Latin rhythmic hexameter
The Latin rhythmic hexameter or accentual hexameter is a kind of Latin dactylic hexameter which arose in the Middle Ages alongside the metrical kind. The rhythmic hexameter did not scan correctly according to the rules of classical prosody; instead it imitated the approximate sound of a typical metrical hexameter by having roughly the same number of syllables and putting word accents in approximately the same places in the line.
The rhythmic hexameter flourished between the 3rd and 9th century A.D. The earliest examples come from what is now Tunisia in north Africa. One poet to use it for literary compositions was Commodian, who is thought to have lived in North Africa in the 3rd century A.D. Other examples come from Portugal, Spain, Lombardy in northern Italy, and southern France. Several examples are found on tombstones, but there is also an anonymous Christian work of the 6th or 7th century called Exhortatio poenitendi, and a book of riddles of the 8th century.
Over the centuries the style of the rhythmic hexameter underwent various changes; for example, in some early versions it had six stresses in each line, whereas later it had five. It has been suggested by one scholar that in its later form, with its five stresses with a caesura between the second and third, it eventually developed in France into the early form of iambic pentameter.
Metre versus rhythm
One of the first scholars to make the distinction between rhythmic and metrical poetry was the English monk Bede in his book On Metre. Basing his definition of rhythm on an earlier one by Marius Victorinus, he defines rhythm as "the composition of words modulated not by metrical quantity but by the number of syllables according to the judgement of the ears".It seems that not all rhythmic poems were made with equal skill. Bede observes that common people make rhythmic poems "in a rustic way", but learned people "in a learned way". He cites as a good example of a rhythmic poem imitating the iambic metre the hymn O rex aeterne, Domine, and of the trochaic the hymn Apparebit repentina dies magna Domini.
With iambic and trochaic metres, the word accents in the rhythmic style tend to follow the ictus of the metre. However, with a dactylic hexameter, except in the last two feet, where metre and accent coincide, this is not the case, and the accent does not usually coincide with the beginning of a foot. A rhythmic hexameter, therefore, generally has the last two accents fixed, but the earlier ones variable, the first accent occurring sometimes on the 1st, sometimes on the 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th syllable.
Accent in the metrical hexameter
A typical metrical hexameter is made up of six feet, each of which can be either a dactyl or a spondee, the last two feet almost always being dactyl + spondee . Thus the general scheme or pattern is:– u u | – u u | – u u | – u u | – u u | – x
There is a usually a break, called a caesura, in the middle of the 3rd foot. Thus a typical line might be:
– u u | – –|– –|– –| – u u| – –
at pater Aeneas, / audito nomine Turni
Sometimes, instead of a third-foot caesura, there is a break in the 2nd and 4th foot, but this is much less common:
– u u|– u u | – –|– – |– u u |– –
inde toro / pater Aeneas / sic orsus ab alto
From an accentual point of view, usually there are two stresses in the first part of the line, and three in the second. In some lines, however, there are three stresses in the first half:
– u u|– u u|– –|– –| – u u |– –
árma virúmque cáno, / Tróiae qui prímus ab óris
– – |– u u| – u u|– u u|– u u|– –
spárgens úmida mélla / sopóriferúmque papáver
The number of syllables in each half varies. In the first half it is from 5 to 8; in the second half from 8 to 10. In the last two feet, it seems that poets sought in most lines to make the word accent coincide with the verse rhythm, and so usually the last word in the line has either two or three syllables, which ensures this coincidence. Only very rarely does a verse end in a monosyllable, and it is usually for special effect.
A poet writing a rhythmic hexameter, therefore, would follow the same rules. For example, in Commodian's poetry, the second half of each line has 8 to 10 syllables, and as in Virgil, the last word has either two or three syllables. The first half of the line usually has six syllables, but occasionally 5 or 7.
Dag Norberg writes: "The study of quite complicated rhythmic verse forms, which we have dealt with so far, has taught us that these forms were created in the following way: the poet read the quantitative models while noticing, not the quantity or the ictus, but the prose accent and the distribution of the different types of words; and in the new poetry he tried to render these accents and this structure in a more or less exact way without caring about the quantity or the ictus."
In his study of the historical development of rhythmic poems, J. J. Schlicher writes: "Rhythmical poetry was based upon the natural judgement of the ear rather being based than upon rules."
Urbanilla
Perhaps the earliest example of rhythmic hexameter comes from what is now Tunisia. From a tomb near Gafsa 200 miles south of Carthage comes the following inscription. It has been dated to the early 3rd century A.D. and so is probably earlier than Commodian's poems. The style is different from Commodian's 2 + 3 stresses per line; instead, like Venantia's and Oppilanus's epitaphs from Spain there seem to be three stressed words in each half line. It is possible that some lines are meant to be divided into three as in some lines in Oppilanus's epitaph:Burger compares some of the lines to lines of Virgil which have similar accentuation:
The omission of final -m in sorte, fatu reflects contemporary pronunciation, according to Friedrich Hanssen, who made a study of the prosodic features of Commodian's poetry. The word sociam must be scanned as two syllables, and consilio as three to get the correct rhythm in the last two feet; similarly negotiorum has four syllables. This feature, called synaeresis, is also frequently found in Commodian's verse. Norberg counted more than 90 examples of synaeresis in Augustine's Psalmus where, because there are exactly 8 syllables in each half line, synaeresis is easy to spot.
