CAPITAL, SACRED SCRIPTURE. - I. IN EPIGRAPHY. - Applied to writing, the term "c." means "larger," "more showy," such as the letters customarily used in the capita of pages and treatises. It is not a word in use in ancient Latin. In technical language, however, it is not a synonym of "majuscule," but designates that form of writing which appears on the most ancient stone monuments and which is still essentially reproduced in the majuscules of modern printing. In this sense it is opposed both to cursive and to minuscule, and also to uncial.
It appears that in antiquity a single type of writing was in use among each people, whether Greek or Italic, with an alphabet that the Greeks derived from the Semites and the Italics from their Greek neighbors of the Chalcidian colonies (Cumae, Naples, etc.). Certainly all the oldest written texts show the same type of letters, which are essentially those called capitals above.
The Greek c. shows little evolution in its forms, and almost only has round variants as compared with the square ones already from the 3rd-2nd centuries B.C., forms that could be called uncial.
The Latin c., from its most ancient form (archaic c.), gradually refined its stroke, so that in the time of Augustus it presents us with a noble type, severe and elegant at once, in which the forms of the letters are perfectly stabilized. This type has two fundamental variants: the quadrata or monumental, and the actuary or rustic c.
The quadrata writing has very broad letters, with the straight strokes perfectly horizontal or vertical, so that each one can be inscribed in a perfect square or rectangle. It was used commonly on monuments and marble tombstones, in mosaics, in stamps and seals, in the headings of books, and wherever the writing had to present a special character of monumentality. It adapted itself in a special way to incision with the chisel.
The actuary or rustic c. is characterized, on the contrary, by narrower and more slender forms, by the tendency of the horizontal strokes to escape upward, by the depression and partial deformation of all the curved strokes, by the frequent abandonment of the vertical for the slanted. As such it adapted itself especially to writing with pen and brush, and was perhaps produced above all by the use of these instruments. Hence it is obvious that it was as a rule used in the registration of public and private acts, whence its name of actuary. And so great was the force of usage that even when these acts had to be incised in hard material, such as bronze or marble (rescripts of emperors, acts of the Arval Brethren, etc.), they were written there in rustic.
Moreover, the two forms did not always remain totally distinct. In less careful writings on marble, rustic forms often run through the midst of the quadrata ones; in the 3rd-4th centuries, then, and particularly in Christian epigraphy, quadrata and rustic letters are continually mixed, indeed with the progressive degradation of calligraphy, the whole epigraph takes on an ever more rustic appearance.
Pope Damasus, with his calligraphic reform, attempted a decisive return to the purest forms of the quadrata c., even exaggerating somewhat its characters of breadth and severity, but it was an action that had little effect around and after him.
The Latin c. in its formal shape has lasted almost unchanged on monuments down to our own days.
The cursive form (cursim ducta, that is, rapid) must always have been used, from the time people began to write outside of monuments, for the most common uses of life. It seems therefore that it also has a development of its own independent of that of the c. In fact, when it begins to appear it carries with it the marks of archaism and of the popular.
It is essentially the same c. writing, but traced in haste and without much care. Hence the elements of one and the same letter often separate from one another, and even more often elements of two successive letters join together; many apices are exaggeratedly lengthened and the whole writing easily inclines to the right. Much of its characteristic is given to the cursive also by the medium with which one writes and by the surface that receives the writing. In general right angles are avoided and the curves tend to soften their depths and to open out. Also in the kind of letters many uncial and minuscule elements are introduced. Moreover there is not just one type of cursive alphabet; according to times and places there are strong variants, indeed one may think that sometimes the strongest variations are due to the unskillfulness of the writer and to the resistance of the surface on which one writes.
The cursive was used commonly in private documents and in brief personal inscriptions, which have come down to us mostly on wax tablets and scratched on walls by visitors. The letters that in it depart most from the capital are a, b, d, e, h, q, r, s.
Bibliography6 works
Antonio Ferrua
II. IN PALEOGRAPHY
In parallel with lapidary writing, there also develops from archaic c., which is exclusively epigraphic writing, a book c., of which three types can be distinguished: rustic, elegant and cursive.
Some treatise writers recognize the direct derivation from archaic c. only for the latter type, while the true and proper book c., rustic and elegant would be the continuation of the lapidary capital. But certain elements (the absence of the median line in the A of the rustic capital, the rising above the line of the vertical strokes of some letters, certain characteristic forms that have no counterpart in the epigraphic field, the continuous character of the writing at an epoch when in inscriptions one encounters an element of division between word and word) reasonably suggest a parallel process rather than one of dependence, although in certain cases a mutual influence cannot be excluded. Indeed, for certain forms of actuary capital the contrast between thick and thin strokes, the undulating ductus, etc., lead one to recognize a conscious imitation of book writing on the part of the lapidary, and not vice versa.
