Title Περὶ ὁμιλίας καθημερινῆς/ de sermone cottidiano: This title has affinities with the titles of three other colloquia: ME (second colloquium), LS, and C. See on ME 3a.

Ia–2d The exhortation and response with which this text begins are unusual; most of the other colloquia begin with an explanatory preface in the author’s own voice (C, Mp, and both the ME colloquia) or with a description of the start of a boy’s day (LS and most of the other colloquia after their prefaces). It may be a later addition to the original schoolbook format, but not necessarily, for the colloquium Stephani begins with a very short speech that could be related to this passage: someone who could be (but need not be) the main character’s father says ‘Read well! What did you do today?’ (S 1–2). There the question provides a framework for the rest of the text, which is narrated by the boy in an apparent response to the initial question: ‘I got up . . .’ Here the introductory speeches are less well connected to the rest of the text, both because the father does not ask the boy to describe his day and because the rest of the text is in dialogue format rather than first-person narrative and therefore does not seem to be part of the boy’s response to his father. Nevertheless it is possible that there is some distant connection between the two introductions.

It is notable that the exhortation in 1a–2d contains elements that are part of the usual morning routine described in other versions of the schoolbook, such as getting up early, getting dressed, and going to school. It is likely that those elements have migrated from the main part of the text into the introductory exhortation: the exhortation was created or expanded by taking material from the morning scenes of the original schoolbook.

Ia προσφίλτατε/amantissime: The Latin term is classical and well attested as a vocative from the second century AD onwards (Marcus Aurelius in Fronto, Epistulae 29.7 van den Hout). The Greek, however, is very rare: apart from this passage and 12a below it appears only once, in a seventh-century text (where it is also in the vocative: Miracula Sancti Artemi, in Papadopoulos-Kerameus 1909: 78.23).