The History of Rome

The retention moreover of the reckoning by months or - which is the same thing - by years of ten months implies a tacit, but not to be misunderstood, confession of the irregularity and untrustworthiness of the oldest Roman solar year.  This Roman calendar may be regarded, at least in its essential features, as that generally current among the Latins. When we consider how generally the beginning of the year and the names of the months are liable to change, minor variations in the numbering and designations are quite compatible with the hypothesis of a common basis; and with such a calendar-system, which practically was irrespective of the lunar course, the Latins might easily come to have their months of arbitrary length, possibly marked off by annual festivals - as in the case of the Alban months, which varied between 16 and 36 days. It would appear probable therefore that the Greek - trieteris - had early been introduced from Lower Italy at least into Latium and perhaps also among the other Italian stocks, and had thereafter been subjected in the calendars of the several cities to further subordinate alterations. For the measuring of periods of more than one year the regnal years of the kings might have been employed: but it is doubtful whether that method of dating, which was in use in the East, occurred in Greece or Italy during earlier times. On the other hand the intercalary period recurring every four years, and the census and lustration of the community connected with it, appear to have suggested a reckoning by lustra similar in plan to the Greek reckoning by Olympiads - a method, however, which early lost its chronological significance in consequence of the irregularity that now prevailed as to the due holding of the census at the right time.

Introduction of Hellenic Alphabets into Italy

The art of expressing sounds by written signs was of later origin than the art of measurement. The Italians did not any more than the Hellenes develop such an art of themselves, although we may discover attempts at such a development in the Italian numeral signs[10], and possibly also in the primitive Italian custom - formed independently of Hellenic influence - of drawing lots by means of wooden tablets. The difficulty which must have attended the first individualizing of sounds - occurring as they do in so great a variety of combinations - is best demonstrated by the fact that a single alphabet propagated from people to people and from generation to generation has sufficed, and still suffices, for the whole of Aramaic, Indian, Graeco-Roman, and modern civilization; and this most important product of the human intellect was the joint creation of the Aramaeans and the Indo-Germans. The Semitic family of languages, in which the vowel has a subordinate character and never can begin a word, facilitates on that very account the individualizing of the consonants; and it was among the Semites accordingly that the first alphabet - in which the vowels were still wanting - was invented. It was the Indians and Greeks who first independently of each other and by very divergent methods created, out of the Aramaean consonantal writing brought to them by commerce, a complete alphabet by the addition of the vowels - which was effected by the application of four letters, which the Greeks did not use as consonantal signs, for the four vowels -a -e -i -o, and by the formation of a new sign for -u - in other words by the introduction of the syllable into writing instead of the mere consonant, or, as Palamedes says in Euripides, Ta teis ge leitheis pharmak orthosas monos Aphona kai phonounta, sullabas te theis, Ezeupon anthropoisi grammat eidenai.

This Aramaeo-Hellenic alphabet was accordingly brought to the Italians through the medium, doubtless, of the Italian Hellenes; not, however, through the agricultural colonies of Magna Graecia, but through the merchants possibly of Cumae or Tarentum, by whom it would be brought in the first instance to the very ancient emporia of international traffic in Latium and Etruria - to Rome and Caere. The alphabet received by the Italians was by no means the oldest Hellenic one; it had already experienced several modifications, particularly the addition of the three letters -"id:xi", -"id:phi", -"id:chi" and the alteration of the signs for -"id:iota", -"id:gamma", -"id:lambda"[11]. We have already observed[12] that the Etruscan and Latin alphabets were not derived the one from the other, but both directly from the Greek; in fact the Greek alphabet came to Etruria in a form materially different from that which reached Latium. The Etruscan alphabet has a double sign -s (sigma -"id:s" and san -"id:sh") and only a single -k[13], and of the -r only the older form -"id:P"; the Latin has, so far as we know, only a single -s, but a double sign for -k (kappa -"id:k" and koppa -"id:q") and of the -r almost solely the more recent form -"id:R". The oldest Etruscan writing shows no knowledge of lines, and winds like the coiling of a snake; the more recent employs parallel broken-off lines from right to left: the Latin writing, as far as our monuments reach back, exhibits only the latter form of parallel lines, which originally perhaps may have run at pleasure from left to right or from right to left, but subsequently ran among the Romans in the former, and among the Faliscans in the latter direction. The model alphabet brought to Etruria must notwithstanding its comparatively remodelled character reach back to an epoch very ancient, though not positively to be determined; for, as the two sibilants sigma and san were always used by the Etruscans as different sounds side by side, the Greek alphabet which came to Etruria must doubtless still have possessed both of them in this way as living signs of sound; but among all the monuments of the Greek language known to us not one presents sigma and san in simultaneous use. The Latin alphabet certainly, as we know it, bears on the whole a more recent character; and it is not improbable that the Latins did not simply receive the alphabet once for all, as was the case in Etruria, but in consequence of their lively intercourse with their Greek neighbours kept pace for a considerable period with the alphabet in use among these, and followed its variations. We find, for instance, that the forms -"id:/\/\/", -"id:P"[14], and -"id:SIGMA" were not unknown to the Romans, but were superseded in common use by the later forms -"id:/\/\", -"id:R", and -"id:S" - a circumstance which can only be explained by supposing that the Latins employed for a considerable period the Greek alphabet as such in writing either their mother-tongue or Greek. It is dangerous therefore to draw from the more recent character of the Greek alphabet which we meet with in Rome, as compared with the older character of that brought to Etruria, the inference that writing was practised earlier in Etruria than in Rome.

