Charisius

Flavius Sosipater Charisius was a 4th-century Latin grammarian, the author of an ars grammatica in 5 books. He is believed to have come from Africa, and to have spent the later part of his life in Constantinople. Like some other ancient grammarians, his work was used as a Medieval textbook, and is mostly of interest to contemporary scholars for its many quotations of earlier authors, some of whom would otherwise be known to us only by name, or not at all, with which Charisius juxtaposes his basic lessons of school grammar. 

Our text of Charisius has substantial gaps. Our primary source is a manuscript copied at Bobbio early in the 8th century and known as N for Naples, where it currently resides, one of the few Dark Age Latin manuscripts of non-Christian texts which we have today, referring with "Dark Age" to the period between the 5th-century Fall of the Western Roman Empire and the 9th-century Empire of Charlemagne. N is written on pieces of 6th-century parchment re-used for the purpose.

Besides N, there survive a few fragments of another 8th-century manuscript, called p, for Paris, its current home, and some miscellaneous later fragments and quotations by other authors. In addition, in the late 15th or early 16th century, a copy, n, was made of the fragile and crumbling N. n preserves some passages no longer legible in N.

The first edition of Charisius, by Johannes Pierius Cyminus, appeared in Naples in 1532.

The standard text of Charisius today, as far as I have been able to determine, remains the Teubner edition of Barwick published in 1925, which was re-published in 1964 with corrections and additions by Kuehnert.