Shorthand is so closely associated with the hurry and rush of modern business that it is startling to think of it having been in use among the ancient Greeks and Romans. Yet there seems to be no doubt that the orations of Cicero were committed to paper with as much skill and rapidity as the modern stenographer can boast.
Just how old the system of abbreviated writing is which the ancient Greeks called tachygraphy, it is impossible to say. Xenophon is believed to have used it in taking notes of the lectures of Socrates, which would take it back to the fifth century before Christ. This is disputed by some authorities, but there seems to be no doubt about its use in the first century. A writer in the Chicago Tribune gives some interesting facts about it.
The development of shorthand was due especially to Marcus Tullius Tiro. Born in Latium in 103 B.C., Tiro, who was a slave, was brought up with Cicero, who was some years his junior. Freed, he became Cicero’s secretary, and in this capacity aided him greatly. In the famous trial of Catiline (63 B.C.) the stenographic rapidity of Tiro was at its height.
In the first century before Christ a discourse of Cato Uticensis, according to Plutarch, was taken down by shorthand reporters.
Early in the third century Anno Domino is found the term semeiograph (stenographic character), used by the Greek orator, Flavius Philostratus.
Origen, of Alexandria (185–254 A.D.), noted his sermons down in shorthand, and Socrates, the ecclesiastical historian of the fourth century, said that parts of the sermons of St. John Chrysostom were preserved by the same process.
The shorthand that they used was a form of writing in which each word was represented by a special sign. The letters of the alphabet, with modifications, connected so as to admit of great rapidity of execution, formed the elements of these characters.
Manilius, who was a contemporary of Cicero, Vergil, and Horace, mentions it in verse. He says:
In shorthand skilled, where little marks comprise
Whole words, a sentence in a single letter lies,