GFS Neohellenic

The letters go back to Venice in 1492, to an edition of Macrobius printed in the shop attributed to Giovanni Rosso, also known as Joannes Rubeus. His Greek was round and close to monoline, with very little difference between thick and thin. A British scholar brought it back in the 20th century.

That was Victor Scholderer of the British Museum Library. By the late 19th century the people who cared about Greek type in Britain wanted it to match an idealized, never quite defined “greekness” of the past, and Scholderer, following his predecessor Richard Proctor, held the same view. In 1927 the Society for the Promotion of Greek Studies asked him to advise on a new face, and he picked the Rosso type for revival. Lanston Monotype cut it as New Hellenic. No Greek type had succeeded in Britain like it since Porson Greek, more than a century earlier, and from the 1930s it was taken up in Greece as well, with a redrawn Ξ and Ω.

The Greek Font Society digitized it in 1993 and 1994 with money from the Athens Archaeological Society, adding a set of epigraphical symbols for inscriptions. Italic, Bold and Bold Italic followed in 2000, together with a Latin to go beside the Greek. Takis Katsoulidis and George D. Matthiopoulos did the work.

The 4 styles carry small caps, old style and lining figures, and the extended Greek needed for polytonic text. Its lowercase is low against the capitals, so give it a slightly bigger size than you would a modern sans.

A classics journal or a parallel-text edition is where we would put it.