Greek manuscript

“ As my eye fell listlessly on the manuscripts, I saw they contained only the Spanish language written in the Greek characters—a mode of writing that, I easily conceived, must have been as unintelligible to the officers of the Inquisition, as the Hieroglyphics of the Egyptian priests. Their ignorance, sheltered by their pride, and that still more strongly fortified by the impenetrable secresy attached to their most minute proceedings, made them hesitate to entrust to any one the circumstance of their being in possession of manuscript which they could not decypher. ”

“ To return now to classical forms of manuscripts, it appears to have been a long time before the book or codex form of manuscript was extended from the wood and ivory tablets to writings on parchment or paper.
The roll form of MS.It seems probable that throughout the Greek period manuscripts on paper or vellum were usually, if not always, in the shape of a long roll; and that it was not till about the beginning of the Roman Empire that leaves of parchment or paper were sometimes cut up into pages and bound together in the form of the older tablets. ”

“ In the next year five hundred and fifty-five additional manuscripts were given by him to the Library, and in 1640 eighty-one more. This splendid donation of nearly thirteen hundred manuscripts comprised works in Oriental and many other languages; a large number of them being of exceptional value and interest. Among them was a manuscript of the Acts of the Apostles in Greek and Latin, of the end of the seventh century, which is believed to have been once in the possession of the Venerable Bede. ”

“ It is therefore no wonder that only a small fraction of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament preserved to modern times were written in the uncial period, and but few of this number belong to the first five or six centuries, none being earlier than the age of Constantine. Most uncial manuscripts are more or less fragmentary; and till lately not one was known which contained the whole New Testament unmutilated. A considerable proportion, in numbers and still more in value, have been brought to light only by the assiduous research of the last century and a half. ”

“ A glance at the Catalogue of the Greek manuscripts at Paris is yet more instructive in this respect. Vergecius, Darmarius, Valeriano of Forli, and a score of others were gaining great names as copyists in the service of princes, secular and ecclesiastical. Every noble and every prelate was in honour bound to be the owner of as brilliant a collection as he could. In these libraries the Greek classics were doubtless more prominent and more valued than the Greek Fathers ”

“ Now, when evidence like this is presented, we need not lay stress upon the traditionary history of particular manuscripts, nor upon their apparent antiquity, nor upon the genuineness of the dates affixed to them; for from the facts actually before us, we can draw only one inference. Without going further, therefore, we may conclude with certainty, that several Greek manuscripts of Herodotus were in existence some time before the publication of the printed editions ”

“ Besides, it is not one ancient writer, but very many that quote the Old Testament freely, and frequently; sometimes they do so with perfect accuracy, sometimes with less care; but yet they do it so as to furnish over-abundant evidence of the fact that the Greek version of the Old Testament, such as we now find it in the Vatican Manuscript, was familiarly known to, and was in the hands of, the Christian community at that early time;—as it had been for centuries before that time. ”

“ The Greek is written without intervals between the words. The papyrus is in fair preservation, and is believed to date from the third or fourth century. It thus ranks in age with the oldest Greek manuscripts of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament in London, Rome and St. ”

“ Both in Greek and Latin literature the roll lasted down to the early centuries of the Christian era. It was superseded by the codex, the manuscript in book form (in the modern sense of the word book) , composed of separate leaves stitched together into quires and made available to receive writing on both sides of the material. ”

“ Iliad of the 4th century.Manuscript of the Iliad at Milan; of all existing Greek or Latin manuscripts none gives a better notion of the style of illuminations used in manuscripts of the best Graeco-Roman period than the fragments of Homer's Iliad which are preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrogiana in Milan. ”

“ Notwithstanding this, however, there are decisive grounds for holding that our Acts of Pilate contains in its main substance the document drawn from Justin and Tertullian. The first of these to be noticed is, that the Greek text, as given in the version most widely circulated in the manuscripts, is surprisingly corroborated by two documents of the rarest character, and first used by myself—a Coptic-Sahidian papyrus manuscript and a Latin palimpsest—both probably dating from the fifth century. ”

“ There is a large number of rare and curious manuscripts, among which are old Greek works of the seventh and eighth centuries, a Koran which once belonged to the Sultan Bajazet, the handwriting of Luther and Melanchthon, a manuscript volume with pen-and-ink sketches by Albert Dürer, and the earliest works after the invention of printing. Among these latter was a book published by Faust and Schaeffer, at Mayence, in 1457. There were also Mexican manuscripts written on the aloe leaf, and many illuminated monkish volumes of the Middle Ages. ”

“ The upper part of each manuscript is occupied by a series of pictural tablets; under them are vertical columns of distinct hieroglyphics, or, in the epistolographic manuscripts, pages of the text, which are commonly divided [Pg 25] into paragraphs, with a tablet at the head of each; the first words being constantly written with red ink, made of a kind of ochre, as the black is of a carbonaceous substance. ”

“ They and their pupils wrote books giving their reasons for believing this; but as printing was not invented till seventeen hundred years later, these works were known only to a few learned men. Most of the European scholars then lived in Greece or Constantinople, and kept these precious manuscripts in monasteries or private libraries, or in palaces and schools.
In the twelfth century a Spanish-A-ra ́bi-an philosopher read some of these Greek manuscripts, and then wrote a book, saying that he not only believed that the earth is round, but that he thought it would be possible to sail around it! ”

“ Unfortunately, these paintings were executed on a very crumbling surface, which has in many places peeled off: it is sad to see one of the most precious monuments of Greek and Christian Art in a deplorable state of dilapidation.
The masterpiece of the tenth century, which again is due to the artists of Greece, is a “Psalter, with Commentaries,” belonging also to the Imperial Library (number 139 among the Greek manuscripts) , a work in which the miniature-painter seems not to have been able to disengage himself from the Pagan creeds in illustrating Biblical episodes. ”

