Note 277 — CHAPTER 1. BEFORE QUINTILIAN—CICERO, HORACE, SENECA THE ELDER, VARRO.

The actual primacy is assigned to a verse canon of the Ten Latin Comic Poets by a certain Volcatius Sedigitus, who may be close to 100 B.C. This “stupid production,” as Mr Nettleship unkindly but most justly calls it, may be found in his Essay (so often quoted) in Aulus Gellius, xv. 24, or in Baehrens' Poetæ Latini Minores, vi. 279. The six-fingered one puts Cæcilius first, Plautus second, Terence sixth, Ennius tenth, antiquitatis causa. He had, of course, borrowed the “canon” system from the Alexandrians, among whose most dubious services to criticism the arrangement of such things must be placed. There are touches of literary and critical reference in Ennius, in the Prologues of Terence, &c., but nothing that need delay us.