paper. In the case of private documents, as a rule, no copies were made except on perishable materials.

Wills of private persons, indeed, are often found engraved on marble or other lasting material; these were

exposed in the most public manner over the graves that lined the great highways leading out from the cities;

but wills were quasi-public documents in the classical period, and had been entirely public documents at an

earlier time, according to their original character as records of a public act affecting the community and

acquiesced in by the whole body.

Similarly, it can hardly be doubted that, in a more ancient period of Greek society, documents which were

only of a private character and of personal or literary interest were likely to be recorded on more perishable

substances than graver State documents. This view, of course, can never be definitely and absolutely

proved, for the only complete proof would be the discovery of some of those old private documents, which

in the nature of the case have decayed and disappeared. But the known facts leave no practical room for

Paper was in full use in Egypt, as a finished and perfect product, in the fourth millennium before Christ. In

Greece it is incidentally referred to by Herodotus as in ordinary use during the fifth century BC. At what

date it began to be used there no evidence exists; but there is every probability that it had been imported

from Egypt for a lo ng time; and Herodotus says that, before paper came into use on the Ionian coast, skins

of animals were used for writing. On these and other perishable materials the letters and other commonplace

documents of private persons were written. Mr. Arthur J. Evans has found at Cnossos in Crete "ink-written

inscriptions on vases," as early as 1800 or 2000 years BC; and he has inferred from this "the existence of

writings on papyrus or other perishable materials" in that period, since ink would not be made merely for

writing on terra -cotta vases (though the custom of writing in ink on pottery, especially on ostraka or

fragments of broken vases, as being cheap, persisted throughout the whole period of ancient civilisation).

Accordingly, though few private letters older than the imperial time have been preserved, it need not and

should not be supposed that there were only a few written. Those that were written have been lost because

the material on which they were written could not last. If we except the correspondence of Cicero, the great

importance of which caused it to be preserved, hardly any ancient letters not intended for publication by

their writers have come down to us except in Egypt, where the original paper has in a number of cases

survived. But the voluminous correspondence of Cicero cannot be regarded as a unique fact of Roman life.

He and his correspondents wrote so frequently to one another, because letter-writing was then common in

Roman society. Cicero says that, when he was separated from his friend A tticus, they exchanged their

thought as freely by letter as they did by conversation when they were in the same place. Such a sentiment

was not peculiar to one individual: it expressed a custom of contemporary society. The truth is that, just as

in human nature thought and speech are linked together in such a way that (to use the expression of Plato)

word is spoken thought and thought is unspoken word, so also human beings seek by the law of their

nature to express their ideas permanently in writing as well as momentarily in speech; and ignorance of

writing in any race points rather to a degraded and degenerate than to a truly primitive condition.