Quintus Remmius Palaemon

Quintus Remmius Palaemon, Roman grammarian, a native of Vicentia, lived in the reigns of 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. Though a man of profligate and arrogant character, he enjoyed a great reputation as a teacher; Quintilian and Persius are said to have been his pupils. His lost Ars (Juvenal, vii. 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 treated of barbarisms and solecisms (Juvenal vi. 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.

See C Marschall, De Remmii Palaemonis libris grammaticis (1887); "Latin Grammar in the First Century" by H Nettleship in Journal of Philology, vol. xv. (1886); JE Sandys, Hist. of Classical Scholarship (2nd ed., 1906).

This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.