A List of Total Line Counts for Christian Texts: The title is 'Versus Scribturarum Sanctarum' or 'Lines of Holy Scriptures.' The second line says 'Genesis Versus IIIId' or 'Genesis Lines 4500.' The third line says 'Exodus Versus IIIdcc (= 3700). From the Codex Claromontanus (5th or 6th century AD), Leaf 467v, National Library, Paris, France.
Stichometry refers to the practice of counting lines in texts: Ancient Greeks and Romans measured the length of their books in lines, just as modern books are measured in pages. This practice was rediscovered by German and French scholars in the 19th century. Stichos (pl.stichoi) is the Greek word for a 'line' of prose or poetry and the suffix '-metry' is derived from the Greek word for measurement.
The length of each line in the Iliad and Odyssey, which may have been among the first long, Greek texts written down, became the standard unit for ancient stichometry. This standard line (Normalzeile, in German) was thus as long as an epic hexameter and contained about 15 syllables or 35 Greek letters.[1]
Stichometry existed for several reasons. Scribes were paid by the line and their fee per line was sometimes fixed by legal decree. Authors occasionally cited passages in the works of other authors by giving their approximate line number. Book buyers used total line counts to check that copied texts were complete. Library catalogs listed the total number of lines in each work along with the title and author.[2]
Scholars believe that stichometry became established in Athens sometime during the 5th century BC when copying prose works became common. Stichometry is mentioned briefly in Plato's Laws (c. 347 BC),[3] several times in Isocrates (early to mid-4th century),[4] and in Theopompus (late 4th to early 3rd century),[5] but these casual references suggest the practice was already routine. The same standard line was used for stichometry among the Greeks and Romans for about a thousand years until stichometry apparently fell out of use among the Byzantine Greeks in the Middle Ages as page numbers became more common.[6]
The standard work on stichometry is Kurt Ohly's 1928 Stichometrische Untersuchungen[7] which collects together the results of some fifty years of scholarly debate and research. Today, stichometry plays a small but useful role in research in fields as diverse as the history of the ancient book, papyrology, and Christian hermeneutics.
Definitions
There are two kinds of stichometry: total stichometry is the practice of reporting the total number of lines in a work. Partial stichometry is the practice of including a series of numerals in the margins of a text, usually to mark every hundredth line.
Stichometry was sometimes confused with colometry, the practice of some Christian authors in late antiquity of writing texts broken into rhetorical phrases to aid delivery. Some modern Jewish and Christian scholars use ‘stichometry’ as a synonym for ‘stichography,’ which is the occasional practice in ancient scriptures of laying out texts so that each biblical or poetic verse begins on a new line.[8]
Evidence for stichometry
Charles Graux (1852--1882): French classicist and palaeographer. His discovery of the standard line launched the rigorous, modern study of stichometry.
The libraries of Europe contain many medieval copies of ancient Greek and Latin texts. Many of these contain short notes or 'subscriptions' on the final page that, in hundreds of cases, give the total number of lines in the work.[9] In texts of classical authors such as Herodotus and Demosthenes, these totals are expressed in the older, acrophonic numerals that were used in Athens during the classical period but abandoned sometime during the Hellenistic period.[10] Thus these stichometric totals are thought to descend, along with the content of the texts, from very early editions.[11]
Many ancient authors mention stichometry. Galen complains about the verbosity of a rival and says he can offer a description in fewer lines.[12] In the 1st century BC, a philosopher criticized Zeno of Citium and cited particular passages by giving their line number to the nearest hundredth line.[13]Diogenes Laërtius probably draws on the Pinakes, the published catalogue of the Library of Alexandria, when he reports the total number of lines in the oeuvres of various authors. He says, for example, that Speusippus wrote 43,475, Aristotle wrote 445,270, and Theophrastus wrote 232,808 lines.[14] The Cheltenham Canon lists line totals for books in the Christian Bible and concludes with an anonymous note apparently written by a book dealer in the 4th century AD when the practice of stichometry was perhaps becoming less familiar:
Since the list of line totals [of the books in the Bible available] in the city of Rome is not reliable, and elsewhere because of greed is not complete, I have gone through each individual book, counting 16 syllables to the line (as used in Virgil), and recorded the number for each book in all of them.[15]
Beginning in the 19th century, archaeologists discovered a large number of more or less fragmentary Greek scrolls in Egypt. Ohly describes and analyzes some fifty papyri which provide direct, ancient evidence for total and partial stichometry.
