In contrast to some of the other symbols explored here, the ampersand seems at first sight to be entirely unexceptional. Another of those things the Romans did for us, the symbol started life as the Latin word et, for ‘and’, and its meaning has stayed true to its origins since then. Even the word ‘ampersand’ itself manages to quietly hint at the character’s meaning, unlike, say, the conspicuously opaque naming of the pilcrow or octothorpe. Dependable and ubiquitous, the ampersand is a steady character among a gallery of flamboyant rogues.

Things were not always thus, however. Today’s ampersand might take pride of place in the elevated names of Fortnum & Mason and Moët & Chandon, but its Roman ancestor was a different beast entirely. Born in distinctly ignoble circumstances and dogged by a rival character of weighty provenance, the ampersand would spend a thousand years of uneasy coexistence with its opponent before finally claiming victory. The ampersand’s is a true underdog story.

The first century BC politician, philosopher, lawyer and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero was one of that select circle of Roman personalities who, in the manner of the most prominent of today’s footballers and pop stars, could go by a single part of his tripartite name and yet still be instantly recognised. Cicero, as he is and was invariably known, was alternately immersed in and exiled from Roman politics at the highest levels. His life and works are a fascinating microcosm of a Republic groaning under its own weight.

Born in 106 BC to an aristocratic but hitherto undistinguished family, on the face of it Marcus Tullius Cicero was an unlikely candidate to succeed within the Republic’s rigidly hierarchical society. Political office in Rome was the preserve of a wealthy elite who had held the reins since its very founding,1 and as the scion of a family of neither notable wealth nor patrician stock, Cicero faced an uphill struggle for acceptance. Running afoul of another traditional Roman prejudice, Cicero was not in fact a native of Rome itself but instead a small provincial town to its south. Most unfortunate of all, though, his very name counted against him: his now-famous cognomen, or personal surname, meant ‘chickpea’; apparently inherited from a cleft-nosed ancestor, it was not the most stirring of names for an aspiring politician.2 The insecurity he felt at the disadvantages arrayed against him left the young Cicero with a fierce desire to succeed. Adopting the Homeric motto “Always to be best and far to excel the others”,3 he would live up to it in spectacular fashion.

A lawyer by his mid-twenties, Cicero used wisely the opportunities afforded by his vocation, becoming a practised orator, cultivating political contacts and coming to public notice at the head of high profile cases.4 Making the leap from law to public service, he scaled the political ladder known as the cursus honorum, or ‘honours race’, with almost indecent haste, elected at the first try and the youngest legal age to each of the successive political offices of Quaestor, Aedile and Praetor.5 His meteoric rise culminated in 63 BC with his election to the Republic’s highest office: that of Consul, one of two equal partners who served a one-year term and who held the power of veto over each other’s actions. With a deal in place guaranteeing his corrupt and inept co-Consul Gaius Antonius Hybrida a lucrative provincial governorship in exchange for his quiescence,6 Cicero was the de facto civilian leader of the Republic.

Early in his year in office, word reached Cicero of the prospect of a coup orchestrated by Lucius Sergius Catilina, one of his defeated opponents for the position of Consul, and the protégé of a cabal of reformists seeking to reduce the Senate’s power. By then a shrewd politician, Cicero had cultivated a network of informants in the slippery world of the ruling classes, and was thus warned of an impending attempt on his life. Posting guards at his house to thwart the assassins, he stood before the Senate the very next day to deliver a scathing speech designed to turn popular opinion against Catiline and his cronies.6 Its opening words are well known to scholars of Latin:

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia? (How far, finally, will you abuse our patience, Catiline? For how long will your frenzy still elude us? To what limit will your unbridled brazenness flaunt itself?)7,

