In several recent studies we have developed precise statistical methodologies which have demonstrated that the cursus mixtus was the dominant rhythmical system for final clausulae in Latin prose from the third century a.d. to the fifth. The cursus mixtus consisted of four standard metrical forms derived from the richer variety of Cicero's Asiatic tradition – cretic-spondee, dicretic, cretic-tribrach and ditrochee –, which were structured according to three accentual patterns – planus, tardus and velox. The latter are differentiated by the (...) number of unstressed syllables intervening between and following two accented syllables. The planus has two unaccented syllables between two word accents and one after the last accent. The tardus has two between two accents and two after the last accent. The velox has four between two accents and one after the last accent. The four metrical forms are contained within the parameters of the accentual cadences. The planus contains either the cretic-spondee or the ditrochee ; the tardus either the dicretic or the cretic-tribrach ; the velox either the ditrochee or the cretic-spondee (nimium videbatur. Authors who used the cursus mixtus, however, preferred to effect an exact coincidence between the accent and ictus, and as a result evinced primarily the following standard rhythmical forms: planus/cretic-spondee; tardus/dicretic or cretic-tribrach; and velox/ditrochee. So far now we have examined only the rhythmical properties of final clausulae, but it is appropriate also to investigate for rhythm at internal positions within the sentence. (shrink)

There has been much discussion in recent years regarding the date and authorship of the poems included in the Appendix Vergiliana, and about the Civis and the Culex in particular. Evidence of very various kinds has been brought to bear on the question. My chief aim in this paper is to propound a criterion which as far as I know is new—though it seems to me a fairly conspicuous thing, and I do not know why it has not been investigated (...) —and to examine certain criteria which seem to me to have been treated quite wrongly—treated in a way which could lead to no conclusion—even by so distinguished a scholar as Norden. I propose in a second paper to examine the argument from diction, especially in regard to the Culex, and to try to show that the evidence adduced for Virgilian authorship by Miss Jackson is not so conclusive as it has been supposed to be; and, next, to point out certain features or mannerisms in the Culex which seem to me to be on the whole against authorship by Virgil. I have hardly any doubt that both the Ciris and the Culex were written before 44 B.C., and the Lydia and Dirae only two or three years later; but, while the evidence for the early date of some of the Vergiliana grows stronger on further examination, the evidence for Virgilian authorship seems to me to grow weaker, even in the case of the well-attested Culex. (shrink)

In each example an adjective is separated from its noun by a verb and an unqualified noun. The separation by the verb may be regarded as conditioned by the metre, but not the further separation by the unqualified noun, as the qualified and unqualified nouns are metrically interchangeable. Horace would appear to prefer the wider separation to the less wide.

Pacuvius is generally regarded as the first Roman playwright who only wrote tragedies; fragments transmitted without an indication of title or context are commonly attributed to tragedies, and ancient references to comedies are discarded as unreliable. The present paper questions this consensus. It first raises several methodological objections (section 1) and then examines two quotations preserved by Fulgentius, demonstrating that these comic fragments are unlikely to be forgeries because they comply with the rules of early Latin metre and (...) the motivic and linguistic conventions of Roman comedy (section 2). Section 3 shows that several fragments which have previously been attributed to tragedies do not fit the contexts to which they have been assigned; they have much closer parallels in New Comedy and are likely to come from comoediae palliatae. The observations in sections 1-3 corroborate each other and have three wider consequences which are discussed in section 4: first, Pacuvius was probably more faithful to his Greek models than is currently thought; secondly, the ‘specialization’ in serious drama started one generation later with Accius and Titius; thirdly, the common practice of organizing the fragments of early Roman poetry according to genre is problematic because many fragments would suit both a tragic and a comic context. (shrink)

