share in determining whether a sign becoming superfluous shall
be retained or dropped from the alphabet; thus the Attic alphabet
lost the eighteenth Phoenician sign, but retained the others which
had disappeared from the -u.

14. The golden bracelet of Praeneste recently brought to light
(Mitth. der rom. Inst. 1887), far the oldest of the intelligible
monuments of the Latin language and Latin writing, shows the older
form of the -"id:m"; the enigmatic clay vase from the Quirinal
(published by Dressel in the Annali dell Instituto, 1880) shows
the older form of the -"id:r".

15. At this period we shall have to place that recorded form of the
Twelve Tables, which subsequently lay before the Roman philologues,
and of which we possess fragments. Beyond doubt the code was
at its very origin committed to writing; but that those scholars
themselves referred their text not to the original exemplar, but to
an official document written down after the Gallic conflagration,
is proved by the story of the Tables having undergone reproduction
at that time. This enables us easily to explain how their text by
no means exhibited the oldest orthography, which was not unknown to
them; even apart from the consideration that in the case of such
a written document, employed, moreover, for the purpose of being
committed to memory by the young, a philologically exact transmission
cannot possibly be assumed.

16. This is the inscription of the bracelet of Praeneste which
has been mentioned at xiv, note 14. On the other hand even on the
Ficoroni cista -"id:C" has the later form of -"id:K".

17. Thus -"id:C" represents -Gaius-; -"id:CN" -Gnaeus-; while
-"id:K" stands for -Kaeso-. With the more recent abbreviations of
course this is not the case; in these -"id:gamma" is represented
not by -"id:C", but by -"id:G" (-GAL- -Galeria-), --"id:kappa", as
a rule, by -"id:C" (-C- -centum- -COS- -consul; -COL -Collina-), or
before -"id:a" by -"id:K" (-KAR- -karmetalia-; -MERK- -merkatus-).
For they expressed for a time the sound --k before the vowels -e
-i -o and before all consonants by -"id:C", before -a on the other
hand by -"id:K", before -u by the old sign of the koppa -"id:Q".

18. If this view is correct, the origin of the Homeric poems (though
of course not exactly that of the redaction in which we now have
them) must have been far anterior to the age which Herodotus assigns
for the flourishing of Homer (100 before Rome); for the introd