Reference edition: Appendix Probi, edd. S. Asperti - M. Passalacqua, Firenze 2014.

The title Appendix Probi was introduced by Joseph von Eichenfeld and Stephan Endlicher to designate a grammatical text for which the two scholars produced the editio princeps (1837), which is transcribed in the codex Lat. 1 (formerly Vind.17) of the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli (at the time, in Vienna) after the Instituta artium attributed to Probus. 

It is a composite text, consisting of materials aimed at educational instruction. The manuscript that transmitted it, copied in Bobbio at the end of the seventh century or the beginning of the eighth, is in some parts greatly deteriorated (the codex is a palimpsest: the scriptio inferioris in uncial, from the fifth century). The use of ‘Mondo Nuovo’ instrumentation for the examination of the palimpsests has recently permitted a better reading of parts that were not previously legible. The results of this reading have been adopted in the new critical edition of the Appendix by Stefano Asperti and Marina Passalacqua (2014), which supersedes that published in Keil’s Grammatici Latini (1864). 

The new edition allows us to identify 8 sections in the text, whereas traditionally only 5 were distinguished (sections 1-3 were enclosed in one section, and section 7 was not identified). The sections identified in the new edition are as follows:

1) a list of nouns, subdivided on the basis of ablative endings;

2) a list of locutiones, separated by case;

3) a list of nouns, separated by quantity;

4) a list of masculine nouns;

5) a list of correct and incorrect forms;

6) a list of differentiae verborum;

7) a section in which only the words verbum neutrale are legible;

8) a list of deponentia and communia verbs.

The section that has received the most attention and the greatest number of studies is the fifth (3 in the traditional numbering), for its significance in the study of the linguistic transition from classical to vulgar Latin: this section has also been frequently published, by Foerster (1892), Ullmann (1893), Baehrens (1922), and others. The part containing the differentiae verborum (4 in the traditional numbering, 6 in the current one) has remarkable import for the history of the differentiae genre, and it is also the source for Isidore of Seville’s De differentiis(published by Stok in 1997). Only this section is also witnessed by another codex (Montpellier, Faculté de Médecine, H 306). A copy of this section of the Bobbio codex was additionally made by someone in Aulus Janus Parrhasius’ circle in the current codex V D 32 of the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli (identified by Stok in 2005).

The texts of the Appendix date to the middle of the fifth century, and derive from material used in an educational, (probably Roman) setting; they contain traces of Christian culture (Robson’s theory that the Appendixwas composed in the same period that the Bobbio codex was copied has not been generally accepted). The materials that form the various parts of the Appendix are undeniably related not only to the Instituta, but to other texts attributed to Probus, particularly the De nomine [F. Stok, tr. C. Belanger].