Capitalization

[aretay00]

I am wondering when words were capitalized in Homeric Greek. Titles of books? Names of people? Of places? Government offices? Perhaps significant events (like the Trojan War)?

Pardon my beginner's ignorance!

[Sinister Petrus]

They weren't. Capitals—or rather small letters—hadn't been invented at the time the epics were finally written down. Or accents or breathing marks. Or spaces or punctuation. It would've been written like this:

THEYWERENTCAPITALSHADNTBEENINVENTEDATTHETIMETHEEPISWEREFINALLYWRITTENDOWN

Or something like that. (I promise not to get into boustrophedon.) Now, I'm not the biggest expert on Greek, but in Latin I've seen quite a bit of variation on punctuation and capitalization. By and large it seems to have more to do with local standards than anything else. I.e. Germans capitalize more. French editions might use « and » rather than “ and ”.

On the other hand, Greek has a modern standard for punctuation and capitalization and may well impose that on modern editions of epic. Is that what you are looking for?

[Rothbardian]

They weren't. Capitals hadn't been invented at the time the epics were finally written down. Or accents or breathing marks. Or spaces or punctuation. It would've been written like this:

THEYWERENTCAPITALSHADNTBEENINVENTEDATTHETIMETHEEPISWEREFINALLYWRITTENDOWN

Well, that looks very much like capitals to me!

[Sinister Petrus]

Well, that looks very much like capitals to me!

Erm, I'll have to fix that post to say "nothing but capitals" or "miniscules". Oops.