The apex was a diacritical sign which appears in inscriptional evidence above or to the right of the vowel sign it modifies.Footnote 1 The earliest datable example, according to Reference OliverOliver (1966: 50), is múrum (CIL 12.679, 104 BC). We are informed by the writers on language that the purpose of the apex was to mark vowel length. Thus Quintilian notes, of the letters for vowels:
at, quae ut uocales iunguntur, aut unam longam faciunt, ut ueteres scripserunt, qui geminatione earum uelut apice utebantur aut duas …
When joined together as vowels, however, they either make one long vowel (as in the old writers who used double vowels instead of an apex) or two vowels …Footnote 2
ut longis syllabis omnibus adponere apicem ineptissimum est, quia plurimae natura ipsa uerbi, quod scribitur, patent, sed interim necessarium, cum eadem littera alium atque alium intellectum, prout correpta uel producta est, facit: ut “malus” arborem significat an hominem non bonum, apice distinguitur, “palus” aliud priore syllaba longa, aliud sequenti significat, et cum eadem littera nominatiuo casu breuis, ablatiuo longa est, utrum sequamur, plerumque hac nota monendi sumus.
For example: it would be very silly to put an apex over all long syllables, because the length of most of them is obvious from the nature of the word which is written, but it is sometimes necessary, namely when the same letter produces different senses if it is long and if it is short. Thus, in malus, an apex indicates that it means “apple tree” and not “bad man”; palus also means one thing if the first syllable is long and another if the second is long; and when the same letter is found as short in the nominative and as long in the ablative, we commonly need to be reminded which interpretation to choose.Footnote 3
A fragment following the De orthographia of Terentius Scaurus in the manuscripts and sometimes attributed to him (see Reference ZetzelZetzel 2018: 319) also provides some information about the apex:
apices ibi poni debent, ubi isdem litteris alia atque alia res designatur, ut uénit et uenit, áret et aret, légit et legit, ceteraque his similia. super i tamen litteram apex non ponitur: melius enim [i pila] in longum producetur. ceterae uocales, quae eodem ordine positae diuersa significant, apice distinguuntur, ne legens dubitatione impediatur, hoc est ne uno sono eaedem pronuntientur.
Apices ought to be placed where by means of the same spelling two different words are written, such as uēnit and uenit, āret and aret, lēgit and legit, and other similar instances. No apex is placed over the letter i: it is better for this to be pronounced long by means of i-longa. Other vowels, which, placed in the same order, signify different things, are distinguished by an apex, so that the reader is not impeded by uncertainty, that is so that he does not pronounce with the same sound these same vowels.
From these two writers then, it is generally gathered that apices and i-longa were used to mark long vowels,Footnote 4 but they recommend using them only when words are distinguished only by length of a vowel. This part of the prescription of Quintilian and ‘Scaurus’, that apices should be used only to distinguish words that were otherwise written identically, is not followed in any inscription of any length (Reference RolfeRolfe 1922: 88, 92; Reference OliverOliver 1966: 133–8).
A couple of letters may suggest that some writers aimed to use apices not only on long vowels, but also on most, if not all, long vowels (except for /iː/, which seldom receives an apex). One of these is CEL 8, written on papyrus, which is dated to between 24 and 21 BC, and probably comes from a military scriptorium. Reference KramerKramer (1991) provides a different reading from that of CEL. If he is correct, this would be an example of (almost) every long vowel being marked:Footnote 5 44 apices or i-longa on 49 long vowels, plus 1 i-longa on a short vowel; but of the 5 missing a mark, 2 are in areas where the papyrus is damaged, so they might have been lost.Footnote 6 CEL 83 is a papyrus letter from the Fayûm, described by the editor as ‘in elegant epistular cursive’ (in corsiva epistolare elegante), and again perhaps in a military context. Cugusi prefers a date in the second half of the first century AD, but second and third century dates have been suggested. This letter contains 14 apices, 7 on /ɔː/, 4 on /aː/, 1 on /eː/, 1 on /uː/ and 1 on /iː/ (there are no instances of i-longa). This compares to 3 other instances of /ɔː/ without an apex and 2 of /uː/ (and 9 of /iː/).