“ More manuscripts are coming to light constantly, manuscripts once well known and then lost. Many of them, perhaps many earlier than we now have, must have been familiar to Jerome four hundred years after Christ. When, therefore, there is a plain difference between the Vulgate and our early Greek manuscripts, the Vulgate may be wrong because it is only a translation; but it may be right because it is a translation of earlier manuscripts than some of ours. It is steadily losing its value at that point, for Greek manuscripts are all the time coming to light which run farther back. ”

“ As it became known that in Venice there was demand for Greek manuscripts, and that Venetian printers were offering compensation to scholars for editing Greek texts for the press, scholars speedily found their way to the City of the Lagoons. To many of these scholars, who had been driven impoverished from their homes in the East, the opportunity of securing a livelihood through the sale and through the editing of their manuscripts must have opened up new and important possibilities. ”

“ On the other hand, early cursive documents on vellum are scarce, for it must be borne in mind that, even allowing for the loss of such documents attributable to the perishable nature of that material in the humid climates of Europe, papyrus and waxen tablets were also the usual writing materials of the Greeks and Romans. The importance of the survival of Greek cursive papyri to so late a period is very great, for it enables us to trace the development of the Greek literary minuscule handwriting of the 9th century in a direct line from the cursive script of the papyri centuries earlier. ”

“ It was on this ground that, while printing-presses were, during the century after 1450, multiplying rapidly through Europe, the printing of Greek books continued to be for a large portion of the period an exceptional class of undertakings, and work was still found for scribes who could be trusted to make accurate transcripts of Greek codices. ”

“ There is, in short, abundant evidence to show that illuminated manuscripts were common among the Romans of the Imperial period; and there is a very strong probability that manuscripts decorated with miniatures were no less frequent in the great libraries of the Ptolemies and of the Attalid kings, in fact throughout the Greek world from the time of Alexander the Great downwards, if not earlier still. ”

“ This proof, it must be acknowledged, is much more complete in reference to the Greek, than to the Latin authors; it is also more ample in relation to ecclesiastical and sacred, than to profane literature. Of all the extant manuscripts, executed in the middle ages, perhaps nineteen in twenty belong to the former class. The continuance of the eastern empire till the middle of the fifteenth century, afforded an uninterrupted protection to Greek learning during those periods in which western Europe was laid waste by the Gothic nations. ”

“ Chrysostom, in eight folio volumes, printed at Eton in 1610, at the charge of Sir Henry Savile, the editor. The late T. B. Reed, in his History of the Old English Letter Foundries (p. 140) , speaks of this edition as 'one of the most splendid examples of Greek printing in this country,' and further describes the types with which it was printed as 'a great primer body, very elegantly and regularly cast, with the usual numerous ligatures and abbreviations which characterised the Greek typography of that period' (p. 141) . [Pg 159]
Fig. ”

“ Cyrene, Rhodes, Cos, Cnidus, Halicarnassus, Miletus, Priene, Ephesus, Magnesia on the Maeander, Pergamum, Delos, Thera, Athens, Eleusis, Epidaurus, Olympia, Delphi, Dodona, Sparta, have been explored or excavated by the Austrians, English, French, Germans and Greeks. German, French, British, Austrian and American institutes have been established at Athens, to a great extent engaged in the study of inscriptions. From every part of the Greek world copies of inscriptions are brought home by the students of these institutes and by other travellers. And still the work proceeds at a rapid rate. ”

“ In truth men distinguished in letters have represented to us that the arts, history, morality, philosophy, and almost all other branches of knowledge, flow from the Greek authors as streams flow from their sources. We know likewise that, Greek being more difficult to print than French and Latin, it is indispensable for the successful administration of a printing establishment of this sort, that the director thereof should be well versed in the Greek tongue, extremely painstaking, and blessed with abundant means ”

“ The antiquities of Thebes consist of a few inscribed slabs and fragments which are (as usual) collected in a dark outhouse, where it is not easy to make them out. I was not at the trouble of reading [pg 235] these inscriptions, for in this department the antiquarians of the University of Athens are really very zealous and competent, and I doubt whether any inscription now discovered fails to come into the Greek papers within a few months. From these they of course pass into the Corpus Inscriptionum Græcarum, a collection daily increasing, and periodically reedited. ”

“ We have early mention also of inscriptions on bronze plates; [4] but the word for “book” (which is our word “ Bible “) does not occur at all till near the time of Plato, or shortly before b.c. 400. The first mention of it, I think, is in the “Birds” of Aristophanes [5] (b.c. 415) , and here it only means a collection of written oracles, which, perhaps, were among the first records that began to be written down. [6] Speaking generally, it is quite extraordinary how very scanty are the notices of writing, or of any of its kindred operations or materials, throughout the earlier Greek literature. ”

“ Still under mediaeval influence, it began at first by finding its inspiration in the past, and so introduced a great classical revival, in which manuscripts of Greek and Latin authors and statues of gods and nymphs were almost as much revered as relics of the saints in an earlier age. Rich men hastened on journeys to the East in order to purchase half-burned fragments of literature from astonished Greeks, while in the lecture-halls of Italy eager pupils clamoured for fresh light on ancient philosophy and history. ”

“ The requirements of that reading public among the Greeks, led to the disuse of skins for the purpose of writing, since only a cheaper and more plentiful material could satisfy the demand. Egyptian papyrus being both cheap and plentiful, it was adopted and remained in use for over a thousand years among the people who spoke Greek and Latin. Books upon vellum or parchment—charta pergamena, an improved form of the old skins—were only produced occasionally, as luxuries, between the second century B.C. and the fifth century of our era. ”