[Verginius Rufus]

Most Greek inscriptions just run the words together (e.g., the Greek text on the Rosetta Stone), but occasionally you will find word dividers (often two or three dots written vertically).

I think most of the copies of Greek texts on papyrus found in Egypt also run the words together without breaks.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

Most Greek inscriptions just run the words together (e.g., the Greek text on the Rosetta Stone), but occasionally you will find word dividers (often two or three dots written vertically).

I believe that the same thing is true of Classical Latin, with divisions sometimes being marked by a single dot at a point half the height of the letters. I have no idea when the dots became replaced by blank spaces, since you often see medieval Latin written with the dots. Perhaps it came about after the invention of printing, when it became easy to place a spacer piece of type between words.

[Verginius Rufus]

George Ostrogorsky's History of the Byzantine State has some illustrations which show medieval Greek manuscripts. Figure 50 is from an 11th century manuscript, and several illustrations show drawings in a 14th-century copy of the Chronicle of John Scylitzes (now in Madrid) which include surrounding portions of the Greek text. Generally they don't have spaces between the words, but the accents and breathings would probably have made it easy for a Greek-speaking reader to separate the words.

Dimitri Obolensky's book The Byzantine Commonwealth has an illustration of a page from an 11th-century Cyrillic manuscript which doesn't have spaces between words--presumably the person who penned the page was following Byzantine practices of his day.