Page:EB1911 - Volume 20.djvu/612

Rh of relaxation. Roundness of style, then, is characteristic of Greek cursive writing in the papyri of the first three centuries of the Christian era, however much individual hands, or groups of hands, might vary among themselves.

A specimen (fig. 4) of cursive writing of the general Roman type is selected from a papyrus (Brit. Mus. No. cxxxi.) which is of more than usual interest, as it is on the verso side of the rolls of which it is composed that the text of Aristotle's Constitution of Athens has been transcribed. It contains the farming accounts of the bailiff of Epimachus, son of Polydeuces, the owner of an estate in the nome of Hermopolis in the 9th and 10th years of the reign of Vespasian, that is 78-79:—

In the second half of the 1st century two styles of handwriting predominate in the cursive papyri. There is the clear and flowing hand, which may be termed the ordinary working hand; and there is also a small and very cursive style which appears in private correspondence and in legal contracts. The 2nd century follows on the same lines as the 1st century; but with the 3rd century decadence sets in; the writing begins to slope, and grows larger and rougher and tends to exaggeration.

This exaggeration of the writing of the later Roman period leads the way to the pedantic exaggeration and formalism characteristic of the Byzantine period. In this period the general style of writing is on a larger scale than in the Roman; exaggeration in the size of certain letters marks the progress of the 4th century. Material is wanting for full illustration of the changes effected in the 5th century; but the papyri of the 6th century show a further advance in formalism, the common style being upright and compressed and full of flourishes. In the 7th century the hand assumes a sloping style, which always seems to accompany decadence, and grows very irregular and straggling. A specimen of the fully developed Byzantine hand of a legal type is here shown in a few lines from a lease of a farm (fig. 5) in the 6th century (Brit. Mus. pap. cxiii 3):—

In the long range covered by the Greek papyri the formation of individual letters necessarily varied under different influences; but in not a few instances the original shapes were remarkably maintained. From those which thus remained conservative it is rash to attempt to draw conclusions as to the precise age of the several documents in which they occur. On the other hand, there are some which at certain periods adopted shapes which were in vogue for a limited time and then disappeared, never to be resumed. Such forms can very properly be regarded as sure guides to the palaeographer in assigning dates. We may therefore take a brief survey of the Greek cursive alphabet of the papyri and note some of the peculiarities of individual letters. The incipient form of the alpha which gradually developed into the minuscule letter of the middle ages may be traced back to the Ptolemaic documents of the 2nd century, but the more cursive letter, which was a simple acute angle, representing only two of the three strokes of which the primitive letter was composed, was characteristic of the 3rd century, and seems to have gone out of use within the Ptolemaic period. The development of the cursive beta is interesting. At the very beginning we find two forms in use: the primitive capital letter and a cursive shape somewhat resembling a small n, being in fact an imperfectly written B in which the bows are slurred. This form lasted through the Ptolemaic period. Then arose the natural tendency to reverse the strokes and to form the letter on the principle of u; but still the capital letter also continued in use, so that through the Roman and Byzantine periods the u-shape and the B-shape run on side by side. Analogously the letter kappa, formed on somewhat the same lines as the beta, runs a similar course in developing a cursive u-shaped form by the side of the primitive capital. Delta remained fairly true to its primitive form until the Byzantine period, when the elongation of the head into a flourish led on to the minuscule letter which is familiar to us in the medieval and modern alphabet. Epsilon, the most frequently recurring letter in Greek texts, departs less from its original rounded uncial form that might have been expected. Frequent and varied as its cursive formations are, yet the original shape is seldom quite disguised, the variations almost in all instances arising from the devices of the scribe to dispose swiftly and conveniently of the cross-bar by incorporating it with the rest of the letter. The tendency to curtail the second vertical limb of eta, leading eventually to the h-shape, is in evidence from the first. But in the development of this letter we have one of the instances of temporary forms which lasted only within a fixed period. In the 1st century, side by side with the more usual form, there appears a modification of it, somewhat resembling the contemporary upsilon, consisting of a shallow horizontal curve with a vertical limb slightly turned in at the foot,. Its development from the original Η is evident: the first vertical limb is slurred, and survives only in the beginning of the horizontal curve, while the cross-bar and the second vertical are combined in the rest of the letter. This form was in general use from the middle of the 1st to the middle of the 2nd century, becoming less common after about 160, and practically disappearing about 200. The letters formed wholly or in part by circles or loops, theta, omikron, rho, phi, in the earlier centuries have such circles or loops of a small size. Just as there is an analogy between beta and kappa in their developments, as already noticed, so also do mu and pi advance on somewhat similar lines. From the earliest time there is a resemblance between the broad shallow forms of the two letters in the 3rd century, and particularly when they adopt the form of a convex stroke the likeness is very close; and again, in both Roman and Byzantine periods an n-shaped development appears among the forms of both letters. There is also one phase in the development of sigma which affords a useful criterion for