Un particolare caso di tradizione indiretta: Apollonio Discolo in Prisciano

The relationship between the text of the syntactic books of the Priscianus' Ars and their main Greek source, the Syntax of Apollonius Dyscolus, is very close and, from a philological point of view, presents multiple aspects, given the difficulty of establishing a reliable text for Apollonius (on the one hand due to the poverty of the manuscript tradition, consisting of very few witnesses, all incomplete and almost all of later date, and on the other hand due to the poor intelligibility of Apollonius' words): in fact, recourse is made to Priscianus, more or less opportunely, either to correct or supplement Apollonius' possibly corrupt text, or to reconstruct the content of the lost parts, or simply to try to understand the sense of the Greek text; on the other hand, Apollonius is used to verify the correctness of Priscian's text as it has been transmitted and sometimes to justify as calques of Greek constructions the peculiar linguistic forms that appear in it, without, however, ruling out the possibility that the Latin grammarian may have sometimes wished to depart, both in sense and form, from his source. The article presents a series of cases that illustrate the different modes of this relationship.