Reference edition:

F.Casaceli, Foca, De nomine et verbo. Introduzione, testo e commento, Napoli 1974.

The Ars de nomine et verbo is constructed as a short scholastic handbook on syntax that was intended, in the first case, for the students of its author.  The work’s preface - comprising a few elegiac distychs followed by a prose epistle addressed to an unknown dedicatee - casts light on the goals and contents of the treatise: the grammarian’s intent is to create an opusculum that represents the golden mean between excessively long works that tax their reader’s memory and extremely brief writings that are of limited practical use.  Its focus is therefore limited to the forms of nouns and verbs, the most complicated, but also the most essential, elements of discourse.  The result is a “regulae-type” of grammar (Law), in which - apart from the literary pretentions that seem to emerge from its important poetic preface (Mondin) - there appear pages almost entirely comprised of “enumerations of nouns and verbs according to gender, declension, and conjugation” (Schanz-Hosius).  Even examples drawn from literary works, a mainstay of grammarians, are relatively rare.  The work’s sources seem to be Charisius, Diomedes, and perhaps Donatus.  [A. Balbo – S. Mollea; tr. C. L. Caterine].