190 SHADY CHARACTERS
and disseminate but instead the words of God’s Son and his great¬
est disciples, and thus it was that just as Origen had appropriated
the asteriskos and obelos for his exhaustive critical edition of the Old
Testament, so too the diple found renewed purpose in the serviced
religion.10 In the process, the diple's once-expansive range of applica-
tions was honed to a fine point: under Christianity, the diple would
gain a meaning worthy of its form.
The volume of literature produced by and for Christians exploded,
along with the spread of the Church. Roughly one in fifty of all known
second-century Western manuscripts are of Christian origin, but by
the eighth century the ratio had risen to a staggering four out of every
five." Authors praised, commented upon, and attacked one another’s
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^ .di ' Figure Ю.2 Diples in Matthew 2:6 of Codex Sinaiticus. Also visible
here are some of Aristophanes’s points and accents. One of the most
important surviving early manuscripts, the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus,
or “Sinai Book,” is in essence the first complete Bible. Its constituent parts
are scattered among several of the world’s major libraries.12
QUOTATION MARKS $0- 191
work, supporting their arguments by quoting the Bible and what sym¬
bol could be more appropriate to the marking of this most noteworthy
oftexts, other than the familiar dipleV’ By the time Isidore of Seville
came to write about punctuation in his seventh-century Etymologies, his
description of the diple could be curt and unambiguous: “Our scribes
place [the diple] in books of churchmen to separate or make clear the
citations of Sacred Scriptures.”14 A very specific point indeed.
As in its earlier days, however, the diple was not the only method
used to distinguish such scriptural quotations. Like the Bible itself,
many theological works were passed down from generation to genera¬
tion, and successive editions often displayed wildly different approaches
to the same text. In about 590 ad, for instance, a grammarian named
Dulcitius applied himself to editing a copy of Saint Augustine’s De
Imitate, a Latin treatise on the triune nature of God.’5 Augustine’s
original fifth-century text had introduced quotations from the Bible
with a verb of speaking (he wrote) but no punctuation; Dulcitius, on
the other hand, employed diples to further distinguish quotations. Ren¬
dered in the unspaced capitals typical of the time, and terminated with
a high point, Dulcitius presented the famous opening words of John
1:1 as follows:16
> HESAIDINTHEBEGINNINGTHERE
WASTHEWORD'
The scribe of a different sixth-century copy of De Trinitate, mean¬
while, challenged the unspaced tyranny of scriptio continua by quaran¬
tining quotations between letter-width gaps, with the diple nowhere
to be seen:
I HESAYS IAMINTHEFATHERANDTHEFATHER
I INME17