Page 124 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

sible for the division of the Homeric poems into twenty-four books each, using capital Greek letters for the Iliad, and lower-case for the Odyssey. Edi- torial comments, glosses and commentaries by Zenodotus and later scholars at the Royal Library of Alexandria are believed to be preserved among the “A scholia” in the most famous Greek codex of the Iliad, Venetus A which is regarded by some as the best text of the epic poem. This manuscript, which was most probably written at the Imperial Library of Constantinople about 950 CE, is preserved in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. It was presum- ably copied from papyri written at the Royal Library of Alexandria, or from some intermediary copy or copies, which were later lost or discarded.
Besides the awkwardness of manipulating the roll form, and the limited information each could contain, papyri were much harder to interpret than any modern book because punctuation, if any, was usually rudimentary, and texts were written in scriptura continua without word division.
Minor points of articulation or breath pauses, where we now place a comma or a colon, are left unpunctuated for the most part; when marked, raised dots are normally used, and these are often additions by a reader. Punctuation is, however, routine for marking periods (i.e. at the end of a sentence), changes between speakers in drama and dialogue, and other major points of di- vision, such as the poems within an epigram collection. Points of major division are most often signaled by the paragraphos (a horizontal line at the left edge of the column) . . . Note that the net effect is designed for clarity and beauty but not ease of use, much less mass readership. Importantly, this design is not one of primitivism or ignorance. The ancients knew perfectly well, for instance, the utility of word division—the Greek school texts on papyri bear eloquent testimony to the need for emerging readers to practice syllable and word division. Similarly, philhellenism in the early empire led to the adoption of scriptio continua in Latin literary texts, which earlier had used interpuncts (raised dots) to divide the words—that is word division was discarded by the
124