Modern rediscovery
Total Stichometry on a Papyrus Column: A line count in the subscription on the last column of a text by the philosopher Philodemus (1st century BC). The first line says 'ΦΙΛΟΔΗΜ[ΟΥ]' or 'By Philodemus' (brackets around restored characters). The second says '[ΠΕΡΙ ΡΗΤ]ΟΡΙΚΗϹ' or 'On Rhetoric.' The last says 'XXXXHH' or '4200 [lines] (written with attic numerals).' Transcription of papyrus charred by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and excavated at Herculaneum (Oxford, 1824).
Friedrich Ritschl, a leading German classicist in the mid-19th century, stimulated interest in the mysterious numerals found at the end of medieval manuscripts by discussing them in several of his essays.[16]
In an 1878 article that Ohly called ‘epoch-making,’ Charles Graux proved that the numerals at the end of the medieval manuscripts were proportional to the length of each work and in fact gave the total number of a fixed unit equal to a Homeric line.[17] This discovery established the concept of the standard line.
While studying the Clarke Codex of Plato's dialogues at Oxford, Martin Schanz noticed that isolated letters in the margins of two dialogues formed an alphabetic series and marked every hundredth standard line (alpha = 100, beta = 200, etc.). He was able to show that other manuscripts had similar marginal markings. His 1881 article named this kind of line-counting 'partial stichometry' and contrasted it to 'total stichometry' studied by Graux.[18]
Theodor Birt's well-known The Nature of the Ancient Book (1882)[19] substantially widened research on stichometry. Birt saw that Graux's breakthrough led to a cascade of insights about scribal practices and publishing, citations and intertextuality, and the kinds of formats and editions used in antiquity. Stichometry thus led to a broader study of the spatial organization of ancient books and their social, economic, and intellectual roles. As Hermann Diels said,
The investigations of the recently deceased Charles Graux, taken all too prematurely from the world of scholarship, have made it henceforth inalterably certain that the standard line (the stichos) of the ancients was a unit of spatial length equal to the hexameter. Theodor Birt has rightly erected his shrewd and persuasive The Nature of the Ancient Book upon this foundation.[20]
Birt's 550-page work was stimulated by practical questions about the ancient culture of books but grew into a broad reevaluation and reorganization of our knowledge of ancient literature and intellectual life. His introduction argued:
The nature of the literature of antiquity and the form of the ancient book reciprocally conditioned each other. The context of publication enveloped and modified literary creativity. The dividends of these investigations will thereby far exceed the satisfaction of merely antiquarian pleasures.[21]
Many of Birt's theories and interpretations are dated and have been superseded by later research, but he permanently broadened and deepened the methodologies used in histories of the ancient book and connected stichometry to a broad range of intellectual and literary issues.[22]
In 1893, James Rendel Harris' book Stichometry extended these new developments to an analysis of the stichometric data found in many early manuscripts of the Christian Bible and other Christian texts.[23]
In 1909, Domenico Bassi published a survey of the stichometric notations found on the papyri excavated at Herculaneum.[24]
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, archaeologists discovered a large number of fragmentary, Greek scrolls in Egyptian tombs, mummies, and city dumps. Some of these contained stichometric notations, and papyrologists became interested in the question of whether this data provided clues that would aid in reassembling the fragments. Kurt Ohly studied the stichometry found in many of the scrolls excavated at Herculaneum in Italy but his 1929 book Stichometrische Untersuchungen[25] contained a complete survey of the treasure trove of newly discovered Greco-Egyptian papyri with stichometric notations. It is regarded as the standard work on stichometry. Ohly discusses the length of the standard line, the evidence for syllable counting, the various number systems used in stichometric reports, and the aims and history of stichometry among the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines. Ohly's catalog of ancient papyri with stichometry together with Bassi's survey and the line reports in medieval manuscripts collected by Graux provide a wide range of evidence for ancient stichometric practices and their evolution through the centuries.
