PRISCIAN [PRISCIANUS CAESARIENSIS], the celebrated Latin grammarian, lived about A.D. 500. This is shown by the facts that he addressed to Anastasius, emperor of the East (491-518), a laudatory poem, and that the mss. of his Institutiones grammaticae contain a subscription to the effect that the work was copied (526, 527) by Flavius Theodorus, a clerk in the imperial secre tariat. His title Caesariensis points, according to Niebuhr and others, to Caesarea in Mauretania. Priscian was quoted by several writers in Britain of the 8th century—Aldhelm, Bede, Alcuin and was abridged or largely used in the next century by Hrabanus Maurus of Fulda and Servatus Lupus of Ferrieres. There is hardly a library in Europe that did not and does not contain a copy of his great work, and there are about a thousand mss. of it. The greater part of these contain only books i.–xvi. (sometimes called Priscianus major) ; a few contain (with the three books Ad Spit machum) books xvii., xviii. (Priscianus minor) ; and a few con tain both parts. The earliest mss. are of the 9th century, though a few fragments are somewhat earlier. All are ultimately derived from the copy made by Theodorus. The first printed edition was in 1470 at Venice.
The Institutiones grammaticae is a systematic exposition of Latin grammar. It is divided into 18 books, of which the first 16 deal mainly with sounds, word-formation and inflexions; the last two, which form from a fourth to a third of the whole work, deal with syntax. He has preserved to us numerous fragments which
would otherwise have been lost, e.g., from Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius, Lucilius, Cato and Varro.
Priscian's three short treatises dedicated to Symmachus are on weights and measures, the metres of Terence, and some rhetorical elements (exercises translated from the lIpoyv,uvao-p,ara of Hermogenes). He also wrote De nomine, pronomine, et verbo (an abridgment of part of his Institutiones), and an interesting specimen of the school teaching of grammar in the shape of com plete parsing by question and answer of the first 12 lines of the Aeneid (Partitiones xii. versuum Aeneidos principalium). He also wrote two poems, not in any way remarkable, a panegyric on Anastasius and a translation of Dionysius's Periegesis.
The best edition of the grammatical works is by Hertz and Keil, in Keil's Grammatici latini, vols. ii., iii. ; poems in E. Bahrens' Poetae latini minores, the "Periegesis" also, in C. W. Muller, Geographi graeci minores, vol. ii. See J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship (1908), vol. i. ; and A. Luscher, De Prisciani studiis Graecis (Breslau, 1912).