In addition to all this, little attention was paid to the separation of words and sentences, and the art of punctuation was but imperfectly understood.
Finally, and above all, the orthography of Latin was extremely fluctuating and uncertain. We have seen, in an early part of this work, how it varied in the time of the republic, and it, in fact, never became fixed. Mai talks repeatedly, in his preface, of the strange inconsistencies of spelling in the Codex, which contained Cicero’s work De Republica; and Cassiodorus, who of all his contemporaries chiefly cultivated literature during the reign of the barbarians in Italy, often regrets that the ancient Romans had left their orthography encumbered with the utmost difficulties. “Orthographia,” says he, “apud Græcos plerumque sine ambiguitate probatur expressa; inter Latinos vero sub ardua difficultate relicta monstratur; unde etiam modo studium magnum lectoris inquiret.”
In consequence of this dictation to short-hand, and this uncertain orthography, we find that the corruption of the classics had begun at a very early period. The ninth Satire of Lucilius was directed against the ridiculous blunders of transcribers, and contained rules for greater correctness. Cicero, in his letters to his brother Quintus, bitterly complains of the errors of copyists,—“De Latinis vero, quo me vertam, nescio; ita mendose et scribuntur, et veneunt[506].” Strabo says, that in his time booksellers employed ignorant transcribers, who neglected to compare what they wrote with the exemplar; which, he adds, has occurred in many works, copied for the purpose of being sold, both at Rome and Alexandria[507]. Martial, too, thus cautions his reader against the mistakes occasioned by the inaccuracy and haste of the venders of books, and the transcribers whom they employed:
“Si qua videbuntur chartis tibi, lector, in istis,
Sive obscura nimis, sive Latina parum;
Non meus est error: nocuit Librarius illis,
Dum properat versus annumerare tibi[508].”
Aulus Gellius repeatedly complains of the inaccuracy of copies in his time: We learn from him, that the writings of the greatest Classics were already corrupted and falsified, not only by the casual errors of copyists, but by the deliberate perversions of critics, who boldly altered everything that was too elegant or poetical for their own taste and understanding[509]. To the numerous corruptions in the text of Sallust he particularly refers[510].
The practice, too, of abridging larger works, particularly histories, and extracting from them, was injurious to the preservation of MSS. This practice, occasioned by the scarcity of paper, began as early as the time of Brutus, who extracted even from the meagre annals of his country. These excerpts seldom compensated for the originals, but made them be neglected, and in consequence they were lost.
It seems also probable, that the destruction of the treasures of classical literature commenced at a very early period. Varro’s library, which was the most extensive private collection of books in Italy, was ruined and dispersed when his villa was occupied by Antony[511]; and some of his own treatises, as that addressed to Pompey on the duties of the Consulship, were irretrievably lost. Previous to the art of printing, books, in consequence of their great scarcity and value, were chiefly heaped up in public libraries. Several of these were consumed in the fire, by which so many temples were burned to the ground in the reign of Nero[512], particularly the library in the temple of Apollo, on the Palatine Hill, which was founded by Augustus, and contained all the Roman poets and historians previous to his age. This literary establishment having been restored as far as was possible by Domitian, suffered a second time by the flames; and the extensive library of the Capitol perished in a fire during the reign of Commodus[513]. When it is considered, that at these periods the copies of Latin works were few, and chiefly confined within the walls of Rome, some notion may be formed of the extent of the loss sustained by these successive conflagrations.