Recent research and applications
Partial stichometry in Plato: The lambda in the margin means 'line 1100' since lambda is the eleventh letter in the Greek alphabet. The Greeks used letters of the alphabet for numerals but decorated them to distinguish them from ordinary letters, here with a two bars and two dots. The same stichometric notations appear in another Plato manuscript and they probably derive from an early edition. Clarke Codex of Plato's Dialogues, copied in AD 895, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, leaf 210v, detail.
Rudolf Blum summarized research on stichometry in the catalog of Callimachus at the Library of Alexandria.[27]
Holger Essler (University of Würzburg) discussed stichometry's role in the ongoing efforts to reconstruct the papyri excavated at Herculaneum.[28]
Dirk Obbink (Oxford University) used stichometry in his restoration of Philodemus' On Piety.[29]
Jay Kennedy (Manchester University) claimed in several articles[30] and a book, The Musical Structure of Plato's Dialogues,[31] that Plato counted the lines in his dialogues in order to insert symbolic passages at regular intervals and thereby formed various musical and Pythagorean patterns.
Rachel Yuen-Collingridge and Malcolm Choat (Macquarie University) used stichometry along with other kinds of evidence to make inferences about scribal practice and copying techniques.[32]
Mirko Canevaro (Durham University) argued that the stichometric totals in the Demosthenes manuscripts descended from the earliest editions. He used these totals to show that the supposed excerpts of documentary evidence inserted in the speeches were not present in those early editions and were thus late forgeries. His book, The Documents in the Attic Orators, includes an introduction to stichometry.[33]
The codex was the historical ancestor of the modern book. Instead of being composed of sheets of paper, it used sheets of vellum, papyrus, or other materials. The term codex is often used for ancient manuscript books, with handwritten contents. A codex, much like the modern book, is bound by stacking the pages and securing one set of edges in a form analogous to modern bookbinding by a variety of methods over the centuries. Modern books are divided into paperback or softback and those bound with stiff boards, called hardbacks. Elaborate historical bindings are called treasure bindings. At least in the Western world, the main alternative to the paged codex format for a long document was the continuous scroll, which was the dominant form of document in the ancient world. Some codices are continuously folded like a concertina, in particular the Maya codices and Aztec codices, which are actually long sheets of paper or animal skin folded into pages.
Plato was an Athenian philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece, founder of the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.
Papyrus is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge. Papyrus can also refer to a document written on sheets of such material, joined together side by side and rolled up into a scroll, an early form of a book.
Palaeography (UK) or paleography is the study of historic writing systems and the deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts, including the analysis of historic handwriting. It is concerned with the forms and processes of writing; not the textual content of documents. Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating manuscripts, and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of scriptoria.
The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region.
Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, are a system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece, they are still used for ordinal numbers and in contexts similar to those in which Roman numerals are still used elsewhere in the West. For ordinary cardinal numbers, however, Greece uses Arabic numerals.
The Villa of the Papyri was an ancient Roman villa in Herculaneum, in what is now Ercolano, southern Italy. It is named after its unique library of papyri, discovered in 1750. The Villa was considered to be one of the most luxurious houses in all of Herculaneum and in the Roman world. Its luxury is shown by its exquisite architecture and by the very large number of outstanding works of art discovered, including frescoes, bronzes and marble sculpture which constitute the largest collection of Greek and Roman sculptures ever discovered in a single context.
Philodemus of Gadara was a Syrian Epicurean philosopher and poet. He studied under Zeno of Sidon in Athens, before moving to Rome, and then to Herculaneum. He was once known chiefly for his poetry preserved in the Greek Anthology, but since the 18th century, many writings of his have been discovered among the charred papyrus rolls at the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. The task of excavating and deciphering these rolls is difficult, and work continues to this day. The works of Philodemus so far discovered include writings on ethics, theology, rhetoric, music, poetry, and the history of various philosophical schools. Ethel Ross Barker suggested in 1908 that he was owner of the Villa of the Papyri Library.
