€ καὶ τοῦ ῦ καὶ τοῦ ὁ καὶ τοῦ ὤ, from which it is clear that the vowels e, v, o, w must have had fixed sounds, which would justify their designations ψιλόν, &c.; whereas ἄλφα, ἦτα, and ἰῶτα were expressed by names rather than by definite utterances, because their sounds were variable. In Aristophanes, Nub. 872, Pheidippides is ridiculed for his broad pronunciation of au:

ἰδοὺ κρέμαι, ὡς ἠλίθιον ἐφθέγξατο

καὶ τοῖσι χείλεσιν διεῤῥνηκόσιν.

from which it is clear that Attic taste had begun to drop the full articulation of both vowels in the diphthong. That a and or made single sounds is also shown by their liability to elision, and by their being counted short for purposes of accentuation; the Alexandrian poet Callimachus actually makes eye the response of an echo to valxı (Epigr. 30); and Sextus Empiricus, who flourished under Hadrian, says that a, e, and où, were not diphthongs, because they had but one sound from beginning to end (adv. Gramm. l. 1. c. 5, p. 241). From all this it appears that there was a gradual loss of the full pronunciation of the combined vowels.

(b) The same results from the Roman transcriptions; for at and or are generally written ae and oe, as in 'A0ñvat, Athenæ, BowTía, Baotia. The improper diphthong is sometimes expressed by o, sometimes by e, as in pawdía, rhapsodia, èredós, epodus, but Tpayudós, tragedus; ou is sometimes shortened into i, as in Inomaus, cimeterium, from Oἰνόμαος, κοιμητήριον; ει is sometimes i and sometimes e; thus we have Euevos, Euxinus, and generally before consonants, except in Polycletus, Helotes, Cuperus; Aiveías, Eneas, Movoεîov, Museum. It is to be observed, however, that all these transcriptions belong to a time when the Romans had lost their own pure diphthongs; for aule was once even aulāï.

(c) The modern Greek pronunciation confuses between oi, et, 7, and, pronounces at like a in male, and gives the value of v to the second vowel in eu, ou, nu. That Reuchlin should have adopted this articulation from the learned Greeks, who taught him their language, was natural enough, but it is certain that no such confusion prevailed among the ancient Greeks, who could not have had such words as κεκέλευσμαι, πεπαίδευνται if u had been a consonant, and would never have relinquished the power of distinguishing between the root syllables in πείθω, πέποιθα, and ἐπίθησα:

and that a never sank from æ, however that was pronounced, to a mere French e, which was the value of 7, is clear from the fact, that even the latest Romans gave at the value of a, as in Plutarch's πрaíþekтos for præfectus, and always represented by e, as in the same writer's transcriptions: carere, kapĥpe, majores, μaïwpns, sapiens, σαπίηνs, Rhenus, Ρῆνος.

24 On the employment of a and e to represent vowels, the breathings were expressed by the second or first half of H written over the vowel affected by it: this notation, which is due to Aristophanes of Byzantium, has been revived by the Oxford Press; but generally the smooth breathing (spiritus lenis, πveûμa yıλóv) is marked'; and the rough breathing (spiritus asper, πveûμa daσú) is marked ". If the word commences with a diphthong, the breathing is placed over the second vowel; not so when the second vowel is Iota subscriptum, or absorbed: compare èyú, olos with "Aions and aow. When a word or syllable begins with p the rough breathing is always placed over that letter: when p is doubled, the first p takes the smooth breathing according to a general principle, which will be explained in its proper place (97): compare pýτwp, rhetor with IIúppos, Pyrrhus.

Obs. 1 Certain German editors, following Bekker and Dindorf, print the double p without any breathing'. That this is erroneous is shown not only by the Latin transcription, but also by the express statement of Arcadius (πepì vevμátwv, 200, 21, ap. Valcken. Ammon. p. 242). It is held by one scholar (Lobeck, Paralip. p. 14) that the accents of ῤῥιμμαι ought to be expressed by βέῥιμμαι when the perfect assumes that form, and the rule for the transference of the breathing seems to justify this. Some of the ancient grammarians retained the breathing of the p even in the middle of a word, making it lenis or asper, according to circumstances; thus they wrote κáπpos, 'Arpeús, but Χρόνος, ἀφρός, θρόνος (Anecd. Bekk. p. 693, 20).

Obs. 2 It is observed that the Eolians especially omitted the aspirate, whence this wors, as it is called, is regarded as Æolic wherever it occurs. This was carried so far that even words beginning with v or p were marked with the lenis; thus we find uppe, vμμiv, ὔμοιος, ἔρχα, ύσκλος, ἔμφαλος, and 'Ρᾶρος with its derivatives; Arcadius, p. 242 Valcken.; Anecd. Bekk. p. 693, 11; Herodian, Tepì μovýpovs λéέews, p. 35, 6. The Eolians are also said to have written pp in the middle of a word (Anecd. Bekk. u. s.; Greg. Corinth. p. 588). Those who adopt the old-fashioned theory that the Latin language is connected with the Æolic dialect of the Greek, will find in this viλwois a special

1 In adopting this orthography, in the Cambridge text of Thucydides, we have sacrificed our own opinion to the necessity of making the series uniform.

difficulty, for the Latin, as distinguished from the Greek, retains the original sibilant of which even the aspirate is a weaker form: compare ¿έ, sex, čпта, septem, &c.

