The Origins of the Ligatures in to Theodore Go Back to the Earliest Printed Greek Books c. 1500

The “weird” ligatures in To Theodore look less like the mannerisms of a modern forger and more like the long after-life of very old scribal habits. Medieval and early-modern Greek writing used hundreds of ligatures and abbreviations; early Greek printers around 1500 (Aldus, later Garamond’s Grecs du roi) consciously copied those minuscule hands, so printed books preserve the same repertoire: ου as Ȣ, καί as ϗ, στ as ϛ (stigma), and a family of -ος ligatures in which sigma is tucked into or above omicron. Palaeographic guides to Homeric manuscripts, for example, explicitly note an abbreviated -ος with a raised omicron as a regular Byzantine ending, showing that this is a genuine scribal convention, not a typographic invention.

The suggestion is that the letter’s mixture of ligatures—its particular -ος form, its use of ϗ, various ου and ται forms, and the odd abbreviation κου for κυρίου—could be inherited from an earlier exemplar whose cursive, highly abbreviated “letter-writing” style has been faithfully carried forward. That would also explain some asymmetries: certain -κος words are abbreviated while “Μάρκος” is written out, and “Ἰησοῦς” is never turned into a nomen sacrum, as if a private letter preserving pre-factory habits of writing did not yet treat these as fixed sacred abbreviations.

On this view, the anomalies are significant, but in a way that points backward, not to a modern tinkerer who has ransacked 16th-century fonts, but to a chain of copying that preserved old shorthand habits into the 17th–18th centuries. A forger would have had to master an eighteenth-century monastic hand, then deliberately overlay it with a cluster of archaic ligatures that are rare in that period and hardly discussed in the literature, all without any clear payoff in convincing readers. The more economical hypothesis, the argument goes, is that both early printers and the Mar Saba scribe stand in the same broad tradition of Greek cursive abbreviation, and that a serious test of authenticity should be a systematic ligature-by-ligature comparison with dated manuscripts and early prints rather than psychological reconstructions of motive.

As one classic description of these types puts it, early Greek typesetters tried so hard to mimic the flowing minuscule hand that they left “even those familiar with Greek … at pains to read the simplest words,” because of the density of ligatures. The claim is that To Theodore belongs inside that history of cramped, highly abbreviated Greek, not outside it as an ingenious twentieth-century pastiche.