To discuss Professor Lindsay's doctrine of ‘Breves Breviantes’ would involve writing a long article, for which there is no space in the April number of the Class. Quart. But it would be wrong in me to pass his treatment of Plaut. Bacch. 1106 by without comment. What he calls ‘a sane view of the law of B.B.’ involves the emendation of a number of lines which are in other respects quite above suspicion. In these circumstances would it not be the (...) wiser course to reconsider the supposed ‘sane law’ rather than to attempt to alter the text so as to make it fit a law which is not admitted by some of the most eminent of modern critics ? Emendation is particularly unfortunate in this instance, because the metre is anapaestic, and the suggestion of Professor Lindsay that the word Philoxene may be ‘a gloss to indicate the speaker or a misinterpretation of some marginal indication of a speaker’ is surely ill-considered; for the speaker is Nicobulus, and the speakers of adjacent lines are given correctly, so far as I see, in the MSS. Such a gloss would, then, be meaningless. Professor Lindsay's attempt at emendation of this line is, in fact, striking evidence of the bankruptcy of the ‘sane view‘ of iambic shortening to which he has unfortunately committed himself. (shrink)

That accent as well as quantity plays a certain rô1e in the structure of early Latin dramatic verse is no new doctrine. It has been present in some form or other to the minds of most writers on Plautine and Terentian prosody since the time of Bentley, who in his Schediasma de metris Terentianis laid the foundations of modern research into this somewhat thorny subject. Unfortunately, however, the question has been complicated from the very first by the introduction of a (...) third term into the discussion, viz. the term ictus, with the result that the fundamental issue has been obscured and to some extent side-tracked. Bentley was himself responsible for this result; for it was he who introduced into his text of Terence those ictus-marks which have figured in most texts of Plautus and Terence down to the present day. And his whole theory of Terentian verse was dominated by the postulate that it was delivered on the stage with a stress of the voice falling rhythmically on the ‘rise’ of each foot: e.g. Malúm quod ísti dí deaéque omnés duínt. (shrink)