Nonius Marcellus’ intellectual tendencies, contemporary concerns and treatment of the Roman literary past are the subject of this study, which contends that the author’s predilections and intended readership often guided his selection of quotations, affected his presentation of them, and, consequently, shaped our reception of early Latin we know principally or exclusively from the De compendiosa doctrina. Nonius was selecting not merely ‘old words’ regardless of their valence, but more precisely those old words that could be incorporated with minimal accommodation into the speech patterns of fourth-century North Africa. This means that his collection of Latinity often has as much to do with imperial, provincial, and formal public speech as it does with republican Latin literary styles; that Nonius was more attuned to the philosophical, intellectual, theological, and cultural implications of the texts that he was excerpting than has yet been recognised; and that he probably bequeathed us a collection of literary Latin distorted by his own interests and concerns, and by his readers’ particular needs.