The elegant capital is the paleographic counterpart of the square capital in inscriptions: there is today a tendency to recognize in it an influence of the epigraphic forms of the Damasan revival rather than of the lapidary of the 1st century. The very few examples that have come down to us (some Virgilian codices, all mutilated: the Augustan, partly in the Vatican [Vat. lat. 3256; 4 leaves] and partly in the State Library of Berlin [2°, 416; 3 leaves]; the Sangallensis [1394; 11 leaves]; the Oxyrhynchus papyrus [Oxyt. Pap. 1098] and perhaps the Verona palimpsest [XL, 38; 51 leaves]) do not go back beyond the 4th century (it should be observed that the scanty fragments of Herculaneum papyri, which seem to offer a sample of it, are so mutilated that one cannot pronounce with certainty even on the type of writing), but it is thought that it was also in use in an earlier age. The ratio between width and height for the letters of its alphabet is such that the broad letters (B, C, D, G, M, O, Q, etc.) can be perfectly inscribed in a square, and the thickenings of the rounded strokes are traced along an axis that is perpendicular to the line (v. tab. I). It is a solemn writing, of a purely calligraphic character and of rather limited use: in the Middle Ages, having declined as a spontaneous form, it continued to be used as an imitation script in titles, rubrics, and the lemmata of glossaries.
The rustic capital corresponds in the book field to the actuary capital of inscriptions. Its letters have, in comparison with the elegant capital, a greater development in the sense of height, and can therefore be inscribed in a rectangle, with the shorter sides in the same direction as the line; the thickenings follow an axis that falls obliquely on the line, forming the smaller angle on the left (v. tab. II). It has freer movements than the elegant capital, with horizontal strokes often undulating or even, at times, describing a flourish (P, L, more rarely T). The name simply indicates an element of distinction with respect to the elegant capital, in comparison with which it is less solemn, but it by no means denotes coarseness of forms or of execution, since the rustic capital too is a most careful writing and used in luxury codices. Already in use in the 1st century of the common era (the first examples are found in the Herculaneum papyri), it was the normal writing of codices until the 4th century and remained the book writing par excellence until the whole of the 5th century, when the prevalence of the uncial and semi-uncial began; it nevertheless survived for another century as a spontaneous form, then continued to be used sporadically, especially for the titles or the initial lines of precious codices, as an imitation script: perfect examples are frequent especially in the 9th century. The manuscripts, which were listed by Lehmann, number 27, of which 4 are on papyrus: particularly famous are the codices of Virgil, the Medicean-Laurentian (XXXIX, 1), the Vatican (Vat. lat. 3225), the Roman (Vat. lat. 3867), the Palatine (Vat. Palat. lat. 1631); the "Bembine" codex of Terence (Vat. lat. 3226); the Paris codex of Prudentius (Paris. lat. 8084); the Ambrosian palimpsest of Plautus (G. 82 sup.) and the Turin codex of Sedulius (E. IV. 42).
The cursive capital is the documentary writing of the classical age, in which the letters, of capital type, are traced with a cursive ductus, rarely joined by ligatures, more often in nexus. The name is not used constantly by all treatise writers to indicate this writing, which is called now Roman cursive, now ancient cursive, now ancient Roman cursive, at times even cursive majuscule. Schiaparelli even distinguishes a cursive capital and a cursive majuscule, designating by the latter name a mixed writing whose letters, predominantly majuscule, tend to depart from the original capital form, in order to assume others, derived from it as a result of spontaneous evolution. But rather than a type of its own, the cursive majuscule represents a transitional form that leads to the cursive minuscule and whose characteristics are determined by a twofold tendency: toward minusculization and toward greater cursiveness. The cursive capital is documented in the Herculaneum and Egyptian papyri and in the Pompeian and Dacian wax tablets: but although the formation of the letters is the same in both the former and the latter, the general appearance of the writing is very different, on account of the difference of material and of writing instrument (v. tab. III). More pliant, more rounded, richer in ligatures in the papyri; uneven, hard, detached in the tablets, to the point of assuming, in the one case and the other, peculiar forms of their own.
As for every writing, so too for the capital the distinction between the calligraphic form and the cursive form admits of intermediate stages, to which Schiaparelli gives the name of semi-cursive capital, citing as an example the famous Herculaneum papyrus 817, which contains fragments of the anonymous poem De bello Actiaco. But in the case of the capital one must distinguish intermediate forms also in another sense, that is, with respect to the lapidary and paleographic field. The characteristic writings in brush and in scratch, if they can be referred to epigraphy as regards the material, are nevertheless the province of paleography with respect to the writing instrument. For the brush writings, apart from a very few isolated examples that repeat, with a certain coarseness, the alphabet of the square capital, the documentation is offered solely by the wall inscriptions of Pompeii, almost all of an electoral character. The letters present a particular appearance, closely bound to the peculiarity of the writing instrument, which permits a very free stroke and gives relief to the bars and the undulating shafts (v. tab. IV): the hypothesis is not to be excluded, although not put forward by the treatise writers, that this writing suggested the formation of the rustic capital (cf. especially the "Roman" and "Palatine" codices of Virgil). The scratch writings executed with a pointed instrument on the plaster, on the other hand, present the same characteristics as the cursive capital of the wax tablets.
As for the criteria for dating s. c., it may be said that to this day they are entirely lacking: the various attempts that have been made are based solely on elements external to the writing, and have often proved precarious. The scarcity of documentation, the mutilated state of the codices that have come down to us, the absence of elements that would allow the place of origin to be recognized, have not permitted the formulation of chronological principles in the field of books. For cursive c. too, a sufficiently thorough study of its evolution is lacking, but since the documentary texts are almost all dated or datable with great approximation, reliable criteria will be able to be established once such a study has been made.