The conspiracy was thrown into disarray: exposed, Catiline fled first the Senate and then Rome itself, hoping to muster his army and seize power by force, while his accomplices remained in the city only to be discovered and imprisoned. Cicero pressed his advantage, delivering another impassioned speech to convince the Senate to have the conspirators put to death without trial.10 The conspiracy was ended, but the controversy over Cicero’s actions rumbled on. By flouting the laws of the Republic he had given the reformists — not least among them a certain general named Gaius Julius Caesar — the means to put him on trial and subsequently banish him from Italy.11

Cicero’s turbulent life could have filled any number of books, and being a particularly ardent self-promoter, he made a game attempt to write at least a few of them himself. He published his speeches as pamphlets to promulgate his views; he wrote a variety of philosophical treatises during his time in exile, and his voluminous correspondence was hoarded by his closest friend Atticus and published posthumously by Cicero’s indispensable secretary Tiro.12 Most apposite to this story, though, is the manner in which Tiro recorded his master’s spoken words.

Born a slave of Cicero’s household (but later freed, styling himself Marcus Tullius Tiro), Tiro was a gifted scribe who became Cicero’s secretary, biographer and confidante, making himself “marvellously useful […] in every department of business and literature”.13 Following a tour of Greece some years earlier, Cicero had come away impressed by Greek shorthand and directed Tiro to create a similar system for Latin.14 In response, Tiro devised a system composed of Latin abbreviations supplemented with Greek shorthand symbols, modifying and expanding it by degrees to yield a cipher all of its own. The resultant notae Tironianae were an effective secretarial tool: as Cicero boasted to Atticus in one of his regular letters,15 Tiro could record not only words but entire phrases and sentences in shorthand,14 and it was in this way that the famous Catiline Orations were recorded for posterity. Posterity would, of course, have to be content with Cicero’s massaged versions of Tiro’s original notes.

Among Tiro’s notae was the so-called ‘Tironian et’, or ‘⁊’, an innocuous character representing the Latin word et.16 And though this was only one symbol among many (in their most elaborate medieval form, a system descended from Tiro’s original cipher comprised some 14,000 glyphs17), the utility of Tiro’s system ensured that it would remain common currency for over a millennium. The provenance of the Tironian et was mighty indeed.

When the ampersand first came to light a century after Cicero had delivered the Catiline Orations, it emphatically did not issue from the grandees of the Roman establishment; instead, it came quite literally straight from the streets. If the Tironian et was Tiro’s brainchild, the ampersand was an orphan: its creator is not known, and the closest it comes to a parent is the anonymous first century graffiti artist who scrawled it hastily across a Pompeiian wall.18

Exactly when this first recorded ampersand was written is not known, but the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD 19 does impose a rather hard upper limit on the possible range of dates.

This first century ampersand is an example of a ‘ligature’, a single glyph formed by the combination of two or more constituent letters. Modern day ligatures, found in metal type or digital typefaces, appear where two or more adjacent letters are difficult to ‘kern’, or space correctly, and are often subtle enough to escape notice unless the reader is alert to their presence.20 The most common ‘functional’ ligatures in English are ‘fi’, ‘ff’, ‘fl’, ‘ffi’ and ‘ffl’, while a type designer may choose to provide additional pairings like the purely decorative ‘st’, the archaic ‘ſb’, or even the extravagant ‘fffl’, employed solely in the German word Sauerstoffflasche, or ‘oxygen tank’.22

The Pompeiian ampersand is instead a product of a simpler time when handwritten ligatures were time-saving contractions, the result of happy coincidence where the final stroke of one letter led neatly to the first of the next. Still clearly recognisable as the word Et, this ampersand only barely qualifies as a ligature at all, with the middle arm of the ‘E’ touching the stem of the ‘t’ in a suspiciously coincidental manner. Intentional or not, it is tempting to imagine that the ampersand is the result of an accidental slip of its doubtless nervous writer.

Whatever its origins, just as Cicero decisively overcame the prejudices he faced from the Roman establishment, the scrappy ampersand would go on to usurp the Tironian et in a quite definitive manner.