STICHOMETRY. — From στίχος (line), it is the conventional system used by the Greeks and Latins for calculating the length of written texts, counting the verses in poetic works and the lines, reduced to a standard length of approximately 16–17 syllables (the average length of the hexameter), in prose works.
This system was applied chiefly for commercial purposes, to assess the work of the copyist for purposes of remuneration, pecia (v.) in medieval university texts. This explains why the stichometric indications preserved in some manuscripts (especially Greek ones) often do not correspond to the actual number of lines in the roll or codex, but to that of the exemplar from which they derive. A system of partial s. was also used, consisting in numbering the lines in groups (of 100, 50, etc.), thereby facilitating references as in modern citations. The distinction into brief periods or clauses, into which texts were sometimes divided to facilitate reading, especially public reading, was also called s.; for this system, however, the name colometry is more appropriate, since it was based on division “per cola et commata” (comma would have been the member of the period comprising up to 7 syllables, colon that of 8 to 17). Applications of this system are attested for the works of Plato, Demosthenes, and Cicero, for the Benedictine Rule, etc.; but the most famous remains that of the Bible (both in the Greek and Latin Vulgate), documented even before the celebrated ἐκδόσις of the Acts and Epistles prepared by the deacon Euthalius (4th century).