It is argued that a Greek citation in Fulgentius’ Expositio Virgilianae Continentiae previously thought to be prose is in fact a corrupt hexameter verse.

The sources of the theory of the Estonian hexameter can be traced back to 17th-century Germany, where the long syllables of ancient hexameter were replaced with stressed ones, and short syllables with unstressed ones. Although such understanding is clearly inadequate, to a great extent it still holds ground in contemporary approaches. Hexameter, like any other verse metre, can be treated from two angles. First, as an abstract scheme which is realized in different texts, while the degree of (...) realization can vary. Second, hexameter can be viewed as a prototype and actual texts create a certain space further from or closer to the prototype. In both cases questions arise, first, about the limits of hexameter, and second, whether a given text has features of a random hexameter or reflects theauthor’s conscious intent. (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)

This paper presents a graffito written after firing on a Samian-ware bowl dated to the turn of the first and second centuries c.e., which seems to contain part of a hexameter included in the well-known anthology Carmina XII sapientum, the composition of which has recently been attributed to the Christian author Lactantius.

In an earlier article in Classical Quarterly, S. J. Harrison explored the varying frequency of hexameter-endings of the type discordia taetra, where a noun that ends in short a is followed by its epithet with the same termination. It appears from this that while most pre-Augustan poets allow a fairly high frequency of such verse-endings , some Augustan poets and their imitators show a distinct tendency to avoid them , while some almost exclude them altogether . The hexameters of (...) elegiac poetry might be subject to the same restriction; the following are figures for elegy from Catullus to Martial. (shrink)

I should like to draw attention to a metrical phenomenon observable in the hexameters of Callimachus and propound a ‘law’ which so far as I know has not been remarked on before; the accompanying discussion involves some refinements to our understanding of the metrical effect of proclitics of general importance to Greek metrical studies. In analysing the data I have made use of some standard statistical methods which could in my view be used throughout the whole field of Greek metrical (...) studies with great profit. The analysis also provides some detailed evidence useful for a comparison of Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, Theocritus, and Aratus, and the earlier writers by whom the Hellenistic poets were influenced. (shrink)

IN a discussion of the reading in Lucan i. 231, Richard Bentley dismissed Grotius's suggestion Ariminon: ignes on the correct grounds that, like Virgil, Lucan avoids starting a new sentence or clause at the beginning of the sixth foot of the hexameter, except with a pair of monosyllables or with a word emphasized either by repetition or by a strong contrast.

This essay argues that the Nestor's Cup Inscription is not a joke, but rather a magical spell designed to work as an aphrodisiac. It is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the hexametrical couplet and the second with the opening line. In the first section the author argues that the hexameters comprise a bonafide magical incantation, pointing out that: the two hexameters take the semantic form of a conditional curse well known from oaths and proprietary inscriptions of the (...) archaic period and from the earliest extant magical texts; hexametrical verse was commonly used as early as the classical period-and probably much earlier-in magical incantations; prosaic words in the inscription that do not appear elsewhere in literary hexameters, but are used in the Greek magical tradition, may in fact be terms of a quasi-technical nature that survive from a very old, but poorly documented, tradition of metrical incantations; and the deictic pronoun in the second line of the inscription signals the use of performative language common in magical spells. The second section of the paper turns to the opening line of the inscription, arguing that instead of introducing some sophisticated intertextual joke, this line can be best understood as a label or rubric of the sort frequently used to signify authorship or ownership in archaic inscriptions and other early texts to "seal" a writer's name to his œuvre. In later magical texts such rubrics boast a legendary author of a particular incantation or ritual. The author concludes that this inscription records an erotic spell traditionally spoken over a cup without any recourse to writing, and that its appearance on the cup from Pithecusae resulted from a random and ultimately unsuccessful experiment to transfer and transform an oral incantation into a written one in an age of incipient literacy. (shrink)

