Word Reordering After Ordo Est: A Comparison of Porphyrion and Servius

David L. Sigsbee (University of Memphis)

Pomponius Porphyrion, active in North Africa in the early 3^rd century A.D., and Servius, active at Rome in the 4^th century A.D., both wrote what are commonly regarded as school commentaries. Porphyrion wrote his comments on Horace’s works for an audience of North African Latin speakers (as is readily apparent from some features of the Latin in his explanations), and we have his comments in a later redacted form. The majority of topics center on grammar and related matters for school use. Servius, whose commentary also exists in a later form referred to as Servius Danielensis, writes on Vergil’s Aeneid and also includes comments on grammatical matters along with extensive cultural and historical observations. What is common to both of them, however, is that they engage in a practice of reordering Latin phrases, clauses, and sentences for their students in a way that makes the grammatical relationship of words clear, a practice which gives us some insights into ancient instructional techniques for explaining Latin word order.

This presentation will focus on the techniques for the reordering of Vergil and Horace’s words when introduced by the phrase ordo est, of which there are 96 instances in Porphyrion and 109 in the Servius commentators (the exact count in Servius and Servius Danielensis may be disputed).

From this examination, it will be found that Porphyrion has several different reordering formulae that he uses, including simple reordering, skeleton sentences (omitting material not essential to the understanding the structure of a sentence), special positioning of subordinate clauses, relative positioning of ablative modifiers and ablative absolutes, and reordering with additions to the text to complete grammar and sense. Thus, it appears that he has created for Latin a metalanguage that has previously been termed “pedagogical word order.” In contrast, Servius, while he also uses simple reordering and skeleton sentences, uses this reordering technique as a way of expanding and even paraphrasing Vergil. Servius also gives us a number of examples of alternate rendering for the same Latin passage in order to explain disputed interpretations.

The results of putting the reorderings of these commentators in side by side comparison is that we can see how two Latin teachers explained Latin word order to their students, what devices they used, what kind of constructions seemed most to command their attention, how they changed or did not change the relative order of Latin words in a sentence, whether they taught a SOV or other word order, and how they handled subordinate clauses. These findings are all the more interesting since they involve commentators working with students who used differing dialects of Latin and were some time removed from the language of the authors being studied.