A biblical manuscript is any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the Bible. Biblical manuscripts vary in size from tiny scrolls containing individual verses of the Jewish scriptures to huge polyglot codices containing both the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the New Testament, as well as extracanonical works.
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.
The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri or simply the Chester Beatty Papyri are a group of early papyrus manuscripts of biblical texts. The manuscripts are in Greek and are of Christian origin. There are eleven manuscripts in the group, seven consisting of portions of Old Testament books, three consisting of portions of the New Testament, and one consisting of portions of the Book of Enoch and an unidentified Christian homily. Most are dated to the 3rd century. They are housed in part at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland, and in part at the University of Michigan, among a few other locations.
Codex Mosquensis II designated by V or 031, ε 75, is a Greek uncial manuscript of the Gospels, dated palaeographically to the 9th-century. The manuscript is lacunose.
Papyrus 125, designated by 125, is an early copy of the New Testament in Greek. It is a papyrus manuscript of the First Epistle of Peter.
Dirk D. Obbink is an American papyrologist and classicist. He was Lecturer in Papyrology and Greek Literature in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University until 6 February 2021, and was the head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project until August 2016. Obbink was also a fellow and tutor in Greek at Christ Church Oxford, from which role he was suspended in October 2019.
The Herculaneum papyri are more than 1,800 papyri found in the Herculaneum Villa of the Papyri, in the 18th century, carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.
Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 24 is a fragment of Chapter X of Plato's Republic, written in Greek. It was discovered by Grenfell and Hunt in 1897 in Oxyrhynchus. The fragment is dated to the third century. It is housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The text was published by Grenfell and Hunt in 1898.
Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 29 is a fragment of the second book of the Elements of Euclid in Greek. It was discovered by Grenfell and Hunt in 1897 in Oxyrhynchus. The fragment was originally dated to the end of the third century or the beginning of the fourth century, although more recent scholarship suggests a date of 75–125 CE. It is housed in the library of the University of Pennsylvania. The text was published by Grenfell and Hunt in 1898.
Charles Graux was a French classicist and palaeographer. Apart from scores of articles and reviews, he published important critical editions of works by Xenophon and Plutarch and pioneering, descriptive catalogs of the medieval copies of ancient Greek texts preserved in the libraries of Spain and Denmark.
Martin Schanz was a German classicist and Plato scholar. He was a Dozent and Professor at the University of Würzburg from 1867 to 1912, and is especially known for his history of Roman literature and his ground-breaking, critical edition of Plato's dialogues.
Theodor Birt was a German classicist and novelist. He also used the name of the Humanist Beatus Rhenanus as a pseudonym.
References
↑ Kurt Ohly, Stichometrische Untersuchungen (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1928), ch. I.
↑ Plato, Laws, 958e9 – 959a1. See Ohly's analysis, p. 92-3.
↑ For example, Isocrates says in his prose Panathenaicus (136, c. 340 BC) that his composition is fit only for an audience that would countenance long speeches that even extended up ‘to a length of 10,000 hexameters.’
↑ Theopompus (c. 380 – c. 315 BC) congratulated himself for writing display speeches of not less than 20,000 lines and then for writing another 150,000 lines about the relations of barbarians and Hellenes to each other. Photius Bibliotheca, cod. 176, p. 120b, fragment 30B = Fragments of Greek Historians, F 25.
↑ Ohly, ch. IV. The decline of stichometry is also briefly discussed in Llewelyn Morgan, Patterns of Redemption in Virgil's Georgics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 224.
↑ Kurt Ohly, Stichometrische Untersuchungen (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1928).
↑ Both terms are used in E. Tov, ‘The Background of the Different Stichometric Arrangements of Poetry in the Judean Desert Texts,’ in J. Penner, K. Penner, C. Wassen, editors, Prayer and Poetry in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing, 2011), pp. 409 -- 420. For the distinction, see James Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
↑ There is a survey in Graux, ‘Nouvelles Recherches sur la Stichométrie,’ Revue de Philologie, new series 2, 1878, pp. 97 – 143.