Apart from these rare cases, exactly what rule or rules governed the placement of apices therefore often remains obscure, and may vary according to time, place, register or genre, or training. There are three variables which are relevant for our discussion of apices, and to some extent also i-longa. These are (1) the position in the text or nature of a word which contains an apex or i-longa, (2) the position in the word of a vowel or diphthong which bears an apex or which is an i-longa, and (3) the nature of the vowel (or diphthong) that bears an apex: (a) is it long or short (if it is a single vowel), and (b) what vowel or diphthong is it? In the case of i-longa, the relevant question for (3) is whether it represents long or short /i(ː)/ or consonantal /j/. These variables are not necessarily independent: for instance, if the writer was marking all long vowels in a text with an apex or i-longa, or were following the advice of Quintilian and ‘Scaurus’ to only mark long vowels in homonyms, this would obviously determine their position in both the text and in the word. However, when the situation is not so clear-cut, as it nearly never is, it is important to take these variables into account, and to consider which apply. As we shall see, there is considerable variation in our texts, or at least those for which the editions provide information about apices and i-longa. This variation is extremely interesting in terms of the questions surrounding sub-elite education that I am addressing in this book, since it suggests that individual groups of scribes or stonemasons had developed their own rules for when and where to use these diacritics.
Apices and i-longa have been the subject of a number of studies, which have discussed some of the variables which we have mentioned. The use of the apex primarily to mark long vowels (but not all long vowels) is largely confirmed by long inscriptions which presumably reflect elite usage such as the evidence of the Laudatio Turiae of 15–9 BC (CIL 6.1527, 6.37053; EDR093344), and the Res Gestae Diui Augusti of AD 14 (Reference ScheidScheid 2007; CIL 3, pp. 769–99), as discussed by Reference Flobert and CalboliFlobert (1990: 103–4). The first of these has 5 apices on short vowels or diphthongs out of 134 apices altogether (so 129/134 = 96% long vowels), while the Res Gestae has 9 out of 427 (418/427 = 98% long vowels). However, this is by no means consistent across all inscriptions. Reference Flobert and CalboliFlobert’s (1990) corpus of inscriptions from Vienne and Lyon has 75–77% of apices on long vowels, and Reference ChristiansenChristiansen (1889: 17) notes the relative frequency of an apex on <ae>.Footnote 7
The passage of ‘Scaurus’ also implies that i-longa is the equivalent of the apex, that is it is used to mark vowel length for /iː/. While, again, this is true in some inscriptions, Reference ChristiansenChristiansen (1889: 29–32) identified many cases where it represented /j/, and also suggested that it was used for purely ornamental purposes, at the start of an inscription, at the beginning or end of a line, or even to mark a new phrase (Reference ChristiansenChristiansen 1889: 36–7). Many of the examples of ornamental or text-organisational i-longa are found on a short /i/. Very similar conclusions were drawn from an examination of the inscriptions from Hispania by Reference Rodríguez AdradosRodríguez Adrados (1971), and from a corpus of military diplomas dating from AD 52 to 300 by Reference García González and AnonymousGarcía González (1994). This latter provides some further evidence for the use of i-longa as ornamental, or as a way of marking out text structure, in observing that use of i-longa in the abbreviation imp(erator) correlates with position at the start of the diploma, and is not used so frequently in other places in the text (Reference García González and AnonymousGarcía González 1994: 523).
Reference RolfeRolfe (1922) identified several tendencies in placement of the apex (and i-longa) in the inscriptional texts he examined. Firstly, that they tend to be used frequently in some passages but not in others; two words in agreement often both bear them, but sometimes consecutive non-agreeing words also have them. Secondly, that they seem to add dignity or majesty to certain terms, especially connected with the Emperor and official titles; frequent use in names may also fall under this heading. Thirdly, they act as a type of punctuation, before a section mark in the Res Gestae or where punctuation is used in the English translation. Fourthly, they appear on the preposition a, and on monosyllabic words in general. Lastly, they mark preverbs, word division in compounds and close phrases, suffixes, case endings, and verbs in the perfect tense. In his study of apices and i-longa, Reference Flobert and CalboliFlobert (1990: 106), assuming that their basic purpose is to mark long vowels, suggests reasons for cases on short vowels. Like Rolfe, he sees them as a marker of an important word or name, and draws attention to the use of i-longa in his corpus in the name of the Emperor Tiberius (although for some doubt about this, see pp. 256–7).Footnote 8 More recently, Reference FortsonFortson (2020) has identified, in an inscription of the Arval Brothers (CIL 6.2080, AD 120), the use of apices and i-longa to mark out phrase units, generally on the last word of the phrase.Footnote 9
Most of the evidence for apices and i-longa mentioned above has come from inscriptions on stone or bronze, often with a particular focus on the long official/elite inscriptions such as the Res Gestae and the speech of Claudius from Lyon (CIL 13.1668).Footnote 10 In the following sections I will discuss the evidence of some sub-elite corpora, on stone in the case of the funerary inscriptions of the Isola Sacra, and on wax or wooden tablets in the case of the archive of the Sulpicii, and the texts from Herculaneum and Vindolanda.Footnote 11 These will suggest that use of apices and i-longa in these corpora was often rather different from the picture shown by our elite sources, and that it was often associated in particular with scribes and stonemasons rather than other writers, thus providing evidence for their orthographic education.
