Latin prosody


Latin prosody is the study of Latin poetry and its laws of meter. The following article provides an overview of those laws as practised by Latin poets in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, with verses by Catullus, Horace, Virgil and Ovid as models. Except for the early Saturnian poetry, which may have been accentual, Latin poets borrowed all their verse forms from the Greeks, despite significant differences between the two languages.

Background

A brief history

The start of Latin literature is usually dated to the first performance of a play by Livius Andronicus in Rome in 240 BC. Livius, a Greek slave, translated Greek New Comedy for Roman audiences. He not only established the genre fabula palliata, but also adapted meters from Greek drama to meet the needs of Latin. He set a precedent followed by all later writers of the genre, notably Plautus and Terence. The principles of scansion observed by Plautus and Terence are mostly the same as for classical Latin verse. Livius also translated Homer's Odyssey into a rugged native meter known as Saturnian, but it was his near contemporary, Ennius, who introduced the traditional meter of Greek epic, the dactylic hexameter, into Latin verse. Ennius employed a poetic diction and style well suited to the Greek model, thus providing a foundation for later poets such as Lucretius and Virgil to build on.
The late republic saw the emergence of Neoteric poets. They were rich young men from the Italian provinces, conscious of metropolitan sophistication. They, and especially Catullus, looked to the scholarly Alexandrian poet Callimachus for inspiration. The Alexandrians' preference for short poems influenced Catullus to experiment with a variety of meters borrowed from Greece, including Aeolian forms such as hendecasyllabic verse, the Sapphic stanza and Greater Asclepiad, as well as iambic verses such as the choliamb and the iambic tetrameter catalectic. Horace, whose career spanned both republic and empire, followed Catullus' lead in employing Greek lyrical forms, though he calls himself the first to bring Aeolic verse to Rome. He identified with, among others, Sappho and Alcaeus of Mytilene, composing Sapphic and Alcaic stanzas, and with Archilochus, composing poetic invectives in the Iambus tradition. He also wrote dactylic hexameters in conversational and epistolary style. Virgil, his contemporary, used dactylic hexameters for both light and serious themes, and his verses are generally regarded as "the supreme metrical system of Latin literature".
Modern scholars have different theories about how Latin prosody was influenced by these adaptations from Greek models.

Two rhythms

In English poetry the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables produces an "accentual rhythm." In Classical Greek meter the alternation of long and short syllables produces a "quantitative rhythm." Classical Latin meter obeyed rules of syllable length, like Greek meter, even though Latin words bore stress.
Modern scholars have differed about how these different influences affect the way Latin verse was sounded out. Accentual rhythm in Latin may have been observed in pre-classical verse and in some medieval verse, but otherwise the rhythm of Latin verse appears ambivalent and complex. Latin readers probably gave words their natural stress, so that the quantitative metrical pattern acted as an undercurrent to the stresses of natural speech. Here, for example, is a line in dactylic hexameter from Virgil's Georgics when the words are given their natural stress:
quíd fáciat laétas ségetes, quó sídere térram,
and here is the same verse when the metrical pattern is allowed to determine the stress:
quíd faciát laetás segetés, quo sídere térram.
Possibly the rhythm was held in suspense until stress and meter happened to coincide, as it generally does towards the end of a dactylic hexameter. English-speaking, as opposed to e.g. German-speaking, readers of Latin tend to observe the natural word stress, whose interplay with the quantitative rhythm can be a source of aesthetic effects.

