When was the ellipsis first used?

I ran across an interesting article from The Guardian and wanted to share it with everyone. The story was posted on the The Guardian’s website under the headline “Unfinished story … how the ellipsis arrived in English literature. According to the story, Dr. Anne Toner “believes she has identified the earliest use of the ellipsis in English drama, pinning it down to a 1588 edition of the Roman dramatist Terence’s play, Andria, which had been translated into English by Maurice Kyffin and printed by Thomas East, and in which hyphens, rather than dots, mark incomplete utterances by the play’s characters.”

The article goes on to list what The Guardian considers to be the “six best ellipsis in literature. The six best, according to the Guardian are from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by TS Elliot, “The Great Gatsby” by F Scott Fitzgerald, “Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson, “Letters from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, and a diary entry in which Virginia Woolf images death by a bomb. (The article contains the exact outtakes lauded for their usage of ellipsis.)

Read the full article here.