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Quintus Cosconius was a Republican scholar cited by Varro and Suetonius; little else is known of him. The four fragments printed by Funaioli come from his Actiones, which described the procedure of the law courts, and from works of uncertain title. They report the praetor’s attendant calling out the hours, a calculation of the number of Latin verb forms, the story that Terence died at sea with translated comedies of Menander, and the origin of the names of Aeneas’ companions. The text follows Hyginus Funaioli’s Grammaticae Romanae Fragmenta (Leipzig 1907), without his testimonia, notes and apparatus.
The long passage on verbal declension, preserved in Varro’s De lingua Latina, shows Varro using Cosconius as an authority in his account of derivation, while the note on Terence entered the biographical tradition through Suetonius’ life of the poet. Cosconius is little more than a name outside these citations, and the fragments therefore give almost all that is known of his work. They touch law, grammar, literary biography and legend, a range typical of the antiquarian writers of the late Republic.
About this edition. The Latin text was transcribed for this library from a public-domain printed edition (edition: Hyginus Funaioli, Grammaticae Romanae Fragmenta, Leipzig 1907 (vol. 1, pp. 109–110)), using the scan and text recognition at the Internet Archive; the editor’s notes and critical apparatus are not reproduced. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.