Metrisch gebundene Texte sind aus dem altsprachlichen Unterricht nicht wegzudenken: Vergil, Ovid, Horaz, Catull und Martial sind nur einige typische Autoren für die Dichtungslektüre im Lateinunterricht; Homer, Sophokles und Euripides sind typische Beispiele für den Griechischunterricht. Die Curricula schlagen eine Vielzahl poetischer Texte als mögliche Lektüren vor. Allein diese unvollständige Autorenauswahl zeigt schon, dass man allein mit der Behandlung von daktylischem Hexameter und elegischem Distichon nicht besonders weit kommt, will man nicht die Textauswahl nach solchen rein formalen Kriterien unnötig und (...) unzulässig einschränken oder bei allen anderen Metra so tun, als läse man Prosa. Denn ein solches Vorgehen ermöglicht zwar eine Übersetzung, ein wirkliches Verständnis der Texte bleibt den Schülern aber verwehrt, da ihnen die Wirkung des Metrums, der Einschnitte, der Betonung bestimmter Positionen im Vers und nicht zuletzt ästhetische Aspekte verborgen bleiben oder allenfalls indirekt durch den metrischen Vortrag des Lehrers oder eine stilistische Analyse erschlossen werden. -/- Der vorliegende Band widmet sich daher grundlegenden Fragen zum Thema lateinischer und griechischer Prosodie und Metrik im Unterricht unter Einbeziehung der Lehrpläne und einer Befragung von Lehrkräften. Daneben finden sich Praxisbeispiele zu Catull, Ovid, Terenz und Homer, Überlegungen zur Beziehung von Musik und Metrik sowie eine Anregung zum Dichten in lateinischer Sprache. -/- Mit Beiträgen von: Gregor Bitto, John Bulwer, Fabiola Dengler, Boris Dunsch, Magnus Frisch, Hans-Joachim Glücklich, Christoph Kugelmeier, Immanuel Musäus, Jens Pickenhan, Anna Elissa Radke, Wolfgang Schoedel, Katharina Waack-Erdmann und Heike Wolf. (shrink)

I Assume that in Latin there was a stress accent which, in the time of Lucretius, was governed by the well-known ‘law of the penultimate’; also that in Latin poetry, although the metre is determined by the quantity of the syllable, nevertheless the stress accent must not be ignored. In fact, the inter-relation of the ictus of the quantitative metre with the stress accent is a most important factor in determining the rhythm of the verse. It (...) is well known that in the Latin hexameter special importance was attached to the coincidence of ictus and accent in the fifth and sixth feet, so as to secure a characteristic and definite ending to the line. But the coincidence or clash of ictus and accent has its effect in every foot, although to a less extent. Particularly in the fourth foot is it important. There is an obvious difference between a line in which stress accent reinforces the ictus in the fourth, fifth, and sixth feet, and a line in which conflict occurs between ictus and accent in the fourth foot. W. F. J . Knight refers to these lines as homodyned and heterodyned. Each foot of the hexameter could be examined for the effect of homodyne and heterodyne; I am limiting this discussion to the fourth foot. In classifying fourth feet as homodyned or heterodyned, I have described as homodyned a foot in which a stress accent coincides with the ictus; all other feet are heterodyned. It must be realized, however, that there are possible varieties of homodyned fourth feet. They may be spondaic or dactylic; they may be caused by the overlap of the last two syllables of a polysyllabic word, or they may consist of a single word or two words. There is a great difference of metrical effect. Heterodyned lines may again be differentiated between those which contain a stress accent clashing with the ictus, and those in which there is no stress accent at all. (shrink)

IN the heroic Latin hexameter, after the essential alternation of long and short syllables, by far the most important feature is unquestionably the caesura. Nevertheless, ancient writers on metre dismiss it with the most cursory notice; all we get from them is that the chief caesura is the penthemimeral, the trochaic and hephthemimeral coming next; the fourth trochaic and the bucolic are usually rejected, and the trihemimeral is mentioned only by Ausonius, Modern writers, among whom are Müller and (...) Winbolt, deal with the question at greater length, but do not agree even on fundamental points, and often base their statements on an insufficient analysis of the extant remains of Latin hexameter verse. The purpose of the following paper is to attempt a more complete analysis, at least in the case of Virgil, the acknowledged master of the Latin hexameter. But before we proceed further there are two preliminaries which must be settled—what are the main types of caesura, and how many caesurae are admissible in one verse? (shrink)

The relations of philosophy and poetry include but are not exhausted by Plato’s hostility to mimetic poetry in the Republic and Aristotle’s defence of it in the Poetics. For poetry has often carried a philosophical message itself, from the work of Chaucer and Milton to that of T.S. Eliot. In yet earlier generations, poetry was chosen as the medium for conveying a philosophical message by (among Greek philosophers) Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles, and (at Rome) by Lucretius, who struggled both with (...) the Latin language and with the standard metre of didactic poetry, hexameters, to spread what he considered enlightenment and to reach for his Epicureanism an audience that might otherwise have remained unreached. To the extent that poets such as Lucretius succeeded, the philosophical critics of poetry in the tradition of Plato would have to recognise merit in some mimetic poetry. (Thus Lucretius compares clouds of atoms to flocks of sheep, which he graphically depicts.) Yet a defence of poetry other than Aristotelian katharsis would be needed for works such as those of Empedocles and Lucretius. Perhaps Enlightenment can be conveyed equally well in verse as in prose, mimetic components notwithstanding; for some purposes perhaps itcan be conveyed uniquely well. De nihilo nil fit, to quote Lucretius, comprises an example. (shrink)

