Paragraphos

It marked a boundary in Greek writing. A short stroke beneath a line’s first letters signaled a new unit. Greek inscriptions used paragraphoi by the late Archaic period, an early phase of Greek history. A literary text on papyrus, an ancient writing material, in Berlin preserves one from the 2nd century BC. The sign developed as a writing convention, not a one-off invention.

Its job followed the text: a speaker change in drama, a stanza in poetry, a sentence or section in prose, or a list entry or clause in inscriptions. The dicolon, a two-dot mark, could clarify a speaker break; a coronis, another editorial mark, paired with paragraphos for a larger transition.