Reference edition:

Grammatici Latini, VI. Scriptores artis metricae. Marius Victorinus, Maximus Victorinus, Caesius Bassus etc., ex recensione H. Keilii, Hildesheim 1961, 633-634, 9 (reprografischer  Nachdruck der Ausgabe Leipzig 1874).

This anonymous fragment is transmitted in the codex Berlin, Staatsbibl. Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Diez B. Sant. 66, a grammatical miscellany assembled for didactic purposes around Donatus, and written in the years immediately preceding 791 by two copyists, one of a French writing school and the other of an Italian (Bischoff 1973, 12 ss.; Holtz 1981, 358). The latter, who perhaps revised and continued the work of the first, is responsible for the texts and extracts concerning metrical problems in pp. 223-277. Bischoff and Holtz thought that the manuscript was located in western Germany, at Charlemagne’s court, but Villa has raised doubts about this. In his 1995 study she traces the codex back to northern Italy, a theory which she continues in a work from 2000; however, there is certainly a link between whoever prepared the collection and the milieu of the Carolingian court (De Paolis 2003, 60).

            The fragment appears in the manuscript after Mallius Theodorus’ De metris, for which it, together with the following de speciebus hexametri, acts as a conclusion; it addresses elements common to the metrical treatises of Aphthonius and Atilius Fortunatianus (4th c.) — and in the first section, it corresponds with the former almost ad verbum. After providing etymologies of the various names of hexameter (heroum, hexametrum, dactylicum), there follow observations on metrum as a unit of measurement and on the similarities between hexameter and iambic trimeter, which are interpreted, in light of the theory of derivatio, as the two verses from which all others derive. In order to demonstrate that Homer had already combined hexameter and trimeter tamquam pares, it cites a fragment of the Margites (fr. 1 West), as in P. Fackelmann 6; the same verses are also transmitted by Atilius Fortunatianus (GL VI 286, 5-7), as evidence that Homer invented the iamb. The quotation of the Margites, in addition to other citations in the Greek language, therefore shows that the anonymous author of this short compilation (whose date remains uncertain) knew Greek. [M. Callipo tr. C. Belanger]