Until now, the short cult hymns to Liber, Mars and Juno in the Appendix Claudianea have mostly been seen as rhetorical school exercises. Yet a philological-historical analysis shows that they could be remains of occasional poetry from everyday life. The hymns are structured according to the Roman festival calendar and, on the basis of language and content, should probably be dated to the final phase of public non-Christian cult practice in the fourth century. The anonymous poet was familiar with classical (...) Greek and Latin poetry, but reveals weaknesses in Latin prosody and metre. It can therefore be supposed that he should be identified as one of the many Graeco-Egyptian ‘wandering poets’, but probably not as Claudian himself. (shrink)

dicar, qua uiolens obstrepit Aufiduset qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestiumregnauit populorum ex humili potensprinceps Aeolium carmen ad Italos 13deduxisse modos. Surely there is something puzzling about 13–14? What Horace was the first to do was to write Latin poetry using the metrical schemes of the Greek lyricists, principally Alcaeus and Sappho, who wrote in the Aeolic dialect of Lesbos. There can be no reasonable doubt that Aeolium carmen refers in the first instance to Horace's adoption of Aeolic metre. (...) For deduxisse there are two possibilities, and conceivably Horace meant both to operate. The first involves motion, bringing something or someone home or into port. So Horace took Greek metres and moved them in one way or another to Italy. Secondarily deducere might mean ‘to produce ’, a usage found at Sat. 2.1.2-4 similisque meorum mille die uersus deduci posse. (shrink)

Éditeur, commentateur, traducteur d’Érasme et de More, C. Miller s’est particulièrement illustré dans ses travaux sur l’Encomium Moriae et dans sa traduction des poèmes de l’humaniste hollandais. Attentif aux “métamorphoses” de la Moria, il a étudié avec une rigueur extrême les diverses éditions de ce texte fameux, en tenant compte notamment du commentaire de Listrius, pour donner en 1979 une excellente traduction de The Praise of Folly et une non moins excellente édition critique de ce texte. Plus récemment, s’attaquant avec (...) Harry Vredeveld aux poèmes d’Érasme—Vredeveld est l’éditeur des Carmina dans l’édition critique d’Amsterdam—il en fournit la première traduction complète en langue anglaise, sans chercher à opposer aux différents mètres latins les équivalents approximatifs d’ une métrique anglaise: mais c’est une prose poétique, d’une parfaite rigueur, brillante—souvent plus brillante que le modèle latin—, attentive aux nuances subtiles de l’affectivité d’Érasme comme à ses variations d’humeur, passant du grave au mélancolique, ou du dévotieux à l’humoristique selon la couleur du temps, le thème choisi, le destinataire, l’étiage psychique du poeta orator. (shrink)

To Munro's conjecture, which has been accepted by Diels , S. B. Smith , Bailey , Büchner , Martin , and M. F. Smith , there is a serious, possibly a fatal, objection: the genitive plural of hiems is a grammarians' figment and never occurs in classical Latin ; while Lachmann's conjecture is palaeographically improbable. Read ad gelidas rigidasque pruinas; rigidas was omitted by haplography, a fecund source of corruption, and hiemis then supplied from the context to repair the (...) metre. Cf. 2.431 denique iam calidos ignis gelidamque pruinam, 2.521 hinc flammis Mine rigidis infesta pruinis, and, for the collocation of the two adjectives, 2.858 nec frigus neque item calidum tepidumque uaporem. (shrink)

‘pedibus makes no better sense than metre.’ Shackleton Bailey, who suspects an allusion to the exclusus amator theme and accordingly suggests unctis…postibus . But iunctis pedibus is idiomatic Latin for an all-out fight and has an authentic look to it; Ovid, Met. 9. 42–4 illustrates the usage: rursusque ad bella coimus inque gradu stetimus certi non cedere, eratque cum pede pes iunctus. See further Verg. A. 10. 361 haeret pede pes densusque viro vir; Liv. 38. 21. 13 pede (...) collato pugnandum est; Sil. 4. 352–53 teritur iunctis umbonibus umbo, pesque pedem permit; Ov. Am. 1. 4. 44 nec tenerum duro cum pede iunge pedem. However, ‘Stand up to your wife, Cresciturus, and fight’ will not do. That would be a humourless piece of advice and, in any event, Cresciturus appears to be too henpecked to act on it. Since he cannot fight with fair means, he must resort to foul. pēdibus is neither corruption nor false quantity, but a comic coinage: pēs, pēdis, from pēdo , on the analogy of pēs, pĕdis, ‘foot’: Cresciture, si non vis vapulare, coniugi iterum atque iterum oppedas necesse est. Dorsa in the first verse calls attention to the fact that Cresciturus enjoys a strategic position for such a manoeuvre – a position which is the very reverse of iunctis pĕdibus in its normal sense. In short, iunctis…pēdibus is a παρ προσδοκαν for iunctis…pĕdibus. (shrink)

