SERIAL KILLERS IN ANTIQUITY
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Abstract
Latin system, a break he justifies at length at the beginning of Book XI: the pronoun and the participle were invented to fill two gaps, the noun having no person marking, the verb lacking case marking: ‘ce statut d’hybrides justifie leur contiguïté, qui n’est donc pas accidentelle, mais assumée et signifiante’ (p. 16). The text of Priscian is highly informative on different conceptions developed by his predecessors, whether this is done explicitly (he mentions the Stoic position of setting the participle under the verb, but argues that this part of speech should be considered as self-standing, as in Books XVII–XVIII) or implicitly, such as when he speaks of participiale uerbum or casuale uerbum, using expressions that respectively model the Stoic metokhikon rhêma and ptôtikon rhêma. In all these passages Priscian takes a stand in ancient debates, and he sometimes happens to be the only author to document positions for which no other trace has been preserved (for instance that of the Stoics, who thought that the article and the pronoun were one part of speech, p. 93 and n. 3). Evolution may also be seen in the metalinguistic area, where we see ‘comment Priscien procède pour se créer un outil terminologique efficace, surtout dans les domaines de la sémantique et de la syntaxe; où les besoins étaient les plus importants’ (p. 59). The exposition of the participle and the pronoun is indeed peppered with reflections on their construction (transitivity, persons), prefiguring the detailed analyses of Books XVII and XVIII. More broadly, Greek theoretical and metalinguistic sources, Latin antecedents, but also Scaliger’s a posteriori enlightenment are explored in detail. The Greek tradition is therefore omnipresent in three ways: in Priscian’s text, in the annotation that explains the slightest allusion and in the introduction that draws up an exhaustive panorama of the correspondences between the Greek base and its treatment by Priscian. The work of the Ars Grammatica Group is distinguished by a translation that is both precise and elegant, which never hides the difficulties found in the text, by a rich and precise annotation that deciphers the epistemological background of Priscian, but also by the extreme care given to the ratio edendi with regard to the differences with M. Hertz’s text (section 9 of the introduction, pp. 83–5) and divergences concerning the punctuation or the choice to keep passages as authentic. We therefore hope to see the translation of Book VIII, which opens the section devoted to the verb, as soon as possible.