THE<i>ODES</i>: just where do you draw the line?

How did ancient readers of poetry books, working their way through Callimachus or Cercidas or Catullus, know when they had reached the end of a poem? Scribal conventions offered some visual aid: the conclusion of a long lyric poem might be marked by a big wiggly koronis in the left margin, while shorter epigrams were separated by the more economical paragraphos, the same 'dash-mark' which was used to indicate change of speaker in dramatic texts. If the book were an anthology like the Garland of Meleager, a new name would mark both change of authorship and change of poem. Yet such external graphic signals were subject to the hazards of careless transcription, and might be omitted or misplaced; errors would propagate themselves throughout subsequent copies.