Equimetrical translation of verse, which conveys the metre of the source text, should be distinguished from equiprosodic translation of verse, which conveys theversification system of the source text. Equiprosodic translation of verse can rely on the possibilities of natural language (for instance, when presumably Publius Baebius Italicus created the Ilias Latina, he made use of the quantitative structure in Latin), but it can also employ an artificial system (cf., for example, the quantitative verse in Church Slavonic or English). (...) The Estonian language makes it possible to convey the syllabic (based on the number of syllables), accentual (based on the number and configuration of accents) and quantitative (based on the configuration of durations) versification systems. In practice, combined types are most frequent, for instance, the ones in which both the syllable count and the configuration of accents is relevant; in Estonian, versification systems with theparticipation of all three principles are possible as well. Despite the contrast of quantity in Estonian, the transmission of the quantitative structure of ancient metrics still involves a number of difficulties which result from differences in the prosodic structures. The transmission of purely syllabic versification system has also been problematic: it is hard to perceive such structure as verse in Estonian and therefore it has often been conveyed with the help of different syllabic-accentual or accentual-syllabic verse metres. Although equiprosodic translation is not necessarily equimetrical, in actual translation practice it usually is so. (shrink)

This article links Konstantin Batiushkov's poem Elysium to the tradition of poetic imitations of Janus Secundus's Basium II. A French equivalent for this poem's pythiambic distichs was invented by Ronsard, who used cross-rhymed quatrains with regular alternation of dodecasyllabic and hexasyllablic lines. However, the French translators of Basia of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could not use this metre, because its semantic aura was drastically changed by Malherbe's Consolation à Monsieur du Périer. Batiushkov's Elysium as well as its (...) Latin and French sources are poems about a delightful death and the union of lovers in the afterlife; yet the metre, which was used in Malherbe's poem, was for more than two centuries a metre of mournful elegiac stanzas about eternal separation. The question of a metrical prototype for Batiushkov's poem still remains undetermined. His "anacreontic" trochaic tetrameter does not have analogues in the Latin original or its French translations, but coincides with the metre of G. A. Bürger's Die Umarmung from 1776, and finds parallels in some eighteenth-century Russian imitations of Basium II which were most likely forgotten by the beginning of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

This article links Konstantin Batiushkov’s poem Elysium (1810) to the tradition of poetic imitations of Janus Secundus’s Basium II. A French equivalent for this poem’s pythiambic distichs was invented by Ronsard (Chanson, 1578), who used cross-rhymed quatrains with regular alternation of dodecasyllabic and hexasyllablic lines. However, the French translators of Basia of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could not use this metre, because its semantic aura was drastically changed by Malherbe’s Consolation a Monsieur du Perier (1598). Batiushkov’s Elysium (...) as well as its Latin and French sources are poems about a delightful death and the union of lovers in the afterlife; yet the metre, which was used in Malherbe’s poem, was for more than two centuries a metre of mournful elegiac stanzas about eternal separation. The question of a metrical prototype for Batiushkov’s poem still remains undetermined. His “anacreontic” trochaic tetrameter does not have analogues in the Latin original or its French translations, but coincides with the metre of G. A. Burger’s Die Umarmung from 1776 (of which Batiushkov was hardly aware in 1810), and finds parallels in some eighteenth-century Russian imitations of Basium II which were most likely forgotten by the beginning of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

That the hiatus in 33 is inadmissible in an Augustan poet has long been recognised by the critical. Of the three other examples, Prop. II xv. 1 ‘o me felicem! o nox mihi Candida et o tu,’ ib. xxxii. 45 ‘haec eadem ante illam inpune et Lesbia fecit,’ and Manil. I 795 ‘emeritus caelum et Clausi magna propago,’ only the first can claim any excuse, on the ground of the speaker's excitement and the pause after felicem, but, metre apart, (...) even there ‘nox, o’ seems a better order. But the corruption has had perforce to be retained in our texts through lack of a reasonable correction. The line is perfectly sound Latin as it stands and, though not poetry, is sense. (shrink)