10. I. XIV. Decimal System

11. The history of the alphabet among the Hellenes turns essentially on the fact that - assuming the primitive alphabet of 23 letters, that is to say, the Phoenician alphabet vocalized and enlarged by the addition of the -"id:u" - proposals of very various kinds were made to supplement and improve it, and each of these proposals has a history of its own. The most important of these, which it is interesting to keep in view as bearing on the history of Italian writing, are the following: I. The introduction of special signs for the sounds -"id:xi" -"id:phi" -"id:chi".  This proposal is so old that all the Greek alphabets - with the single exception of that of the islands Thera, Melos, and Crete - and all alphabets derived from the Greek without exception, exhibit its influence. At first probably the aim was to append the signs -"id:CHI" = -"id:xi iota", -"id:PHI" = -"id:phi iota", and -"id:PSI"= -"id:chi iota" to the close of the alphabet, and in this shape it was adopted on the mainland of Hellas - with the exception of Athens and Corinth - and also among the Sicilian and Italian Greeks. The Greeks of Asia Minor on the other hand, and those of the islands of the Archipelago, and also the Corinthians on the mainland appear, when this proposal reached them, to have already had in use for the sound -"id:xi iota" the fifteenth sign of the Phoenician alphabet -"id:XI" (Samech); accordingly of the three new signs they adopted the -"id:PHI" for -"id:phi iota", but employed the -"id:CHI" not for -"id:xi iota", but for -"id:chi iota". The third sign originally invented for -"id:chi iota" was probably allowed in most instances to drop; only on the mainland of Asia Minor it was retained, but received the value of -"id:psi iota". The mode of writing adopted in Asia Minor was followed also by Athens; only in its case not merely the -"id:psi iota", but the -"id:xi iota" also, was not received and in their room the two consonants continued to be written as before. II. Equally early, if not still earlier, an effort was made to obviate the confusion that might so easily occur between the forms for -"id:iota S" and for -"id:s E"; for all the Greek alphabets known to us bear traces of the endeavour to distinguish them otherwise and more precisely. Already in very early times two such proposals of change must have been made, each of which found a field for its diffusion. In the one case they employed for the sibilant - for which the Phoenician alphabet furnished two signs, the fourteenth (-"id:/\/\") for -"id:sh" and the eighteenth (-"id:E") for -"id:s" - not the latter, which was in sound the more suitable, but the former; and such was in earlier times the mode of writing in the eastern islands, in Corinth and Corcyra, and among the Italian Achaeans. In the other case they substituted for the sign of -"id:i" the simple stroke -"id:I", which was by far the more usual, and at no very late date became at least so far general that the broken -"id:iota S" everywhere disappeared, although individual communities retained the -"id:s" in the form -"id:/\/\" alongside of the -"I". III. Of later date is the substitution of -"id:\/" for -"id:/\" (-"id:lambda") which might readily be confounded with -"id:GAMMA gamma". This we meet with in Athens and Boeotia, while Corinth and the communities dependent on Corinth attained the same object by giving to the -"id:gamma" the semicircular form -"id:C" instead of the hook-shape. IV. The forms for -"id:p" -"id:P (with broken-loop)" and -"id:r" -"id:P", likewise very liable to be confounded, were distinguished by transforming the latter into -"id:R"; which more recent form was not used by the Greeks of Asia Minor, the Cretans, the Italian Achaeans, and a few other districts, but on the other hand greatly preponderated both in Greece proper and in Magna Graecia and Sicily. Still the older form of the -"id:r" -"id:P" did not so early and so completely disappear there as the older form of the -"id:l"; this alteration therefore beyond doubt is to be placed later. V. The differentiating of the long and short -e and the long and short -o remained in the earlier times confined to the Greeks of Asia Minor and of the islands of the Aegean Sea. All these technical improvements are of a like nature and from a historical point of view of like value, in so far as each of them arose at a definite time and at a definite place and thereafter took its own mode of diffusion and found its special development. The excellent investigation of Kirchhoff (Studien zur Geschichte des griechischen Alphabets), which has thrown a clear light on the previously so obscure history of the Hellenic alphabet, and has also furnished essential data for the earliest relations between the Hellenes and Italians - establishing, in particular, incontrovertibly the previously uncertain home of the Etruscan alphabet - is affected by a certain one-sidedness in so far as it lays proportionally too great stress on a single one of these proposals. If systems are here to be distinguished at all, we may not divide the alphabets into two classes according to the value of the -"id:X" as -"id:zeta" or as -"id:chi", but we shall have to distinguish the alphabet of 23 from that of 25 or 26 letters, and perhaps further in this latter case to distinguish the Ionic of Asia Minor, from which the later common alphabet proceeded, from the common Greek of earlier times. In dealing, however, with the different proposals for the modification of the alphabet the several districts followed an essentially eclectic course, so that one was received here and another there; and it is just in this respect that the history of the Greek alphabet is so instructive, because it shows how particular groups of the Greek lands exchanged improvements in handicraft and art, while others exhibited no such reciprocity. As to Italy in particular we have already called attention to the remarkable contrast between the Achaean agricultural towns and the Chalcidic and Doric colonies of a more mercantile character (x. Iono-Dorian Towns); in the former the primitive forms were throughout retained, in the latter the improved forms were adopted, even those which coming from different quarters were somewhat inconsistent, such as the -"id:C" -"id:gamma" alongside of the -"id:\/" -"id:l". The Italian alphabets proceed, as Kirchhoff has shown, wholly from the alphabet of the Italian Greeks and in fact from the Chalcidico-Doric; but that the Etruscans and Latins received their alphabet not the one from the other but both directly from the Greeks, is placed beyond doubt especially by the different form of the -"id:r". For, while of the four modifications of the alphabet above described which concern the Italian Greeks (the fifth was confined to Asia Minor) the first three were already carried out before the alphabet passed to the Etruscans and Latins, the differentiation of -"id:p" and -"id:r" had not yet taken place when it came to Etruria, but on the other hand had at least begun when the Latins received it; for which reason the Etruscans do not at all know the form -"id:R" for -"id:r", whereas among the Faliscans and the Latins, with the single exception of the Dressel vase (XIV. Note 14 ), the younger form is met with exclusively.

