Reference edition:

Caesii Bassi De metris et Atilii Fortunatiani De metris Horatianis, ed. G. Morelli, Hildesheim 2011-2012 (Collectanea Grammatica Latina 11), vol.1, pp. 47-51.

The title Fragmentum Vaticanum (or “Vatican Grammarian”: cfr. O’Neil, p. 275 and n.15) encompasses five brief, anonymous, grammatical excerpta. The name derives from the presence of the texts in the ms. Vaticanus latinus 5216, and does not represent an independent tradition, because this, like many other works, dates back to the famous discovery of codices in Bobbio in 1493 (Morelli, Trattazioni, 315-16). The extracts De positura, de chria, de poemate, de versu, de accentibus followed the text of Caesius Bassus already when Galbiate prepared a copy in the Bobbio monastery, and so he had to read them in the antigraph. The texts were then copied in the same order in the manuscripts Neapolitanus IV A 11 (85r-86r), Vaticanus latinus 3402 (80r-81v), Vaticanus latinus 5216 (6r-7r); then Parrasio incorporated them into the editio princeps of the rediscovered grammatical and metrical texts (the excerpta were then also copied from Parrasio’s edition into the Ambrosianus Q 123 sup., 113v-114r; for more on this sequence of events: Ferrari; Morelli, Le Liste; Id., Trattazioni).

            The compiler of these brief and essentially schematic categorisations remains unknown (Keil cautiously considered whether the texts could refer to a lost text from Charisius, but this hypothesis is already omitted in Barwick’s edition of Charisius). With the exception of De chria, the excerpts are similar to many, sometimes broader, treatises on the grammatical artes (Diomedes, Donatus, Sergius) or on meter (Atilius Fortunatianus, Mallius Theodorus): De positura quickly distinguishes between distinctio, subdistinctio and mora; De poemate outlines the definitions of poema, poesis and poetice; the sections De versu and De accentibus also show minimal structure (see, in general, Morelli’s apparatus of the loci similes). De Chria can usefully be compared to the various treatises preserved in the Greek Progymnasmata (Theon, Aphthonius, Hermogenes and Priscian’s translation of this last in Praeexercitamina): the excerptum again proposes the canonical distinction between chriai of speech, action, and mixed chriai; for the Latin sphere, see Quintilian’s discussion de chria (I 9, 3-5). The early medieval treatise Anonymus ad Cuimnanum is also significant for De chria, as its comparison has allowed the latest editor to establish the Bobbio text with greater certainty than previous editions could, and at the same time, to situate De chria in a well-defined rhetorical tradition: both the excerptum and Anon. Cuimn. consider the “demonstrative” chria among chriai of speech, and situate it in the fourth spot of this category; this consideration, when viewed against O’Neil’s interventions in his edition, confirms the reliability of the text in the Neapolitanus IV A 11 (Morelli, II, 221-224). [Anita Di Stefano; tr. C. Belanger]