THE ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL BACKGROUNDS

The concept of a general secondary textbook of Latin grammar did not exist in antiquity. Once pupils had finished learning an elementary manual such as Donatus's Ars minor, the only comprehensive grammatical textbooks were sophisticated and advanced works such as Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae. Other secondary textbooks tended to be specialized, such as Donatus's Ars maior (which dealt with only phonetics, the parts of speech and figures), Priscian's Institutio de nomine pronomine et verbo or Phocas's Ars de nomine et verbo. The methods of teaching Latin had been developed for native speakers. Once the parts of speech had been mastered through a simple morphology such as the Ars minor, what was required for further Latin study was a more sophisticated taxonomic system, such as that offered by Donatus's Ars maior or books I to XVI of Priscian's Institutiones. This would provide the pupil with an ever more sophisticated terminology and framework for the reading and analysis of literary authors. As far as Latin sentence composition was concerned, basic syntax did not have to be taught to native speakers; sophisticated syntactical problems were handled through the doctrine of the figures (treated extensively for example in book of Donatus's Ars maior), which discussed exceptions and permitted lapses of correct grammatical usage.