II. LETTERS

Nevertheless there were common factors in the life of these watchfully separatist states. As far back as the thirteenth century B.C. we find one language throughout the Greek peninsula. It belonged to the “Indo-European” group, like Persian and Sanskrit, Slavonic and Latin, German and English; thousands of words denoting the primary relations or objects of life have common roots in these tongues, and suggest not only the predispersion antiquity of the things denoted, but the kinship or association of the peoples who used them in the dawn of history.* It is true that the Greek language was diversified into dialects—Aeolic, Doric, Ionic, Attic; but these were mutually intelligible, and yielded, in the fifth and fourth centuries, to a koine dialektos, or common dialect, which emanated principally from Athens, and was spoken by nearly all the educated classes of the Hellenic world. Attic Greek was a noble tongue, vigorous, supple, melodious; as irregular as any vital speech, but lending itself readily to expressive combinations, delicate gradations and distinctions of meaning, subtle philosophical conceptions, and every variety of literary excellence from the “many-billowed surge” of Homer’s verse to the placid flow of Plato’s prose.*

Greek tradition attributed the introduction of writing into Greece to Phoenicians in the fourteenth century B.C., and we know nothing to the contrary. The oldest Greek inscriptions, dating from the eighth and seventh centuries, show a close resemblance to the Semitic characters on the ninth-century Moabite stone.³ These inscriptions were written, in Semitic fashion, from right to left; sixth-century inscriptions (e.g., at Gortyna) were made alternately from right to left and from left to right; later inscriptions are from left to right throughout, and certain letters are turned around accordingly, as  and  to B and E. The Semitic names for the letters were adopted with minor modifications;† but the Greeks made several basic changes. Above all, they added vowels, which the Semites had omitted; certain Semitic characters denoting consonants or breathings were used to represent a, e, i, o, and ü. Later the Ionians added the long vowels eta (long e) and o-mega (long or double o). Ten different Greek alphabets struggled for ascendancy as part of the war of the city-states; in Greece the Ionian form prevailed, and was transmitted to eastern Europe, where it survives today; in Rome the Chalcidian form was adopted from Cumae to become the Latin alphabet, and ours. The Chalcidic alphabet lacked the long e and o, but, unlike the Ionian, retained the Phoenician vau as a consonant (a v with approximately the sound of w); hence the Athenians called wine oinos, the Chalcidians called it voinos, the Romans called it vinum, we call it wine.Chalcis kept the Semitic koppa or q, and passed it on to Rome and ourselves; Ionia abandoned it, content with k. Ionia represented L as A, Chalcis as L; Rome straightened up the latter form and gave it to Europe. The Ionians used P for R, but in Greek Italy the P sprouted a tail, and became R.⁴

The earliest uses of writing in Greece were probably commercial or religious; apparently priestly charms and chants are the mother of poetry, and bills of lading are the father of prose. Writing split into two varieties: the formal for literary or epigraphic purposes, the cursive for ordinary use. There were no accents, no spaces between words, no punctuation points;⁵ but a change of topic was marked off by a horizontal dividing stroke called the paragraphos—i.e., a sign “written on the side.” The materials used to receive writing were various: at first, if we may believe Pliny, leaves or the bark of trees;⁶ for inscriptions, stone, bronze, or lead; for ordinary writing, clay tablets as in Mesopotamia;* then wooden tablets covered with wax, which were popular, in retrospect, with schoolboys;⁷ for more permanent purposes papyrus, which the Phoenicians brought from Egypt, and (in the Hellenistic and Roman periods) parchment, made from the skins or membranes of goats or sheep. A metal stylus was used on wax tablets; on papyrus or parchment a reed dipped in ink. Wax writing was erased with the flat butt of the stylus, ink with a sponge; so the poet Martial sent a sponge with his poems to his friend, so that they might be wiped out with a stroke.⁸ Many a critic will mourn the passing of this courtesy.

In no field have the old words so regularly come down to us as in that of writing. Paper, of course, is papyrus, and once again, in the cycle of fashion, the substance is a compressed plant. A line of writing was a stichos or row; the Latins called it a versus or verse—i.e., a turning back. The text was written in columns upon a strip of papyrus or parchment from twenty to thirty feet long, wound about a stick. Such a roll was called a biblos, from the Phoenician city, so named, whence papyrus came to Greece. A smaller roll was called biblion; our Bible was originally ta biblia, the rolls.† When a roll formed part of a larger work it was called a tomos, or cutting. The first sheet of a roll was called the protokollon—i.e., the first sheet glued to the stick. The edges‡ of the roll were smoothed with pumice and sometimes colored; if the author could afford the expense, or the roll contained important matter, it might be wrapped in a diphthera (membrane), or, as the Latins called it, a vellum. Since a large roll would be inconvenient for handling or reference, literary works were usually divided into several rolls, and the word biblos, or book, was applied not to each work as a whole, but to each roll or part. These divisions were seldom made by the author; later editors divided the Histories of Herodotus into nine books, the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides into eight, Plato’s Republic into ten, the Iliad and the Odyssey into twenty-four. Since papyrus was costly, and each copy had to be written by hand, books were very limited in the classic world; it was easier than now to be educated, though as hard as now to be intelligent. Reading was not a universal accomplishment; most knowledge was handed down by oral tradition from one generation or craftsman to the next; most literature was read aloud by trained reciters to persons who learned through the ear.§ There was no reading public in Greece before the seventh century; there were no Greek libraries till those collected by Polycrates and Peisistratus in the sixth.⁹ In the fifth century we hear of the private libraries of Euripides and the archon Eucleides; in the fourth, of Aristotle’s. We know of no public library before Alexandria’s, none in Athens till Hadrian.¹⁰ Perhaps the Greeks of Pericles’ day were so great because they did not have to read many books, or any long one.