Grice e Stilone

 Aelius Stilo

The text of Suetonius (gramm. 3, 1) then provides the first names of Latin authors who, at the end of the 2nd century BC, were exclusively devoted to grammar:

Instruxerunt auxeruntque ab omni parte grammaticam L. Aelius Lanuvinus generque Aeli Ser. Clodius, uterque eques Romanus multique ac vari et in doctrina et in re publica usus. 32

The first name refers to the scholar who is known as Aelius Stilo, native of Lanuvium, master of Cicero and Varro.33 From Gellius 3, 3, 12 it is possible for us to gather some information about his linguistic and philological studies on Plautus, then resumed and developed by Varro.34 In a proper linguistic field,some fragments testify to an interest for archaism, investigated both in the carmen Saliare35 and in the XII Tables, 36 as well as in the ancient Italic languages. 37

Another passage from Gellius (16, 8, 2) reports the title of a work by Aelius Stilo denominated Commentarius de proloquiis in which, as Gellius himself informs us, the Latin term proloquium was used to translate the Greek

¿fiwua, a technical term of the Stoic dialectics which indicated a simple sentence, complete in all its parts. Gellius (16, 8, 6) adds that this term was later used by Varro in the XXIV book of the De lingua Latina 38 Therefore, Varro was indebted to Stilo even with regard to the syntactic terminology.

However, the grammatical field in which the dependence of Varro from Aelius Stilo is more widely recognised is etymology. Dahlmann, recalling a Reitzenstein hypothesis, suggested that in the books V-VII of De lingua Latina, Varro would have largely made use of a Stoic Etymologicon, translated into Latin by Aelius Stilo.39 In any case, Varro himself acknowledges his dependence on Aelius Stilo, often quoting his master for the etymologies: out of 51 certain fragments of Stilo's collected by Funaioli, 9 are quoted by Varro.40 It is worth remembering the famous etymology caelum "sky" from celare "to hide", since its antonym is 'to reveal' (fr. 7 Fun.), which makes use of a well-known method of Stilo, called the antiphrasis, by means of which words are explained by their antonyms.41