Quintus Remmius Palaemon or Quintus Rhemnius Fannius Palaemon
[.] was a
Roman
Roman or Romans most often refers to:
*Rome, the capital city of Italy
*Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD
*Roman people, the people of ancient Rome
*'' Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lette ...
grammarian and a native of
Vicentia. He lived during the reigns of
Emperors
An emperor (from la, imperator, via fro, empereor) is a monarch, and usually the sovereign ruler of an empire or another type of imperial realm. Empress, the female equivalent, may indicate an emperor's wife ( empress consort), mother (empr ...
Tiberius
Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus (; 16 November 42 BC – 16 March AD 37) was the second Roman emperor. He reigned from AD 14 until 37, succeeding his stepfather, the first Roman emperor Augustus. Tiberius was born in Rome in 42 BC. His father ...
and
Claudius.
Life
From
Suetonius, we learn that he was originally a
slave who obtained his freedom and taught grammar at
Rome
, established_title = Founded
, established_date = 753 BC
, founder = King Romulus (legendary)
, image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg
, map_caption ...
.
Suetonius preserves several anecdotes of his profligate and arrogant character.
[ He was so steeped in luxury that he bathed several times a day. Tiberius and Claudius both felt he was too dissolute to allow boys and young men to be entrusted to him. He referred to the great grammarian ]Varro
Marcus Terentius Varro (; 116–27 BC) was a Roman polymath and a prolific author. He is regarded as ancient Rome's greatest scholar, and was described by Petrarch as "the third great light of Rome" (after Vergil and Cicero). He is sometimes calle ...
as a "pig." However, he had a remarkable memory and wrote poetry in unusual meters, and he enjoyed a great reputation as a teacher;[ Quintilian and ]Persius
Aulus Persius Flaccus (; 4 December 3424 November 62 AD) was a Roman poet and satirist of Etruscan origin. In his works, poems and satires, he shows a Stoic wisdom and a strong criticism for what he considered to be the stylistic abuses of his ...
are said to have been his pupils.[
]
Works
His lost ''Ars'', a system of grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes domain ...
much used in his own time and largely drawn upon by later grammarians, contained rules for correct diction
Diction ( la, dictionem (nom. ), "a saying, expression, word"), in its original meaning, is a writer's or speaker's distinctive vocabulary choices and style of expression in a poem or story.Crannell (1997) ''Glossary'', p. 406 In its common meanin ...
, illustrative quotations and discussed barbarisms and solecism
A solecism is a phrase that transgresses the rules of grammar. The term is often used in the context of linguistic prescription; it also occurs descriptively in the context of a lack of idiomaticness.
Etymology
The word originally was used by ...
s.[ An extant '']Ars grammatica
An ''ars grammatica'' ( en, italic=yes, art of grammar) is a generic or proper title for surveys of Latin grammar. The first ''ars grammatica'' seems to have been composed by Remmius Palaemon (first century CE), but is now lost. The most famous '' ...
'' (discovered by Jovianus Pontanus in the 15th century) and other unimportant treatises on similar subjects have been wrongly ascribed to him.[
Among Palaemon's ascribed works is a ''Song on Weights and Measures'' (')][ now dated to between the late 4th and early 6th centuries. In this poem, first edited in 1528, the term ''gramma'' is used for a weight equal to two oboli.][.] (Two oboli—a ''diobol''—corresponds to 1/24th of a Roman ounce
The (plural: ) was a Roman unit of length, weight, and volume. It survived as the Byzantine liquid ounce ( grc-gre, οὐγγία, ''oungía'') and the origin of the English inch, ounce, and fluid ounce.
The Roman inch was equal to of a Ro ...
or about 1.14 grams.) This eventually led to the adoption of the term ''gram
The gram (originally gramme; SI unit symbol g) is a unit of mass in the International System of Units (SI) equal to one one thousandth of a kilogram.
Originally defined as of 1795 as "the absolute weight of a volume of pure water equal to th ...
'' as a unit of weight (''poids'', later of mass) by the French National Convention
The National Convention (french: link=no, Convention nationale) was the parliament of the Kingdom of France for one day and the French First Republic for the rest of its existence during the French Revolution, following the two-year Nationa ...
in 1795.
References
Citation
Bibliography
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External links
Bibliography on Palaemon at ''Corpus Grammaticorum Latinorum''
{{Authority control
Imperial Roman slaves and freedmen
Grammarians of Latin
Ancient linguists
1st-century Romans