were supposed to last the longest. The same idea
of perpetuity which in architecture finds its most
striking exposition in the pyramids was repeated,
in the case of literary records, in the two columns
mentioned by Josephus, the one of stone and the
other of brick, on which the children of Seth wrote
their inventions and astronomical discoveries; in
the pillars in Crete on which, according to Porphyry,
the ceremonies of the Corybantes were inscribed;
in the leaden tablets containinlu the works of Hesiod,
deposited in the temple of the Muses, in Boeotia;
in the ten commandments on stone delivered by
Moses; and in the laws of Solon, inscribed on planks
of wood. The notion of a literary production surviving
the destruction of the materials on which it
was first written--the 'momentum, aere perennius'
of Horace's ambition--was unknown before the discovery
of substances for systematic transcription.

"Tablets of ivory or metal were in common use
among the Greeks and Romans. When made of
wood--sometimes of citron, but usually of beech or
fir--their inner sides were coated with wax, on
which the letters were traced with a pointed pen or
stiletto (stylus), one end of which was used for
erasure. It was with his stylus that Caesar stabbed
Casca in the arm when attacked by his murderers.
Wax tablets of this kind continued in partial use in
Europe during the middle ages; the oldest extant
specimen, now in the museum at Florence, belongs