Stichometry

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 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.

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.

Scholars believe that stichometry became established in Athens sometime during the 5th century BCE when copying prose works became common. Stichometry is mentioned briefly in Plato's Laws (c. 347 BCE), several times in Isocrates (early to mid-4th century), and in Theopompus (late 4th to early 3rd century), 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.

The standard work on stichometry is Kurt Ohly's 1928 Stichometrische Untersuchungen 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.

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.

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