12. I. XIII. Etrusco-Attic and Latino-Sicilian Commerce

13. That the Etruscans always were without the koppa, seems not doubtful; for not only is no sure trace of it to be met with elsewhere, but it is wanting in the model alphabet of the Galassi vase. The attempt to show its presence in the syllabarium of the latter is at any rate mistaken, for the syllabarium can and does only take notice of the Etruscan letters that were afterwards in common use, and to these the koppa notoriously did not belong; moreover the sign placed at the close cannot well from its position have any other value than that of the -f, which was in fact the last letter in the Etruscan alphabet, and which could not be omitted in a syllabarium exhibiting the variations of that alphabet from its model. It is certainly surprising that the koppa should be absent from the Greek alphabet that came to Etruria, when it otherwise so long maintained its place in the Chalcidico-Doric ; but this may well have been a local peculiarity of the town whose alphabet first reached Etruria. Caprice and accident have at all times had a share in determining whether a sign becoming superfluous shall be retained or dropped from the alphabet; thus the Attic alphabet lost the eighteenth Phoenician sign, but retained the others which had disappeared from the -u.

14. The golden bracelet of Praeneste recently brought to light (Mitth. der rom. Inst. 1887), far the oldest of the intelligible monuments of the Latin language and Latin writing, shows the older form of the -"id:m"; the enigmatic clay vase from the Quirinal (published by Dressel in the Annali dell Instituto, 1880) shows the older form of the -"id:r".