Although semiotics is a field that no disciplinary body and began to acquire autonomy until the late nineteenth century by Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, interest in the signs and what they can do is probably as old as the man. This interest was primarily practical. But at a certain point became more general and wanted to become an expert knowledge with pretensions of becoming science. The name to know that doctors invented and used later, among others, logicians and philosophers. However, until now there was a history of semiotic thinking comprehensively reconstruyese how was developed reflection on the signs and significance.

The first part of this work, conceived in three volumes, is devoted to Greco-Roman antiquity. It begins with the Homeric texts and ends with Augustine of Hippo, who first explicitly performs a semiotic general reflection. Throughout this journey, two chapters analyze the findings on language and semiotics Plato and argumentation theory Aristotle; others study the Epicureans sígnica inference, the complexity of meaning in the Stoics and the Roman rhetoric, not to mention the treatment of the signs in divination and medicine.