It is sufficiently probable that quantitative scansion in Latin, imposed on a language in which accentuation by stress was alone significant originally, not only gave way to the earlier principle in the decline of Latin literature, but scarcely tended to suppress it at any time in common speech and in familiar writing. It is also probable therefore that even in literature dominated by quantity stress-accentuation was not obliterated altogether. In fact the incidences of it, in Vergilian verse at least, seemed (...) so characteristic that in late Antiquity the Vergilian stress-rhythms were apparently copied without any knowledge of the prosody of the hexameter. In modern expositions, the variety of Vergil's rhythms is generally referred, not only to scansion, but also to stress-accentuation: and it has recently been shown that lines in which stress and metrical ictus predominantly coincide are different in quality and expressiveness from lines in which they do not. Since however no general explanation or definition of this difference in quality seemed to have been offered, I lately attempted a simple theory which would account for the different aesthetic values of lines of these two classes, and which would define, if possible, what these different values are. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women Poets and the Origin of the Greek Hexameter W. ROBERT CONNOR A very considerable question has arisen, as to what was the origin of poetry. —Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7.57 i. a road trip with pausanias Tennyson called the dactylic hexameter “the stateliest measure / ever moulded by the lips of man,” but he did not say whose lips first did the moulding. Despite much (...) arguing we do not know for sure where it came from, or who developed it. But some ancient Greeks did, or thought they did. For them, the hexameter came with a personal history, a legendary one to be sure, but no less powerful for that. The legend, moreover, started with a woman poet. The trail that leads to this is a long and devious one, but a good guide presents himself, Pausanias, author of A Greek Guidebook (Hellados Periegesis). Although he is now valued primarily as a quarry cordoned off for topographers and archaeologists, he had a strong interest in poets, especially women ones. These include Sappho, of course, the valiant Telesilla of Argos of whom he tells two stories (2.20.8, and 2.35.2), and Praxilla of Sicyon (3.13.5). In his account of Boeotia he mentions another woman poet of the fifth century before our era, Corinna of Tanagra. She, he says (9.22.3f.), once defeated Pindar in a poetry contest, and was, he thinks, the most beautiful woman of her time, judging by a statue of her he had seen. He also speaks of Myro of Byzantium (9.5.8). Pausanias was confident that she had written epic and elegiac verse. arion 27.2 fall 2019 Pausanias chooses, moreover, to end his work with an enigmatic story about another woman poet, Anyte of Tegea. He had not mentioned her in his lengthy account of her home town in the mountains of Arcadia, but now her story seems to speak to him. It is set at a ruined shrine of Asclepius near the port town of Naupactus. The reason that Anyte had come there was a strange one: She had had, he says, a vision—not a dream, but a real vision—at the end of which she found herself holding a sealed tablet addressed to one Phalysius of Naupactus. He was, it turns out, a prosperous citizen of the town, but was going blind. Anyte made the journey, surely not an easy one, and delivered the tablet. As soon as Phalysius broke its seal, he found he could make out the letters—a wondrous improvement in his vision, which he attributed to the healing god Asclepius. That is why he built the shrine that Pausanias saw many years later. And the content of the message? Give Anyte two thousand gold staters. Phalysius did so. End of story. End of the Guidebook. So, indeed, Pausanias paid attention to women poets, and there were plenty of them to pay attention to. There is good evidence of a vibrant tradition of women’s poetry among the ancient Greeks. Pausanias is not the only writer of his time to note this. In fact, if on his journeys Pausanias had encountered the well-travelled rhetorician Tatian, the two near-contemporaries could have challenged one another to see who could name the largest number of women poets and identify the sculptors of statues honoring them. Tatian might have won, to judge from his Address to the Greeks, ch 33. But then, Tatian had an agenda. As a convert to a “barbarian” cult he wanted to show that his co-religionists had precedents for respecting women’s intellects: “My object in referring to these women is, that you may not regard as something strange what you find among us, and that, comparing the statues which are before your eyes, you may not treat the women with scorn who among us pursue philosophy.” So much for the Christian Tatian. Did Pausanias have an agenda, too? His stories of two women from Delphi, Boio 86 women poets and the origin of the greek hexameter and Phemonoe, help answer that question. ii. boio’s disruptive poetry when pausanias’s work describes Delphi, the plot thickens. In... (shrink)

