Asterix punctuation
9īy the twentieth century, the asterisk had become the de facto leader of the footnote clan. Later, in printed books, authors used the asterisk to call out their own asides. Having survived the intervening millennia with its visual form largely intact, by the medieval period the asterisk had moved into a new role as an “anchor” for readers’ notes: where a reader wanted to link a note scribbled in the margin to a particular passage in the text, a pair of asterisks would do the trick. And right from the beginning, it came with a warning: a text with an asterisk attached to it is not the whole story. 6, 7 Occasionally, Aristarchus paired an asterisk and obelus to indicate lines that belonged elsewhere in the poem.
In the second century BCE, Aristarchus of Samothrace introduced an array of new critical symbols: the diple (>) called out noteworthy features in the text the diple periestigmene (⸖) marked lines where Aristarchus disagreed with Zenodotus’s edits and, finally, the asteriskos (※), or “little star”, denoted duplicate lines. The asterisk, in turn, was created by one of Zenodotus’s successors. 4 Named the obelos, or “roasting spit”, in the seventh century Isidore of Seville captured the essence of Zenodotus’s mark when he wrote that “like an arrow, it slays the superfluous and pierces the false”. As such, he started drawing a short dash (-) in the margin beside each line he considered to be superfluous, and, in doing so, inaugurated the field of literary criticism. 3 Many spurious additions, deletions and alterations had been made to the Odyssey and Iliad since the time of their composition, but Zenodotus lacked the tools to deal with them. I say a librarian, but really Zenodotus was the librarian, the first in a long line to be employed at Alexandria by the Ptolemaic pharaohs.
In the third century BCE, at Alexandria in Egypt, a librarian named Zenodotus was was struggling to edit the works of Homer into something approaching their original form. I go into greater detail in the Shady Characters book, but the abridged version of the asterisk’s origin story goes something like this. Granted, it is not 5,000 years old, as Robert Bringhurst claims in the otherwise impeccable Elements of Typographic Style 1 (Bringhurst confuses it with a star-like cuneiform mark that represents “deity” or “heaven” 2), but it has more than two millennia under its belt nonetheless.