122 ?<► SHADY CHARACTERS

The hyphen was first documented by another in the longlint
of overachieving, tax-evading scholars at the library of Alex¬
andria. With punctuation already invented, the Earth’s diameter
measured, and Homer’s epic poetry saved for future generations, the
second-century-BC grammarian Dionysius Thrax was evidently left
with precious little to do.* A student of the fifth librarian Aristarchus
(he of asterisk and obelus fame), Thrax set to work on a short essay
entitled “Tékhnë Grammatiké,”t or the “Art of Grammar,” document¬
ing the state of the art in grammatical practice.3 The Tékhnë con¬
cerns itself largely with morphology, or the construction of words,
digressing briefly on the high, middle, and low points first created
by Aristarchus’s predecessor, Aristophanes, and in later supplements
strays further into punctuation and other matters.4 Though some of
the scribal practices Thrax described were employed patchily at best,
the Tékhnë remains both the earliest known and the most important
work on the ancient Greek language.

The first of Thrax’s supplements addressed prosody, or the spoken
delivery of a text, and catalogued the marks used to clarify the empha¬
sis, intonation, and rhythms therein.5 Nestled between the familiar
apostrophe ( ), which clarified ambiguous syllable boundaries, and
the commalike hypodiastole (3), used to separate difficult words, lay the
hyphen (.—.) a bowed line drawn under adjacent words to indicate
that they should be understood as a single entity.6 In an age when texts
were written entirely without word spaces, the hyphen, apostrophe,
and hypodiastole were invaluable in interpreting an author’s words.
The conjoined words ‘littleusedbook,” for example, are given quite

* For more on the Alexandrian library and its laundry list of achievements see chapter 6, “The
Asterisk and Dagger (*, f).”

t Correctly attributing ancient manuscripts is not an exact science, and the authorship of the
Tekbne Grammatiké” and its later supplements is a matter of some dispute.2

THE HYPHEN 123

reUOMGCAAN/
r œ N Ó X 'A ? I е го С G1
1t A l TTT Г( ’ ) Ni 6 Ì ХдХ
ттІЫ-Ú ГАРАИ СТА! éc

TAcéy UH AOeeAAYN СЛТО-

óT f ì ха с di eré Аостлфул
тлoп и pei н l arхч? г
АВіЬ яке і Асфо feONÀ

А F Ш М Хтш? ГА Г 1 с го с

оф FAX іЛЛегс-UH Н ІВЫ

! Vf ГѴ О іол ІГТЧО vá.df'brry » * '

Figure 7.1 A sublinear hyphen {line 6, center) in a
mid-second-century Homeric manuscript.

different meanings by the application of a hyphen or hypodiastole to
yield “littlgysedbook” and “littleusedbook” respectively.

This “sublinear” hyphen (so called because it was drawn below
the main line of text) maintained its form and function in Greek
texts for centuries. Ironically enough, when its end did come as it
did in a roundabout and galling manner, like a boomerang returning
to its oblivious thrower—it was courtesy of the dogged, Grecophile
Romans.

* * *

As mentioned in chapter i, “The Pilcrow (f ),” sometime in the
late second or early third century the Romans adopted the
Greek practice of writing without spaces between words, abandoning
their previous style of separating'words-with'dots.' This was more
a statement of fashion than practicality, and was finally reversed in