Stichometry

STICHOMETRY. - From στίχος (line) comes the conventional system used by the Greeks and Romans to calculate the length of written texts, counting the verses in poetic works and the lines, reduced to a uniform extent of about 16-17 syllables (the average length of the hexameter), in prose works.

This system had a primarily commercial application, for evaluating the copyist's work for the purposes of remuneration, like the pecia (v.) in medieval university texts. This explains why the stichometric indications preserved in certain 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 stichometry was also used, consisting in numbering the lines in groups (of 100, of 50, etc.), thus facilitating references as in modern citations. It was also called [thus] the division into short periods or clauses, into which texts were sometimes divided to facilitate reading, especially public reading: to this system, however, the name colometry is better suited, because it is based on the division "per cola et commata" (a comma would have been the member of the period comprising up to 7 syllables, a colon that of 8 to 17). Applications of this system are attested for the works of Plato, Demosthenes, Cicero, for the Benedictine Regula, etc.; but the most famous remains that of the Bible (both in the Greek and in the Latin Vulgate), documented already before the well-known ἐκδόσις of the Acts and the Epistles edited by the deacon Euthalius (4th century).

Alessandro Prates