albinus, the dedicatee of Servius’ De centum metris, is today much doubted: see Morelli 2011. It is possible that the uncertainty over the metricologist’s identification may have contributed to the homonymy’s presence at the end of Late Antiquity: consider the rhetor C. Consultus Fortunatianus, who is occasionally identified as the dedicatee of Servius’ De metris Horatii (Jones-Martindale-Morris; Kaster). [A. Di Stefano; tr. C. Belanger]