Page:EB1911 - Volume 20.djvu/621

ROMAN CURSIVE] slope to the right in the effort to be more current and to write letters in connexion without lifting the pen. One of the earliest available examples of Latin writing on papyrus to which an approximate date can be assigned is a fragment at Berlin containing portions of speeches delivered in the senate, said to be of the reign of Claudius, 41-54 (Steffens, Lat. Pal. taf. 101). The writing, though still somewhat restrained and admitting but little linking of the letters, is yet of a more flowing character than that of the contemporary tablets and graffiti.

We have to pass into the second century before finding the most perfect Latin document on papyrus as yet discovered (fig. 23). This is now in the British Museum, and records the purchase of a slave-boy by an officer in the Roman fleet of Misenum stationed on the Syrian coast, 166 (Pal. Soc. i. 190; Archaeologia liv. p. 433). The writing of the body of the document is in a formal cursive, generally of the same formation as the inscriptions on the Dacian waxen tablets of the 2nd century, as will be seen from the accompanying facsimile of a few lines (fig. 23).

With this example of legal handwriting of the 2nd century it is interesting to compare two specimens of more ordinary cursive in different styles found in private letters of about the same time. The first (fig. 24) is taken from a fragmentary letter of the year 167 (Grenfell and Hunt, Greek Papyri, 2nd series, cviii.) and is a typical example of a hurried style. The second (fig. 25) is from a letter written by one Aurelius Archelaus to Julius Domitius, tribunus militum, recommending a friend named Theon, of the 2nd century (Oxyrhynchus Papyri, i., xxxii.), an instance apparently of slow and imperfect penmanship, every letter painfully and separately formed, yet not in the detached strokes characteristic of the writing of the graffiti and the tablets.

In the examples above we recognize practically the same alphabet as in the graffiti and tablets, but with certain exceptions, particularly in the shape of the letter E, which is either normal or written very cursively as an acute-angled tick, and in the reversion of other letters to the more normal capital forms.

There is not sufficient material to trace step by step the development of the Roman cursive hand between the 2nd and the 5th centuries; but still, with the few scattered examples at hand, there seems to be reason for conjecture that Latin writing on papyrus passed through phases not very dissimilar to those of Greek writing on the same material. For, when we emerge

from the 3rd century, we find an enlarged flowing hand, as in the Latin translation of the fables of Babrius in a fragmentary papyrus of the Amherst collection (No. xxvi.), ascribed lo the 3rd or 4th century, and in a letter of recommendation from an Egyptian official of the 4th century, now at Strassburg (Archiv. für Papyrusforschung, iii. 2. 168); the handwriting of the latter recalling the large style of the Greek cursive of the Byzantine period (fig. 26). That there should be an affinity between the writing of Greek and that of Latin papyri emanating from Egypt is naturally to be expected.

This example shows what an immense advance had by this time been made in the formation of the minuscule hand, and but little more is required for its completion. It is to be noted, however, that the peculiar old form of letter B with the loop on the left still persists. But only a short time was now needed to bring this letter also in a new shape into line with the other members of the growing minuscule alphabet.

At this point must be noticed a very interesting and important class of the Roman cursive hand which stands apart from the general line of development. This is the official hand of the Roman Chancery, which is unfortunately represented by only two fragmentary papyri of the 5th century (fig. 27), and proves to be a curious moulding of the cursive in a calligraphic style, in which, however, the same characters appear as in other Roman cursive documents, if somewhat disguised. The papyri contain portions of two rescripts addressed to Egyptian officials, and are said to have been found at Phile and Elephantine. Both documents are in the same hand; and the fragments are divided between the libraries of Paris and Leiden. For a time the writing remained undeciphered, and Champollion-Figeac, while publishing a facsimile (Chartes et MSS. sur papyrus, 1840, pl. 14), had to confess that he was unable to read it. Massmann, however, with the experience gained in his work upon the waxed tablets, succeeded without much difficulty in reading the fragment at Leiden (Libellus aurarius, p. 147), and was