Obs. 3 On the other hand, the Attic dialect, in its later forms, seems to have had a tendency to aspiration: thus we find authority for άδην ; ἁθρόος and ἁθροίζω in the orators; άθυρμα, άμμος, whence καθαμμίζω in Aristotle; ανω and αναίνω to explain αφαυαίνω in Aristophanes ; cipyw, "to shut in," as distinguished from epyw, "to shut out" (Lobeck, Αj. p. 338); ἔνη; ἀνύω; ἡθμός and Αίσωπος on the Sigæan inscription ; άλλω to explain φιάλλω and ἐφιάλλω; even ιχθύς (Gellius, Ν. Δ. π. 3); and Αβδηρῖται, ἑλπίς, ισθμός in Attic inscriptions. It is also remarked that the Athenians said raws instead of raos (Athen. p. 397 F).

Obs. 4 In the Ionic dialect the aspirate is sometimes represented by the lengthening of the syllable which bore it; thus we have οὐδός=ὁδός; οὖλος-όλος; οὖρος=ὅρος; ὤριστος=ὁ ἄριστος; ἄλλοι=οἱ ἄλλοι; ἴκμενος and ἴξαλος from ἵκω, perhaps because the frst syllable in these words involved originally a reduplication; aμvdis for apa, because the whole word is lengthened, or because in all forms of Greek å for oa had a tendency to drop its breathing; cf. ἄκοιτις, ἀδελφός, ἀκόλουθος, &c. even in Attic; and ἠλεκτρον, αύλαξ, &c., from ἕλκω, not only lengthen the first syllable, but introduce an articulation vowel after the liquid.

§ IV. Origin and Arrangement of the Letters.

25 Mythology attributes to the Phoenician hero, Cadmus, the introduction into Greece of an original alphabet of sixteen letters; and the old grammarians have supposed that these sixteen were the following:-a, B, y, d, e, 4, K, X, μ, v, o, π, p, σ, т, v (Schol. Dion. Thr. p. 781). There can be little doubt that the Greek alphabet is of Semitic origin, and there is every reason to believe that it originally consisted of four quaternions of letters: but it is a sound theory, which has been confirmed by the independent investigations of at least four or five different scholars, that for , k, p, and v in the above list we must substitute 7, 0, and the two obsolete characters F (Baû) and Q (кóππa), which are still retained as numerical signs after e and π respectively, and that the original arrangement of these sixteen letters was as follows:

A. BгA. E. FHO. AMN. 2. O. II Q T.

This order is artificial and systematic; as we shall see, if we consider the original value of these characters. For A, E, and O, were originally the representatives of breathings of which A was the

lightest, E the heaviest, and O of intermediate weight: F was an aspirated labial, H an aspirated guttural, and an aspirated dental: so that the nine mutes stood thus, each set being preceded by its appropriate breathing or vowel:

and the liquids A, M, N, Σ stood between the aspiratæ and the tenues, because they probably completed a still shorter Semitic alphabet of only twelve characters.

26 When F fell out, and H, the double aspirate, was taken to represent the double e, the first letters added to the above were u and, two representatives of F, and x, the substitute for H in its original use. The other additional letters were borrowed, as their names denote, from corresponding letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and from this was also taken the obsolete Záv, of which we have spoken above. The Greeks added, for their own convenience, a double o (called & péya, and written w), and two combinations of Ziyua or Záv with IIî, in one of which the # preceded, while in the other it followed the sibilant. These combinations were called Vi and Σaμπî, and were represented by the same sign in different postures. V preceded and Eaμπî followed N. Under the form , the Eaμmî was used to represent the number 900.

27 The Ionians in Asia Minor were the first to adopt the complete alphabet of twenty-four letters, arranged as we now have it. The Samians have the credit of being the earliest employers of this extension of the written characters, and it was from them that the Athenians derived the additional letters, although they were not used in public monuments until the Archonship of Euclides, Ol. 94, 2. Β. C. 403. Hence we read of τὰ γράμματα τὰ ἀπ ̓ Εὐκλείδου aрxovтos. Of course Herodotus, who was an important contributor ἄρχοντος. to the literary intercourse between Samos and Athens, had brought the improved alphabet into use among men of education at a much earlier period, and Euripides expressly distinguishes between ŋ and e as vowels in spelling the name Onoe's (apud Athen. p. 454 c).

η

28 The earliest extant approximation to anything like a handwriting is the inscription on the prize vase brought from Athens by Mr Burgon, which cannot be later than 600 B.C. (see Böckh, Corp. Inscr. I. p. 49). It is written as follows, from right to left:

IM] : ИОЛОА ИОЗИЗОА ИОТ

The only abbreviation observable in this is the omission of e in the termination -θεν; for the true transcription is: τῶν ̓Αθήνηθεν ἄθλων εἰμί, not, as Böckh supposes, τῶν ̓Αθηνέων ἆθλον εἰμί. The later Greeks used a number of contractions in their MSS., the commonest of which are given in the accompanying table.