In Latin Hexameter Verse, his 1903 manual for composers of Latin hexameters which is still useful as a guide to Vergil's metrical and prosodic practices, S. E. Winbolt states that a hexameter ‘must not end with an adjective preceded by a noun with a similar short ending, e.g.…flumina nota’ unless the adjective is emphatic, ‘i.e. strongly distinctive, predicative or antithetical’. Whether or not his distinction between emphatic and non-emphatic adjectives in this position is wholly workable , Winbolt here (...) rightly detects a strong tendency in Vergil and other Latin poets towards avoiding endings of this general kind, which we can conveniently call the ‘Discordia taetra’ type after one of its earliest and best-known instances in the Annales of Ennius . The rarity of this type of line-ending is clear in Vergil; there are only 16 examples, regardless of whether the adjective is emphatic or not, in the 9890 lines of the Aeneid. Such a select and easily-defined phenomenon might prove a yardstick of some interest in the history of the Latin hexameter, for it seems to raise a number of questions to which the answers would be significant and useful. Is this type of ending avoided equally by all poets? Is there an increasing tendency to avoid it as time goes on? Is it associated with any particular genres of hexameter poetry? Do poets tend to use in it the same words or phrases as their predecessors? To discover the answers, this article will look at the ‘Discordia taetra’ phenomenon in Latin hexameter poetry, defining it as the instance where a noun ending in a short vowel is immediately succeeded by an adjective of similar ending and in agreement at the end of the hexameter, and where such a noun is not a substantivised adjective and such an adjective is neither predicative nor a participle. (shrink)

The fragments of a hexameter poem about Dionysus recently discovered in a palimpsest (Sin. Ar. NF 66) reveal some different faces of Dionysus, including an Adonis-figure at the heart of a dispute between two goddesses (Persephone and Aphrodite), and a personified wine-god, Oinos, threatened by the machinations of his enemies in the court of Zeus. These palimpsest texts help to illuminate some of the allusions to the early life of the god that have long puzzled scholars, especially in some (...) of the early Christian apologists and the collection of OrphicHymns. (shrink)

He then proposes two levels of analysis: a "deep-structure" level, which describes the associations of words and ideas before they take metrical form, and a "surface-structure" level, which describes the words as they are employed on any particular occasion. Out of Line combines formulaic and metrical analysis, expanding the study of Homeric meter both in practice, by taking into account larger compositional structures such as entire scenes, and in theory, by using the result to test models of formulaic composition.

This paper examines the distribution of thematic infinitive endings in early Greek epic in the context of the long-standing debate about the transmission and development of Homeric epic diction. There are no aorist infinitives in - in Homer which would scan as -before a consonant or caesura (for example *). It is argued that this artificially ending - should be viewed as an actual analogical innovation of the poetic language, resulting from a proportional analogy to the futures. The total absence (...) of aoristic - in Hesiod is unlikely to be coincidental: the analogical form must have been the product of a specifically East Ionic Kunstsprache, and so could have been simply unknown in some other Ionian school of epic poetry where Hesiod was trained. Finally, the striking avoidance of anapaestic aorist infinitives in - is argued to be explained better under the approach to the Aeolic elements in Homeric diction than under the theory. (shrink)

In poem 64 Catullus, as Fordyce points out in his edition , often has lines enclosed by a noun and its adjective, e.g.: 5 auratam optantes Colchis avertere pellem Very often, but not always, a syntactical unit is enclosed as well as the line. This is perhaps not surprising, considering the prevalence of punctuation at the end of the line in this poem. Nevertheless, an examination of the lines will show that when a noun and adjective1 enclose both line and (...) syntactical unit the fact that they enclose a syntactical unit can be regarded as a determinant of the word order. (shrink)

The fact that the enclosing word order is not common in Latin prose, and is first found to any extent in the neoteric poet Catullus and in Cicero's Aratea, raises the possibility that they may owe this feature of their style to Alexandrian influence. In one way at least, in the inversion of connecting particles, atque, nam, etc., Alexandrian influence on Catullus' word order is generally admitted, e.g.