The Romans did not even write single words; >they wrote in continuous breath-group units (separated by punctuation >reflecting the importance of the pause) that Fraenkel and I both happen to >call >"cola".
A small correction: if 'Romans' refers to Roman writers in the Augustan Age and before, then it is not true that the Romans did not write single words. Inscriptions, and such Latin papyri as survive from that era (including the Gallus papyrus), show that the use of interpuncts - raised dots marking word divisions - was universal. Other signs were also added, to mark sense pauses, change of speaker, etc; the inscribed texts of Augustus' Res Gestae, for example, are literally riddled with slashes and squiggles. But starting in around the first half of the 2nd century AD, the Romans, for reasons which remain obscure, gave up this useful habit of writing interpuncts and began following the Greek custom, which was and always had been to run words together, in scripta continua. There were basically two exceptions to the early Roman norm: personal pronouns coming immediately after a verb, and prepositions. In both of those cases, the interpuncts are usually missing, giving us such things as MISITIBI, and IMMATRIMONIO (i.e. misi tibi, and in matrimonio). I mention this because the line which was the object of discussion a few posts back, Ecl. 2.24 (Amphion Dircaeus in Actaeo Aracyntho) should actually be considered a four-word, not a five-word line. (for more info, see J. N. Adams, "Interpuncts as evidence for the enclitic character of personal pronouns in Latin," ZPE 111: 208-210, 1996) Best, Philip Thibodeau The University of Georgia ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
