Tra canonizzazioni della ‘norma’ ed infrazione. Sondaggi dai frammenti grammaticali latini su papiro (I-VI d.C.)

Moving from the parallelism between what we read about the way of inflecting procurator in some Late Antiquity’s Artes grammaticae and the declension of the same word in the scriptio inferior of an unpublished palimpsest parchment scrap stored in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the paper focuses on the necessity of looking deeper at the fragmentary Latin grammars on papyrus. The main aim is to build up a corpus of ‘grammatical’ Latin fragments and to reconsider what should be included in this corpus; not only papyri containing lines from grammatical treatises could be included, but also declensions of nouns and conjugations, and grammatical clarifications given in bilingual glossaries and in marginalia. Making a corpus of Latin grammatical papyri will not simply be a contribution to Latin Papyrology, but especially a decisive element for our knowledge of ‘manuals’ in schools in the Pars Orientis of the Empire, their linguistic theories and the way in which they used to ‘write’ Grammar. A diachronical and diatopical analysis, in parallel with the known (Τέχναι and the) Late Antiquity’s Artes, will support a new step while making a corpus of Grammaticae Romanae Fragmenta; moreover, grammatical topics transmitted by these fragmentary texts mirror the necessity of canonizing the ‘rule’, maybe as consequence of its infraction.