From Suetonius (De grammaticis, 23) we learn that he was originally a slave who obtained his freedom and taught grammar at Rome. Though a man of profligate and arrogant character, he enjoyed a great reputation as a teacher; Quintilian and Persius are said to have been his pupils. His lost Ars (Juvenal, vii. 215), a system of grammar much used in his own time and largely drawn upon by later grammarians, contained rules for correct diction, illustrative quotations and treated of barbarisms and solecisms (Juvenal vi. 452). An extant Ars grammatica (discovered by Jovianus Pontanus in the 15th century) and other unimportant treatises on similar subjects have been wrongly ascribed to him.
References
C Marschall, De Remmii Palaemonis libris grammaticis (1887)
H Nettleship, "Latin Grammar in the First Century", Journal of Philology, vol. xv. (1886)
JE Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship (2nd ed., 1906).
This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopędia Britannica.
QuintusRemmiusPalaemon, a former slave, began his life in textile manufacturing.
Quintus Haterius Tychicus similarly enjoyed commercial success as a building contractor and had his tomb engraved with a picture of a crane and of buildings in Rome he had worked on.
On the one hand, the success of men like Palaemon, Eurysaces and Vestorius (which in itself may have been recorded because it was unusual, not typical) whose mere existence threatened the the traditional link between money, land, office and manners, clearly outraged the sensibilities of members of the Roman elite.
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