A tale of two languages

Abstract From early on Latin grammarians were fascinated by the relationship between Latin and Greek. When they started to describe their own language, they borrowed extensively from Greek grammatical terminology, which they tended to translate into Latin. In the grammatical literature references to the structure of Greek are frequent, usually serving didactic purposes. In this paper, I deal with a treatise written by the fifth-century homme de lettres Macrobius, in which he compared the two languages. His perspective differed from that of common grammarians because his comparison was inspired by intellectual curiosity rather than didactic considerations.