Like the poems in Commodian's Instructiones, this epitaph has an acrostic in the initial letters of the lines, in this case spelling out the name "Urbanilla". In the last three lines, with luce, Lucius, luci, the author plays on his own name.
Burger suggests that in some, but not all, of the verses there is an assonance or rhyme between the two halves of the verse: vivendi/tali, servare/iuvare, misera/clusa. This feature is sometimes seen in other examples of rhythmic hexameter verse.
Commodian
Apart from such inscriptions, the earliest surviving hexameter poetry in the rhythmic style is believed to be that of Commodian, whom one of the manuscripts of his Carmen Apologeticum describes as Episcopus Africanus "African Bishop". His date is probably 3rd century, although some have argued for the 4th or 5th century. There are indications in his poetry that he may indeed have lived in North Africa, although it is possible that he originally came from Gaza, since the last poem in his book Instructiones, quoted below, in which the name "Commodianus" is hidden in a reverse acrostic, is entitled Nomen Gasei or Nomen Gazaei.The lack of attention to the length or shortness of vowels in the Urbanilla epitaph and in Commodian's poetry may in fact be a North African feature, since St Augustine tells us, in the 4th book of his On Christian Doctrine, published in 426, that the people of the region made no distinction between long and short vowels, pronouncing ōs "mouth" and os "bone" identically. Augustine in his book on Music imagines a dialogue between a pupil and teacher in which the pupil admits that he can hear the difference between long and short syllables but adds "the trouble is, that without being taught I have no idea which syllables are supposed to be long and which short". The grammarian Consentius agreed that it was a characteristic of African pronunciation to say pīper and ŏrātor instead of piper and ōrātor. But it seems that in other parts of the Roman world, distinctions of vowel length continued to be observed until at least the 5th century.
Commodian wrote two books of rhythmic hexameter poetry, one called Instructiones, consisting of 80 short poems, and the other the 1055-line Carmen Apologeticum Contra Paganos or Carmen de Duobus Populis. The following is an example from Instructiones:
Like the Urbanilla epitaph, Commodian's hexameters do not scan metrically, but accentually. In the first halves of the lines, as Thurneysen shows, the accentual patterns closely match line openings found in Virgil. For example:
- íncolae caelórum :
- tenénte princípium, simplícitas bónitas, cum súis corpóribus :
- irásci nolíte, hoc plácuit Chrísto, sex mílibus ánnis :
- recipiétis énim :
The second halves of Commodian's lines also have accentual patterns which imitate those of Virgil, but with some exceptions.
Another example from Instructiones is:
In this example, the words lege and caeli must be pronounced with two short vowels each, but deos is pronounced with a long first syllable. The words nolite inquit are pronounced as five syllables without elision, and in indignatio mea, the ending -tio is pronounced as one syllable by synezesis.
In most lines of Commodian, as in the above, there are five accents. The 4th and 5th accent are generally fixed but the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd are variable in position, just as in Virgil's hexameters. However, in the great majority of lines the pre-caesura accent comes on the 5th syllable. Between the 2nd and 3rd accent there is always a caesura, and there is also often a word-break at the end of the 4th foot.
However, although Commodian's verse seems to have been mainly accentual, yet it was also partly metrical. For although he could write fratri devoto at the end of a verse, ignoring the length of the unaccented syllables, yet the stressed syllables in the last two feet were usually metrically long. He only rarely finishes a verse with a word like iter or bibant which in classical Latin has a short accented syllable.
Because of this, Dag Norberg, a specialist in medieval versification, wrote: "We also do not agree with those who consider Commodian to be representative of the new rhythmic poetry. The many traces of quantity that we find in his verses indicate that he intended to write in ordinary hexameters but that he failed in his undertaking. If we are right on this point, then Commodian no longer represents a new system but rather the absence of system and the presence of barbarousness." However, Commodian's works are accepted as rhythmic hexameters by other scholars such as Thurneysen, Burger, and Baldwin and in fact the construction of his verses is very close to that of the Exhortatio Poenitendi, which Norberg accepted as rhythmic.
The lines in the first example above all have a rhyme in -o, but most of Commodian's poems have no rhyme. All the poems in Instructiones have an acrostic in their first letters. This one has a reverse acrostic, reading COMMODIANVS MENDICVS CHRISTI.
Commodian was evidently a well-read man: in his writings there are possible echoes of no fewer than 56 pagan authors, especially Virgil, and it is generally thought that he wrote in accentual hexameters not from lack of skill but because he wished to communicate his message more effectively to his relatively less well educated audience. After Commodian, there were only a few writers who used the rhythmic hexameter for literary compositions, and many of the examples are from epitaphs.
One advantage which rhythmic hexameters gave Commodian, as R. Browning pointed out, is that it enabled him to include various words such as diabolus, occisio, nativitas, spiritalis, suscitare, archisynagoga, concupiscentia, saeculum which would be difficult to fit into conventional metre.