Prosody

Quantity

Generally a syllable in Latin verse is long when
  • it has a long vowel or a diphthong or
  • it ends in two consonants or a compound consonant
  • it ends in a consonant and is followed by a syllable that begins with a consonant or
  • it is the final syllable in a line of verse i.e. brevis in longo, under that hypothesis.
Otherwise syllables are counted as short.
Syllables ending in a vowel are called open syllables, and those ending in a consonant are called closed syllables.
Long syllables are sometimes called heavy and short ones light. Consonants preceding the vowel do not affect quantity.
For the above rules to apply
  • the digraphs ch, th, ph, representing single Greek letters, count as one consonant;
  • h at the beginning of a word is ignored;
  • qu counts as one consonant;
  • x and z each count as two consonants;
  • A plosive followed in the same word by a liquid can count as either one consonant or two. Thus syllables with a short vowel preceding certain such combinations, as in agrum or patris, can be long or short, at the poet's choice. This choice is not permitted, as a rule, in compound words, e.g. abrumpo, whose first syllable must remain long, or for all plosive-liquid combinations.
  • A final short open vowel standing before a plosive followed by a liquid in the following word remains short, save very rarely, as in Virgil's licentious "lappaeque tribolique", where the first -que is scanned as long. A short open final vowel may not stand before other double consonants in the same line, again with rare licentious exceptions such as Ovid's "alta Zacynthus", where the final a remains short.
In the comedies of Plautus and Terence some other exceptions to these rules are found, most notably the phenomenon called brevis brevians, in which an unstressed long syllable can be shortened after a short one, e.g. vidēn hanc?, which is scanned u u –. By another exception found in early poetry, including Lucretius, a final -is or -us with short vowels, coming before a word with initial consonant, can sometimes still count as short, as in italic=no, Lucretius 4.1035, scanned – u u – u u – –.
Vowel length is thus vitally important for scansion. Apart from those given above, there are some rules to determine it, especially in the inflected parts of words. However, rules do not cover all vowels by any means, and, outside the rules, vowel lengths just have to be learnt.

Feet

Verses were divided into "feet" by ancient grammarians and poets, such as Ovid, who called the elegiac couplet "eleven-footed poetry". This practice is followed by traditionalists among modern scholars, especially, perhaps, those who compose Latin verses. In foot-based analysis, the "metrically dominant" part of the foot is sometimes called the "rise" and the other is called the "fall," the Greek terms for which are arsis and thesis. In Greek, these terms were applied to the movement of human feet in dancing and/or marching, Arsis signifying the lifting of a foot, and Thesis its placement. In the Greek scheme Thesis was the dominant part of the meter, but the Romans applied the terms to the voice rather than to the feet, so that Arsis came to signify the lifting of the voice and thus the dominant part of the meter. This caused confusion, as some authors followed the Greek custom and others the Latin; thus these terms are no longer generally used. Sometimes the dominant part of the foot, in either quantitative or stressed verse, is called the ictus.
Long and short syllables are marked and respectively. The main feet in Latin are:
  • Iamb: 1 short + 1 long syllable
  • Trochee: 1 long + 1 short
  • Dactyl: 1 long + 2 shorts
  • Anapaest: 2 shorts + 1 long
  • Spondee: 2 longs
  • Tribrach: 3 shorts
According to the laws of quantity, 1 long = 2 shorts. Thus a Tribrach, Iamb and Trochee all equate to the same durations or morae: each of them comprises 3 morae. Similarly a Dactyl, an Anapaest and a Spondee are quantitatively equal, each being 4 morae. These equivalences allow for easy substitutions of one foot by another e.g. a spondee can be substituted for a dactyl. In certain circumstances, however, unequal substitutions are also permitted.
It is often more convenient to consider iambics, trochaics and anapaests in terms of metra rather than feet; for each of these families, a metron is two feet. Thus the iambic metron is u – u –, the trochaic – u – u and the anapestic u u – u u –.

Cola: a different way to look at it

The division into feet is a tradition that produces arbitrary metrical rules, because it does not follow the actual metrical structure of the verse. In particular, though a long syllable and two short ones have the same number of morae, they are not always interchangeable: some metres permit substitutions where others do not. Thus a more straightforward analysis, favoured by recent scholarship, is by cola, considered to be the actual building blocks of the verse. A colon is a unit of 5 to 10 syllables that can be re-used in various metrical forms.
Standard cola include the hemiepes, the glyconic, and the lekythion.

Elision

A vowel at the end of a word does not count as a syllable if the following word begins with a vowel or h: thus Phyllida amo ante alias reads as Phyllid' am' ant' alias. This is called elision. At the discretion of the poet, however, the vowel can be retained, and is said to be in Hiatus. An example of this, in Virgil's fémineó ululátú the "o" is not elided.
A word ending in vowel + m is similarly elided : thus nec durum in pectore ferrum reads as nec dur' in pectore ferrum.

Caesura

In modern terms, a caesura is a natural break which occurs in the middle of a foot, at the end of a word. This is contrasted with diaeresis, which is a break between two feet. In dactylic hexameter, there must be a caesura in each line, and such caesuras almost always occur in the 3rd or 4th foot.
There are two kinds of caesura:
  • strong, when the caesura occurs after a long syllable;
  • weak, when the caesura occurs after a short syllable.