Latin prosody (from Middle French prosodie, from Latin prosōdia, from Ancient Greek προσῳδία prosōidía, 'song sung to music', 'pronunciation of syllable') is the study of Latin poetry and its laws of meter.B. H. Kennedy and James Mountford, The Revised Latin Primer, Longman (1962), page 201 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.See Goldberg for details. 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.R. H. Martin, Terence: Adelphoe, Cambridge University Press (1976), page 1 The principles of scansion observed by Plautus and Terence (i.e. the rules for identifying short and long syllables, the basis of Greek and Latin meter) are mostly the same as for classical Latin verse.Two significant differences are that word-final s may not be counted as making a long syllable, and mute-plus-liquid combinations never make a syllable long. R. H. Martin, Terence: Adelphoe, Cambridge University Press (1976), page 32 Livius also translated Homer's Odyssey into a rugged native meter known as Saturnian, but it was his near contemporary, Ennius (239–169 BC), 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.P. G. McBrown, 'The First Roman Literature' in The Oxford History of the Classical World, J.Boardman, J.Griffin and O.Murray (eds), Oxford University Press (1995) page 450-52
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.Robin Nisbet, 'The Poets of the Late Republic' in The Oxford History of the Classical World, J.Boardman, J.Griffin and O.Murray (eds), Oxford University Press (1995) page 487-90 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 (a dialogue meter borrowed from Old Comedy).Peter Green, The Poems of Catullus, University of California Press (2005), pages 32-7 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."Princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italum," Odes 3.30.13; for his engagement with Catullus see Putnam (2006). 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 (in which he adopted the metrical form of the epode or "iambic distich"). 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".Richard F. Thomas, Virgil: Georgics Vol. I, Cambridge University Press (1988), page 28
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 (also called heavy and light 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 (in Saturnian meter) and in some medieval verse,For the contrast between stress-based and quantitative verse, and for developments after the classical period, see especially Gasparov. For Saturnians, Halporn et al. say "most Saturnians make some kind of sense if we assume that the natural word accent alone carries the rhythm" (p. 60-61). See also Parsons, Freeman, Cole, Mahoney. but otherwise the rhythm of Latin verse appears ambivalent and complex. (Ancient Greek was characterized by pitch, which rose and fell independently of the mora-timed rhythm.) Latin readers probably gave words their natural stress, so that the quantitative metrical pattern acted as an undercurrent to the stresses of natural speech.L.P. Wilkinson, Golden Latin Artistry, Cambridge (1963), page 94 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 (as in "sídere térram" above).William Sidney Allen, Vox Latina: a Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin, 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press (2003) , pages 83-88 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.R. D. Williams, The Aeneid of Virgil, Books I-VI, MacMillan (1972), Introduction page xxvii; W. F. Jackson Knight, Accentual Symmetry in Virgil, Basil Blackwell (1950)
Prosody
Quantity Generally a syllable in Latin verse is long when it has a long vowel or a diphthong (scrī-bae) or it ends in two consonants or a compound consonant (dant, dux) it ends in a consonant and is followed by a syllable that begins with a consonant (mul-tos; dat sonitum) 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 (p, b, t, d, c, g) followed in the same word by a liquid (r, l) 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 (ag-rum, pat-ris) or short (a-grum, pa-tris), 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. (Note that Zacynthus cannot be mentioned in hexameter verse without licence.)
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? ("do you see this woman?"), which is scanned u u –.Article "Brevis Brevians", Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd edition. 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 , Lucretius 4.1035, scanned – u u – u u – –.Bailey, C. (1947) Titi Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex, vol. 1. pp. 123-126.
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" (Amores 1.30). 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 (William W. Goodwin, Greek Grammar, MacMillan Education (1894), page 348). 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 (u) respectively. The main feet in Latin are: Iamb: 1 short + 1 long syllable (cărō) Trochee: 1 long + 1 short (mēnsă) Dactyl: 1 long + 2 shorts (lītŏră) Anapaest: 2 shorts + 1 long (pătŭlaē) Spondee: 2 longs (fātō) Tribrach: 3 shorts (tĕmĕrĕ) 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