Remmius Palaemon
Quintus Remmius Palaemon was a Roman grammarian and a native of Vicentia. He lived during the reigns of Emperors Tiberius and Claudius.
From Suetonius (De grammaticis, 23) we learn that he was originally a slave who obtained his freedom and taught grammar at Rome. Suetonius preserves several anecdotes of his profligate and arrogant character. He was so steeped in luxury that he bathed several times a day. Tiberius and Claudius both felt he was too dissolute to allow boys and young men to be entrusted to him. He referred to the great grammarian Varro as a "pig." However, he had a remarkable memory and wrote poetry in unusual meters, and he enjoyed a great reputation as a teacher; Quintilian and Persius are said to have been his pupils.
His lost Ars (Juvenal 7.215), a system of grammar much used in his own time and largely drawn upon by later grammarians, contained rules for correct diction, illustrative quotations and discussed barbarisms and solecisms (Juvenal 6.452). An extant Ars grammatica (discovered by Jovianus Pontanus in the 15th century) and other unimportant treatises on similar subjects have been wrongly ascribed to him.
Among the ascribed works is a carmen de ponderibus et mensuris, a "poem on weights and measures" (PLM 5.71–82, now dated to between the late 4th and early 6th centuries[1]). In this poem, first edited in 1528,[2] the term gramma is used for a weight equal to two oboli,[3] which led to the adoption of the term gram as a unit of weight (poids, later of mass) by the French National Convention in 1795.
References
- ↑ F. Hultsch, Metrologicorum scriptorum reliquiae 2, 1866, 88-98. J. Gruber, "Carmen de ponderibus et mensuris" in Der Neue Pauly (2006 [1964]).
- ↑ by Johann Setzer of Hagenau, together with works by Celsius, Priscian and Johannes Caesarius; Aurelij Cornelij Celsi, De re medica, libri octo eruditissimi. Q. Sereni Samonici Praecepta medica, uersibus hexametris. Q. Rhemnij Fannij Palaemonis, De ponderibus [et] mensuris, liber rarus [et] utilissimus
- ↑ Charlton T. Lewis, Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary s.v. "gramma", 1879. Two oboli, or a diobol, corresponds to 1/24th of an ounce or about 1.14 grams.
- C Marschall, De Remmii Palaemonis libris grammaticis (1887)
- H Nettleship, "Latin Grammar in the First Century", Journal of Philology, 15 (1886)
- JE Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship (2nd ed., 1906).
- R.M. Olenic, "Reconstitution de l'Ars grammatica de Q. Remmius Palémon," in Problèmes de philologie classique, III. Lvow: Univ. I. Franka, 1963: 98-107.
- J. Kolendo, "De Q. Remmio Palaemone grammatico et agricola," Meander 39 (1984): 407-418.
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This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.