The metre of Olympian II is still a matter of some difficulty. It has commonly been recognized as differing from Pindar's other metres, but many opinions have been held of its character. An understanding of it is, however, not merely essential to any general theory of Pindar's metric but vital to the textual criticism of the poem. Without some coherent theory we cannot say where ‘Responsionsfreiheiten’ are allowed and some important cruces remain unsolved. In recent years three theories have (...) been put forward. In his Res Metrica pp. 153–5 W. R. Hardie put forward the view that it is an example of a μτρον μονοεδές composed in Cretic verse. He holds that it is written in Cretics or their recognized metrical equivalent, Paeons. This kind of verse is known from the Delphic Paean to Apollo and the Paean of Limenius, and so far as the equivalence of Cretics and Paeons is concerned, there is no difficulty in it. But as Hardie himself admitted, his theory does not account for all the facts. It may be said to suffer from the following defects. n In Str. 1, 3, 5, 7 and Ep. 1, 4, 5 he has to assume the existence of an extra single syllable at the beginning of the line. Since all attempts to defend ‘Anacrusis’ are extremely doubtful, this can hardly be maintained here. 2. The clausula of the Strophe cannot be reduced to Cretics or Paeons. 3. He has to admit that in Ep. 2 and 3 there is ‘some Trochaic movement’ and presumably he would have to admit that in Str. 3 there is either an Iambic, or, as he would prefer, a Trochaic movement with Anacrusis in το πσα μεν. There is certainly some truth in Hardie's theory, but since it does not consider all the facts or co-ordinate them into a whole, it is not really satisfactory. (shrink)

The metre of Olympian II is still a matter of some difficulty. It has commonly been recognized as differing from Pindar's other metres, but many opinions have been held of its character. An understanding of it is, however, not merely essential to any general theory of Pindar's metric but vital to the textual criticism of the poem. Without some coherent theory we cannot say where ‘Responsionsfreiheiten’ are allowed and some important cruces remain unsolved. In recent years three theories have (...) been put forward. In his Res Metrica pp. 153–5 W. R. Hardie put forward the view that it is an example of a μέτρον μονοεɩδές composed in Cretic verse. He holds that it is written in Cretics or their recognized metrical equivalent, Paeons. This kind of verse is known from the Delphic Paean to Apollo and the Paean of Limenius, and so far as the equivalence of Cretics and Paeons is concerned, there is no difficulty in it. But as Hardie himself admitted, his theory does not account for all the facts. It may be said to suffer from the following defects. n In Str. 1, 3, 5, 7 and Ep. 1, 4, 5 he has to assume the existence of an extra single syllable at the beginning of the line. Since all attempts to defend ‘Anacrusis’ are extremely doubtful, this can hardly be maintained here. 2. The clausula of the Strophe cannot be reduced to Cretics or Paeons. 3. He has to admit that in Ep. 2 and 3 there is ‘some Trochaic movement’ and presumably he would have to admit that in Str. 3 there is either an Iambic, or, as he would prefer, a Trochaic movement with Anacrusis in ἤτοɩ πɩσα μεν. There is certainly some truth in Hardie's theory, but since it does not consider all the facts or co-ordinate them into a whole, it is not really satisfactory. (shrink)

Metre and meaning intertwine in manifold ways. The aim of this paper is to discuss the interplay between the metric and semantic structures in poetry in the light of the work of a Finnish poet, Ilpo Tiihonen. Throughout his career, which started in the 1970s, he has been one of the few Finnish contemporary poets to make constant use of metric structures and rhyme. The article also aims to shed some light on questions that arise when metrical poetry is (...) translated from one language into another, in this case from Finnish into English. (shrink)

The poetical corpus of 11th-c. Christopher Mitylenaios, such as it is found in manuscript No. Z α XXIX (13th c.) of the Biblioteca della Badia Greca in Grottaferrata, consists of 145 poems and 2856 verses. Of these carmina 123 are written in jambic trimeters, 18 in dactylic hexameters, three in elegiac distichs, and one in an Anacreontic metre. In the first part of the article outer metric is discussed; among other things one learns that the Anacreontic poem 75 forms (...) metrically a case of its own as it consists of eight strophes of four verses each, whereby the even strophes are followed by two so-called koukoullia, that the dactylic hexameters use 28 out of 32 possible schemes, thus contrasting with the Callimachean and Nonnian types, and that in the dodecasyllables the so-called Binnenschluss after the 5th foot is overwhelmingly present while in no less than 16 hexameters the poet uses a caesura after the 3rd foot. In the second part (inner metric) the numerous transgressions of metrical laws are investigated, as well as verse end and accentuation, and prosody; this last item concerns long and short vowels, diphthongs and dichrona, correptio Attica and hiatus. The text ends with a twofold appendix about caesurae. (shrink)