Spurius Carvilius Ruga (possibly 600 BCE or 230 BCE) was a semi-legendary freedman living in Rome who invented the letter G. His invention would have been quickly adapted in the Roman republic because the letter C was, at the time, confusingly used both for the /k/ and /g/ sounds. Ruga was also the first man in recorded history to open a private elementary school, and allegedly the first to divorce his wife. A freedman is a former slave who has been manumitted or emancipated. ... G is the seventh letter in the Roman alphabet. ... See also Roman Republic (18th century) and Roman Republic (19th century) The Roman Republic (Latin: Res Publica Romanorum) was the representative government of Rome and its territories from 510 BC until the establishment of the Roman Empire, sometimes placed at 44 BC (the year of Caesars appointment as perpetual... C is the third letter of the Roman alphabet. ... Primary or elementary education is the first years of formal, structured education that occurs during childhood. ... Divorce or dissolution of marriage is the ending of a marriage, which can be contrasted with an annulment which is a declaration that a marriage is void, though the effects of marriage may be recognized in such unions, such as spousal support, child custody and distribution of property. ...

Plutarch is our only source for the first and second inventions. Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Aulus Gellius both attest to the story of the divorce. According to Dionysius' account, Mestrius Plutarch (c. ... Dionysius Halicarnassensis (of Halicarnassus), Greek historian and teacher of rhetoric, flourished during the reign of Augustus. ... Aulus Gellius (c. ...

Spurius Carvilius, a man of distinction, was the first to divorce his wife ... yet because of his action, though it was based on necessity, he was ever afterwards hated by the people.

However, their date of 230 BCE for Ruga's divorce is somewhat absurd, because the Twelve Tables written in 450 BCE include a provision for divorce. There is no consensus as to how many of Ruga's alleged inventions should be attributed to him, but no other ancient text claims other inventors. The Law of the Twelve Tables (Lex Duodecim Tabularum, more informally simply Duodecim Tabulae) were the ancient legislation that stood at the foundation of Roman law. ...

Ruga's creation of the letter G is noted in the Unicode standard for ASCII punctuation, U0000. In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. ...

Sources

• Quaestiones Romanae questions 54 and 59.
• Earliest Roman Divorces: Divergent Memories or Hidden Agendas? by Gary Martin