Since the relatively few letters which boast apices do not form a cohesive corpus in terms of time or place of composition, I will not discuss them at great length here.Footnote 12 A couple of relevant instances have already been mentioned above. In general, the letters match expectations on the basis of the evidence of the writers on language and the elite inscriptions in that the apices appear almost entirely on long vowels: out of a total of 73 apices (using the reading of Reference KramerKramer 1991 for CEL 8), all but 2 or 3 are non-long vowels: the exceptions are Cláudi (CEL 72), epistolám (CEL 166), where the vowel is phonetically long [ãː], and perhaps ].gó (CEL 85), which, if it is ego, marks a historically long vowel. This makes the divergent usage in the other corpora all the more striking (especially at Vindolanda, where many of the texts containing apices are letters).
Since, as already mentioned, and as will become even clearer from the discussion below, i-longa and apices generally cannot be considered as simply equivalents of each other for /i/ and other vowels respectively, I will discuss the two features separately. The exception to this is the discussion of the Isola Sacra inscriptions with which I begin, where it makes sense to take the two together because their use is rather similar.
Before we turn to these particular corpora in detail, however, it is worth pointing out two serious methodological problems in dealing with apices and i-longa. One of these is the question of how to recognise long and short vowels. Latin underwent a number of sound changes which affected inherited long and short vowels, such that it is not always easy to be sure whether a given vowel was long or short at the time and place of writing of a given document, nor whether length was phonological or phonetic. Of particular relevance are iambic shortening and shortening of other long word-final syllables, and lengthening before /r/ in a syllable coda (see pp. 42–3). I will assume here that in originally iambic words which were paradigmatically isolated, like ego < egō ‘I’, the final vowel is short, but that all other originally long final vowels, even in iambic word forms which are not paradigmatically isolated, were long (or at least, it was known that these ‘should’ be long). I will also assume that vowels before coda /r/ could be phonetically long.
The second issue is the question of what is being counted. If we want to draw conclusions about the use of apices or i-longa it is important to know which vowels are marked in this fashion, but also which are not. For example, as we shall see, Adams observes that apices are particularly common on word-final /a(ː)/ and /ɔ(ː)/ in the Vindolanda tablets. However, this information is incomplete unless we also know what proportion these instances of apices make up of relevant vowels in these tablets. To take an example: suppose in the tablets containing <á> and <ó> these were the only vowels (or the only long vowels, or the only word-final vowels): this would make a significant difference to our analysis of how the apex was being used compared to a situation where there are plentiful examples of /a(ː)/ and /ɔ(ː)/ (not to mention /ɛ(ː)/, /eː/ and /u(ː)/) without apices.
This example was intentionally absurd. But, as we shall see, the tablets do contain a particularly high number of apices on long final /ɔ(ː)/ compared to other text types. This does not necessarily mean that writers at Vindolanda were more fond of putting an apex on /ɔ(ː)/ in this position than on /a(ː)/, but may simply reflect a preponderance of this context: most of the tablets containing apices are letters written to and from men; consequently the greetings formula and addresses of these letters tend to contain large numbers of second declension nouns in the dative and ablative; likewise, names mentioned in the main text are more commonly men than women.
To collect all instances of vowels without apices as well as with apices in the Vindolanda tablets, or in other large corpora which have apices and i-longa, would be overwhelming, but I will look closely at some texts which have relatively large numbers, in order to get at least a qualitative idea of whether the picture from looking over the whole corpus seems to fit in with the practice in individual texts.
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