So begins a bilingual description of a child’s day found in a sixteenth-century collection of glossaries. What is this work? Is it an original essay by a schoolboy, an easy reader for small children just learning their letters, a text for Latin speakers to learn Greek on, or a text for Greek speakers to learn Latin on? Is it a product of the first century ad, the early third century, late antquity, or the Renaissance? If ancient, does it come from the Western empire or from the East? Is it in its original form, or has it been damaged in transmission – for example, why does the child take such care over personal hygiene and then, on a cold day, go off to school apparently naked from the knees up?

Title Logos/Liber is found at the head of all the M manuscripts except T and thus clearly goes back to the M archetype (if not earlier); it is traditionally omitted from editions, however, because of editors’ preferences for the readings of T. No trace of this title is found in the E manuscripts, which offer no consensus on a title but most of which have an ascription that in some way attributes the work to Iulius Polydeuces (Pollux). There is no trace of this ascription in the M version, and it is clearly false (cf. Schoenemann 1886: 3–4; Goetz 1892: xx, xxi), so it is likely to have been added by the adaptor of the E version. This type of invention was not uncommon at the time, and Pollux’s name was wrongly attached to other works as well; see Kresten (1969, 1976).

ia ἀγαθῇ τύχῃ, εύτυχϖς/bona fortuna, feliciter: These are invocations for the success of the literary enterprise; similar invocations (ἀγαθῇ τύχῃ. θεοὶ ἵλεοι/bona fortuna. dii propitii) are found at the end of the preface to the colloquium Montepessulanum (Mp 1d). In both languages the use of such invocations at the start of a text is a characteristic of inscriptions; in Greek it goes back to the classical period, and in Latin (where bona fortuna often becomes simply BF) it seems to be an imitation of the Greek found mainly in the third and fourth centuries ad (see Adams 2003a: 81).

Title The three sources for this colloquium had significantly different titles: L has the A version of the title, S has the B version, which Estienne found in only one of his source manuscripts (Stephanus 1573: 235), and Estienne’s other source manuscript had a reduced version of the A title (lines 3 and 5 only). The first two lines of the A version are likely to be a later addition because they appear only in Latin; they are important for understanding the history of this text (see above, section 1.2.5). There are parallels for the rest of the title in the ME, H, and C versions of the colloquia; see commentary on ME 1n and 3a. The Greek title for the original colloquium was probably περὶ ὁμιλίας καθημερινῆς (see commentary on ME 3a); the A version of the title of LS is probably descended from that, with the addition of the nominative συναναστροφή/conversatio at the end as a vocabulary item. Presumably συναναστροφή replaced ὁμιλία because it was morphologically equivalent to Latin conversatio, though in meaning it is a less good equivalent. The fourth line, καθημερινή/cottidiana, now agrees with the last line (συναναστροφή/conversatio), but if the original form of this title was as above, the adjective originally agreed with the preceding rather than the following noun.

Title B ἀρχώμεθα γράφειν/incipiamus scribere: This is a formulaic phrase, on which see the commentary on ME 1n.