Reference edition:

Grammatici Latini, VII. Scriptores de orthographia. Terentius Scaurus Vellius Longus Caper Agroecius etc., ex recensione H. Keilii, Hildesheim 1961, 92-107 (reprografischer Nachdruck der Ausgabe Leipzig 1880).

Together with Agroecius’ work on the same theme, the two treatises De orthographia and De verbis dubiis attributed to Caper contitute a corpus of orthographical writing formed during Late Antiquity which obtained a moderate reception during the Carolingian Renaissance and then in Italian Humanism. Agroecius is identified as the bishop of Sens around the year 470 (see A. Balbo, in digilibLT, s.v. Agroecius): in the prefatory letter to his work, he explains that he obtained the text of De orthographia from Eucherius, the bishop of Lyon (434-450), which they both believed to be genuinely written by Caper, in order to amend it. The orthographical corpus constituted by the work attributed to Caper and by Agroecius’ De orthographia, conceived as an integration of the work of his illustrious predecessor, therefore has its origin in mid-fifth-century Lyon. The redaction of the De orthographia transmitted under the name of Flavius Caper should instead be placed between the end of the second century, when the grammarian lived, and the death of Eucherius, who lived around 450 CE. However, the appearance of late linguistic phenomena leads us to confine the dating between the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth (De Paolis).

It contains not only orthographical material, but also addresses various kinds of grammatical questions, sometimes in the form of differentiae verborum. The text, which serves a didactic purpose, merges material from diverse erudite and teaching traditions: first of all, the lemmas that preserve learned discussions, crystalized into a simplified and normative form, may be attributed to Caper’s De latinitate, on the basis of comparison with other Latin grammarians (in primis Charisius and Priscian: for an overview, De Nonno 1990, 639-646); then, additions of a later compiler who wrote the work in its current state — the presence of Greek notes would seem to indicate that this compiler was probably a teacher who addressed a Greek audience; lastly, lemmas that there is a tendency today to consider of a heterogeneous provenance, rather than as fragments of an anonymous orthographical treatise in trochaic septenarii and hexameter, as hypothesised by L. Strzelecki in 1949 (see especially De Paolis 2013, Il progetto). [M. Callipo, tr. C. Belanger]