Aelius Donatus

Latin grammarian and rhetorician, who taught in Rome AD c.360. His treatises on Latin grammar were in the Middle Ages the only textbooks used in schools, so that Donat in W Europe came to mean a ‘grammar book’. He also wrote commentaries on Terence and Virgil.

He was the author of a number of professional works, of which several are still extant:

A partly incomplete commentary on the playwright Terence compiled from other commentaries, but probably not in its original form; Life of Virgil text (English translation by David Scott) His Ars grammatica and especially the section on the eight parts of speech, though possessing little claim to originality, and evidently based on the same authorities which were used by the grammarians Charisius and Diomedes, attained such popularity as a schoolbook that in the Middle Ages he became the eponym for a rudimentary treatise of any sort, called a donet. When books came to be printed in the 15th century, editions of the little book were multiplied to an enormous extent. It is in the form of an Ars Minor, which only treats of the parts of speech, and an Ars Major, which deals with grammar in general at greater length.

Aelius Donatus should not be confused with Tiberius Claudius Donatus, also the author of a commentary (Interpretationes) on the Aeneid who lived about fifty years later.