History of the Greek alphabet derive from omicron with a line drawn under it. Long and were written with the digraphs "ει" and "ου", respectively, whereas long and short , , were never distinguished in writing. In 403/2 BC, following the devastating defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the restoration of democracy, the Athenians voted to abandon the old Attic alphabet ("Pre-Euclidean alphabet") and to introduce a standardized variant of the eastern Ionic alphabet, after a proposal by archon Eucleides. This Euclidean alphabet included eta and omega, which concluded the process of adapting the Phoenician script so that all vowels could be written systematically, thus
Greek alphabet an additional diacritic in certain words, the so-called iota subscript, which has the shape of a small vertical stroke or a miniature below the letter. This iota represents the former offglide of what were originally long diphthongs, (i.e. ), which became monophthongized during antiquity. Another diacritic used in Greek is the diaeresis (), indicating a hiatus. This system of diacritics was first developed by the scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium ( 257 – 185/180 BC), who worked at the Musaeum in Alexandria during the third century BC. Aristophanes of Byzantium also was the first to divide poems into lines, rather than