Nonius Marcellus

Nonius Marcellus was a late Roman grammarian and lexicographer . He lived in the 3rd or early 4th century. Nonius Marcellus came from Thubursicu Numidarum in the province of Numidia in North Africa and was nicknamed peripateticus Tubursicensis ("the Peripatetic from Thubursicu").

In addition to a lost work A doctrinis de peregrinando , he wrote the main work De compendiosa doctrina , a compilation that serves partly as a linguistic and partly as a subject dictionary: the first twelve of the twenty chapters deal with questions of word meaning and grammatical properties of words, the the remaining eight with names for items from areas such as shipping, clothing, food, weapons, paints and relationships.

The work is essentially a schematic compilation of quotations. Its value does not lie in the independent commentary by Nonius, but in the fact that it has preserved and handed down numerous passages by older authors. Nonius drew his evidence mainly from authors of the Republican period up to Cicero and Varro . In doing so, he initially relied on existing grammatical and lexical works, in particular Marcus Verrius Flaccus and Aulus Gellius , which he then supplemented with additional quotations from a total of 41 authors. The arrangement of the quotations for each term always follows a fixed order of the authors: Nonius begins with quotations from Plautus and ends with Varro and Cato. Multiple quotations from a single author are in the order in which they appear in this author's work. The fact that Nonius always went through his sources in the same order makes it possible to determine the arrangement of fragments from lost works.

The grammarians Priscian and Fulgentius have used the work of Nonius extensively. The dating of his work and thus his lifetime is based on the fact that Nonius Aulus Gellius used and was in turn used by Priscian.

Text output

• Relevant text edition by Wallace M. Lindsay , Teubner , Leipzig 1903 (full texts: Vol. 1 , Vol. 2 , Vol. 3 ).

Individual passages in the work of Nonius Marcellus are usually indicated using the page numbers in the edition published by J. Mercier in Paris in 1614 under the title De varia significatione Verborum . So "Nonius 143 M" means "Page 143 in Mercier's Nonius edition".

literature

• Michael Chase: Nonius Marcellus. In: Richard Goulet (ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques . Volume 4, CNRS Éditions, Paris 2005, ISBN 2-271-06386-8 , pp. 719-724
• Władysław Strzelecki: Nonius 38. In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume XVII, 1, Stuttgart 1936, Sp. 882-897.

Web links

• Literature by and about Nonius Marcellus in the catalog of the German National Library