Abecedaria
Complete or partial lists of letters
of the alphabet, chiefly Greek and Latin, inscribed
on ancient monuments, Pagan and Christian. At,
or near, the beginning of the Christian era, the Latin
alphabet had already undergone its principal changes,
and had become a fixed and definite system. The
Greek alphabet, moreover, with certain slight modifications, was becoming closely assimilated to the
Latin. Towards the eighth century of Rome, the
letters assumed their artistic forms and lost their
older, narrower ones. Nor have the three letters
added by the Emperor Claudius ever been found in
use in Christian inscriptions. The letters themselves, it may be said, fell into disuse at the death
of the Emperor in question. The alphabet, however, employed for monumental inscriptions differed
so completely from the cursive as to make it wholly
impossible to mistake the one for the other. The
uncial, occurring very rarely on sculptured monuments, and reserved for writing, did not make its
appearance before the fourth century. The number
of Christian objects bearing the Abecedaria, with
the exception of two vases found at Carthage, is
extremely limited. On the other hand, those of
heathen origin are more plentiful, and include certain tablets used by stone-cutters apprentices
while learning their trade. Stones have also been
found in the catacombs, bearing the symbols A, B, C,
etc. These are arranged, sometimes, in combinations which have puzzled the sagacity of scholars.
One such, found in the cemetery of St. Alexander, in
the Via Nomentana, is inscribed as follows:
AXBVCTESDR . . . . . .BCCEECHI
EQGPH. . . .M MNOPQ
RSTVXYZ
This represents, in all probability, a schoolboy's
task, which may be compared with a
denarius of
L. Cassius Caecinianus, whereon the
inscription runs thus:
AX, BV, CT, DS, ER, FQ, GP, HO, IN, KM
It is to
St. Jeroine that we owe an explanation of
this curious
trifle. He tells us that, in
order to
train the memory of young children, they were
made to learn the
alphabet in a double form, joining
A to X, and so on with the other letters. A
stone
found at
Rome in
1877, and dating from the sixth
or seventh century, seems to have been used in a
school, as a model for learning the
alphabet, and,
points,
incidentally, to the long continuance of old
methods of teaching. (See
CHRISTIAN USE OF ALPHABET.)
H. LECLERCQ
The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia