Aristarchian Symbols

Aristarchian symbols are editorial marks developed during the Hellenistic period and the early Roman empire for annotating then-ancient Greek texts—mainly the works of Homer. They were used to highlight missing text, text which was discrepant between sources, and text which appeared in the wrong place.

Two main types of ancient Greek philological annotations can be distinguished: signs and explicit notes. Aristarchian symbols are signs.

Early development

The first philological sign () invented by Zenodotos of Ephesos, the first head of the Alexandrinian Library, in his edition of Homer was the (, a short horizontal dash ), which Zenodotos used to mark spurious lines. For this reason, the practice of using signs for textual criticism has been called 'obelism'.

Aristophanes of Byzantium invented later the 'asterisk' () to mark lines that are duplicated from another place, as well as the 'lunate sigma' () and the 'antisigma' () for two consecutive and interchangeable lines of the same content.

A system of dots also credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium was developed in the 3rd century BCE. A ('low dot') marked an occasion for a short breath after a short phrase, a ('middot') () marked an occasion for a longer breath after a longer passage, and a ('high dot') marked a full stop at the end of a completed thought. Other writers employed two dot punctuation to mark the ends of sentences or changing speakers. Less often, arrangements of three , four , and five dots appeared.

System of Aristarchus

The number of the philological signs and in some cases their meanings were modified by Aristarchos of Samothrake (220–143 BCE), sixth head of the Alexandrinian Library. He used critical and exegetical signs in his editions of the Homeric poems.

A 'dotted lunate sigma' () was used by him as an editorial sign indicating that the line so-marked is at an incorrect position in the surrounding text; an ''antisigma'', or 'reversed lunate sigma' , may also mark an out of place line. A 'dotted antisigma' or 'dotted reversed sigma' () indicates the line after which rearrangements should be made, or to variant readings of uncertain priority.

The ''diple'' marked lines whose language or content was perhaps also exegetically noteworthy and pointed to a corresponding explanation in a commentary. The () a dotted diple pointed to a verse in which Aristarchos' edition differs from that of Zenodotos. He used the ''obelos'' added to the ''asteriskos'' where the repeated line is out of place and the () indicated suspected spuriousness.

Continued use in late classical texts

Aristarchos's were adopted early on by scholars in Rome, and became the standard philological signs for centuries to follow. Some papyrus fragments contain un-Aristarchian signs whose use was fairly consistent nevertheless. For instance, the so-called ''ancora'', an anchor-shaped diagonal upward and downward pointer or , often marks places where text had been omitted or draws attention to text-critical restoration in the top or bottom margin, respectively.

In addition to no punctuation, many original source texts in ancient Greek were written as an unbroken stream of letters, with no separation between words. The , a curved, comma-like mark , was used to disambiguate certain homonyms and marked the word-break in a sequence of letters that should be understood as two separate words. Its companion mark, the () , served to show that a sequence of letters which might otherwise be read as two separate words, should instead be read as a single word. The (see picture, right) marked a division in a text. The was used to mark the ends of entire works, or the end of major sections in poetic and prose texts.

Modern typesetting

Nine ancient Greek textual annotation symbols are included in the supplemental punctuation list of ISO IEC standard 10646 for character sets. Unicode encodes several more signs.

Cultural references

The names of the characters Asterix and Obelix in the French comic series ''The Adventures of Asterix'' by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo are derived from the Aristarchian symbols.

See also

* Dagger (typography)
* Comma
* Textual criticism
* Annotation
* Marginalia
* Proofreading marks

References

{{Reflist

Typographical symbols
Punctuation
Ancient Greek punctuation
Writing systems introduced in the 2nd century BC