Page:Thucydides, translated into English Vol 1.djvu/24

 XX THUCYDIDE5 illiterate person at writing ; and may be truly called 'calligraphic ' from their beauty and regularity. But besides the greater uniformity of the writing there is also a greater similarity in the modes of expression than in literary composition. Most public inscriptions have their set beginnings and endings, their formulas of oaths, decrees, sums, dates ; names of the archon, tribe, prytany, epistates. Some of them, as for example the lists of the quota (C. I. A. 226-272) paid out of the tribute of the allies to the Goddess, are arranged in years, and the imperfect members of the series may be filled up from those which exist in a more complete state. The number of such documents is considerable, and from their formal and official character they throw light upon one another. Hence it is not surprising that, while no human ingenuity, even when assisted by metre, can supply more than two or three letters in a corrupted text of the classics, and hardly so much in prose, parts of a line or of several lines in succession may be restored with comparative certainty in an ancient inscription. Even a single letter occurring in a particular place may afford a clue to the contents of a whole line if the line is repeated elsewhere. The parallel in this case is not like the parallels cited in support of emendations of the classics, from which it is often fallaciously argued that an author wrote in one place as he did in another. For inscriptions are really full of the same forms, whereas there is only a faint pre- sumption that the same turn of expression will occur more than once in a literary composition. Similarly, two or three letters of a name which usually accompanies some other name may give the key : e. g. the letters ITPATEAOIS NTIAEIKAIXIYNAPXO mdicate the words orpaTT^yois NtKi'a ^iK-qparov KvSavTiSj] Kol (vrdfixova-iy, C. I. A. 273. Many restorations which appear improbable at first sight are nevertheless true : e. g. the following, which, though seeming to depend on slender