Stichometry
[6] The standard work on stichometry is Kurt Ohly [de]'s 1928 Stichometrische Untersuchungen,[7] which collects together the results of some fifty years of scholarly debate and research.
Today, stichometry plays a small but useful role in research in fields as diverse as the history of the ancient book, papyrology, and Christian hermeneutics.
Stichometry was sometimes confused with colometry, the practice of some Christian authors in late antiquity of writing texts broken into rhetorical phrases to aid delivery.
Some modern Jewish and Christian scholars use ‘stichometry’ as a synonym for stichography, which is the occasional practice in ancient scriptures of laying out texts so that each biblical or poetic verse begins on a new line.
Friedrich Ritschl, a leading German classicist in the mid-19th century, stimulated interest in the mysterious numerals found at the end of medieval manuscripts by discussing them in several of his essays.
[16] In an 1878 article that Ohly called ‘epoch-making,’ Charles Graux proved that the numerals at the end of the medieval manuscripts were proportional to the length of each work and in fact gave the total number of a fixed unit equal to a Homeric line.
Birt saw that Graux's breakthrough led to a cascade of insights about scribal practices and publishing, citations and intertextuality, and the kinds of formats and editions used in antiquity.
As Hermann Diels said, The investigations of the recently deceased Charles Graux, taken all too prematurely from the world of scholarship, have made it henceforth inalterably certain that the standard line (the stichos) of the ancients was a unit of spatial length equal to the hexameter.
[21] Many of Birt's theories and interpretations are dated and have been superseded by later research, but he permanently broadened and deepened the methodologies used in histories of the ancient book and connected stichometry to a broad range of intellectual and literary issues.
[24] At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, archaeologists discovered a large number of fragmentary, Greek scrolls in Egyptian tombs, mummies, and city dumps.
Kurt Ohly studied the stichometry found in many of the scrolls excavated at Herculaneum in Italy but his 1929 book Stichometrische Untersuchungen[7] contained a complete survey of the treasure trove of newly discovered Greco-Egyptian papyri with stichometric notations.
Ohly discusses the length of the standard line, the evidence for syllable counting, the various number systems used in stichometric reports, and the aims and history of stichometry among the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines.
Rachel Yuen-Collingridge and Malcolm Choat (Macquarie University) used stichometry along with other kinds of evidence to make inferences about scribal practice and copying techniques.