↑ See W. Larfeld, Griechische Epigraphik, 3rd edition, 1914.
↑ See Mirko Canevaro, The Documents in the Attic Orators (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
↑ Galen, Adversus eos qui de typis scripserunt (Köhn, vol. VII, pp. 475-512); see Ohly, p. 5.
↑ Ohly (p. 109 ff.) argues the citations by line number in Diogenes Laërtius (VII 33, VII 188, etc.) derive from a 1st-century BC critic.
↑ Sanday, ‘The Cheltenham List of the Canonical Books of the New Testament and of the Writings of Cyprian,’ Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica, III, Oxford, 1891, pp. 217-325.
↑ See, for example, F. Ritschl, '‘Die Stichometrie der Alten,’ in Opuscula Philologica (Leipzig, 1866), vol. I, pp. 74--112.
↑ The article ‘Nouvelles Recherches sur la Stichométrie’ first appeared in the Revue de Philologie, new series 2, 1878, pp. 97 – 143 and was reprinted in Les Articles Originaux. ‘Epoch-making’: see Ohly, p. 95.
↑ Martin Schanz, ‘Zur Stichometrie,’ Hermes, vol. 16, no. 2, 1881, pp. 309 – 315.
↑ Das antike Buchwesen in seinem Verhältnis zur Literatur, 1882.
↑ H. Diels, 'Stichometrisches,' Hermes, vol. 17, no. 3, 1882, p. 377.
↑ For a discussion of the development of the field, see Roberts, Colin H.; Skeat, T.C. (1987). The birth of the codex (Repr.ed.). London: Published for The British Academy by Oxford University Press. ISBN0197260616.
↑ Domenico Bassi, ‘La Sticometria Nei Papiri Ercolanesi,’ Revista di Filologia, vol. 37, no. 3, 1909, pp. 321 -- 363 (Internet Archive).
↑ Kurt Ohly, Stichometrische Untersuchungen (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1928).
↑ Martin Schanz, ‘Zur Stichometrie,’ Hermes, vol. 16, no. 2, 1881, p. 313. Schanz argued the Venetus manuscript was not a descendant of the Clarke Codex.
↑ Rudolf Blum, Kallimachos: The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), trans. H. H. Wellisch, pp. 157-8.
↑ Holger Essler, ‘Rekonstruktion von Papyrus Rollen auf Mathematischer Grundlage,’ Cronache Ercolanesi, vol. 38, 2008, pp. 273 – 308.
↑ See, for example, Dirk Obbink, editor, Philodemus: On Piety, Part 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
↑ For example, J. Kennedy, ‘Plato's Forms, Pythagorean Mathematics, and Stichometry,’ Apeiron, vol. 43, no. 1, Mar. 2010, p. 1 -- 32.
↑ Jay Kennedy, The Musical Structure of Plato's Dialogues (Durham: Acumen, 2012).
↑ Rachel Yuen-Collingridge and Malcolm Choat, ‘The Copyist at Work, Scribal Practice in Duplicate Documents,’ in Paul Schubert, editor, Actes du 26e Congrès international de papyrologie, in the series Recherches et Rencontres published by the Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Genève, 2012, Volume 30, 827–834.
↑ Mirko Canevaro, The Documents in the Attic Orators (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Bassi's survey of the Herculaneum stichometry at the Internet Archive (Italian).
F.G. Lang's article on stichometry in the New Testament introduces stichometry and collects many references (German).
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![Total Stichometry on a Papyrus Column: A line count in the subscription on the last column of a text by the philosopher Philodemus (1st century BC). The first line says 'PhILODEM[OU]' or 'By Philodemus' (brackets around restored characters). The second says '[PERI RET]ORIKE[?]' or 'On Rhetoric.' The last says 'XXXXHH' or '4200 [lines] (written with attic numerals).' Transcription of papyrus charred by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and excavated at Herculaneum (Oxford, 1824). Philedemus Herculaneum subscription enhance.jpg](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Philedemus_Herculaneum_subscription_enhance.jpg)
