Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 117, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 May 1910 — OLDEST ATTIC LETTER. [ARTICLE]

OLDEST ATTIC LETTER.

Give* a Glimpse of Manners aud Customs In Demasthenes’ Time. A little leaden tablet, tarnished, ugly and otherwise trivial in appearance, was sent a few years ago fro.m Athens to the Imperial Museum of Berlin, the Scientific American says. On one side of it was some writing which only recently was deciphered with precise correctness by Adolph Wilhelm, an Austrian savant, who lives in Athens. The tablet is the original of a private letter that was written about the time of the orator Demosthenes. The writer of the letter lived in a rural neighborhood and wished to send a commercial order to a town. The form of the address was: “To be taken to the pottery .market and to be handed to Nausias, or to ThrAsykles, or to the son” (perhaps the son of the writer was meant). The weekly market, to which the Attic countrymen had gone to offer their produce and wares for sale, may be imagined in progress. There the boy who was bearer of the letter was to find the stand or booth of one of the three persons to whom it was addressed and deliver it to him. The text of the letter says': "Mnesiergoes greets you cordially, he greets your family with the same esteem and wishes thorn good health, and he says also that his own health is good. Please be so kind as to send me a mantle, either of sheepskin or of goatskin, and let it be as cheap as possible, for It does not need to be trimmed with fur. Send with a pair of heavy soles also. As soon as I have an opportunity I will pay you.” So much for the letter, to the motive of which the reader can point, with as much precision as the author. Apparently it was written in winter, poor Mneslergos having been surprised out in the open country by one of those icy snowstorms which sometimes even at this day cover the temples of Acropolis with a mantle of snow. Therefore he desired to receive as quickly as possible the heavy' and wafm garment; oF the poorer countrymen, a goatskin, which could be bought for drachmas, and the strong soles which were worn under the ordinary sandals on the rural plains and hillsides. A good pair of the latter, could be bought for 4 drachmas, as a well-preserved bill of that date shows. A noteworthy feature of this artless letter is the formula that may be

‘ found used in very numerous letters that were preserved by the Greek literature of later Even at the present day every letter written by a rural Greek begins with the same cordial inquiry about the health of the person tc whom the letter is written and with the brief information about the health of the winter.