Plautus, Menaechmi

In this edition by Gratwick I found a more detailed critique of podic analysis similar to the one in the Barsby edition of the Eunuchus. In a section entitled “How to read Plautus rhythmically” it goes a step further than the Barsby edition by recommending that students should read the play by placing an emphasis on the second, sixth and tenth positions, i.e. the first syllable of the cretic in the anceps + cretic measure that is the basis of the iambic line. And although “the emphasis will mostly go with a real or arguable Latin accent” in the line, that is “neither necessary nor to the point”. The point is readers will at least be aware that those positions are different from the other long positions in that they mark a new measure.

But still Gratwick hasn’t solved the problem of the unpredictable rhythm of the iambic line in Plautus given that the shorts in the _v_ “cretic” element are often long, rendering i.e. ___. To Gratwick, there’s only one alternative: “the beats must lack the very characteristic of steady regularity by which they render English verse rhythmical…unless we are really declaring that quantity simply does not matter in the ancipitia.” Although he proves exhaustively that there is a qualitative difference between various ancipitia in the line depending on their position in relation to the anceps + cretic measure, he is still too attached to podic analysis to consider the possibility that the difference is not just in how frequently they are either long or short, but in whether quantity itself functions differently in those positions. If it’s true that in those positions, as I’ve suggested above, a single syllable (whether long or short) is always pronounced short, then the beats in the line will not lack steady regularity, just like the iambic line found in Greek comedy.

To prove that, it would be helpful to know if the frequency of single syllables in the third and seventh positions (where the shorts in the first two cretics found in the Greek line lie) is the same as the frequency of shorts in those positions in the Greek line. The book includes statistical analyses of the distribution of longs and shorts throughout the line in various authors using a twelve-place iambic line. But unfortunately, there are no statistics that distinguish between a long consisting of a single syllable and a long made up of two shorts. So the statistical method itself prevents detection of the pattern I’m looking for.

But in this book I finally found the answer to the question I asked about Alcaeus. In a footnote, Gratwick writes that podic analysis and also the names of the meters as we now know them, e.g. iambic trimeter for a line clearly based on cretics, not iambics, was “already standard in Roman class-rooms c. 50 B.C., borrowed from the Hellenistic Greek source which lies behind Hephaestion (second century A.D.) and thence Byzantine school-books.” So the truth is that the names associated with meter in ancient poetry are based on academic theories of meter that were invented after the poetry itself was written, and so might be misleading.

Terence, Eunuchus and Menander, Dyskolos

I found an excellent Cambridge edition of the Eunuchus at the National Library here edited by Barsby. I had never read much Roman comedy, considering it sort of a contradiction in terms, and was surprised at how funny and well structured I found the play. It was also the first time I made a sustained effort to understand the Latin comic meters. And again, looking at the most frequently used meter, the iambic senarius, it seems to be so irregular as to defy any kind of rhythmic sense:

x-x-x-x-x-v-

There are five anceps positions, almost half, in a line traditionally split into six iambic feet. But in a concluding section of the appendix on meter entitled “The limitations of podic analysis”, Barsby hints at the approach I took to Alcaeus in a previous entry. Podic analysis “disguises the fact that the various [iambic] feet of the line are not identical” he admits. In fact, the senarius is based on the Greek iambic trimeter, which “consists not of six feet but of three ‘measures’ of the shape x – v -, i.e. anceps (x) plus cretic (- v -).” Barsby does not question why this Greek meter apparently based on a cretic is called iambic as I have here before, but instead goes on to point out that this meter is still reflected in the senarius. The second, fourth and sixth positions are statistically more often short syllables than the other anceps in the line, meaning a statistically significant number of ‘measures’ in the senarius conform to the anceps plus cretic ‘measures’ of the Greek iambic trimeter.

As I read the play, I discovered something even more useful. Not only are those anceps in the even positions more often short, they seem to be more often a single syllable — long or short.  In fact, I found it incredibly easy and natural to begin reading the entire play in a rhythm of anceps plus cretic (-v-). The only difference was that the short in these cretics could be a long syllable pronounced short, but not two shorts. Now there are already many circumstances under which a long can be pronounced short in Latin poetry. The interplay between accent and ictus, for example, results in iambic shortening. So maybe these longs were pronounced short as well.

But some of those even positions did contain two shorts instead of either a short or a single long syllable, i.e. x_vv_. I started to note them down after I had begun to read the lines as anceps plus cretic, starting at around line 400. Here is a list of what I found:

413 pollicitium, utilitatem
421 elephantis
560,1 tibi
578 mihi, ad e(am)
579 interiore
589 per impluvium
601 it ego
643 ubi
645 scelus
673 ita
697 ita
702-3 satis
716 modo
724 modo
732 sine
739 sine
749 tibi, neque
758 ita
766 modo
792 tibi
793 mihi
799 maledicas
883 tibi
919, 947, 956 equidem
1007 tibi
1015 ubi
1027 minus
1030 ego
1076 suppeditari
1077 magis
1081 ego
1087 comedendum, mihi
total: 40

Only 40 instances in over 600 lines. But it still confused me why a small number of the even positions would be double shorts if they were being pronounced as short. So I decided to turn to an example of the original Greek model of the iambic trimeter, the Dyskolos of Menander. Unfortunately, the play is sloppily written and rarely funny, but here I found what I think is the answer. The iambic trimeter in Menander is not purely a series of anceps plus cretics. In fact the comic iambic trimeter allows for a phenomenon called substitution: in the even positions sometimes the short in the cretic can be substituted with two shorts, i.e. x-vv-. My idea is that these double shorts may have sounded something like grace notes, meaning they were pronounced twice as fast as a short so it took the same amount of time to say the two substituted shorts as it would to say one normal short. That way, the rhythm wasn’t lost.

Returning to the Eunuchus, I noticed that in my list of double shorts in that play there was a tendency for the two shorts to appear in short, two-syllable words such as tibi, mihi, ego, sine, modo, etc., that is to say in words that are easy to say quickly. It seems possible that these double shorts are reflecting the phenomenon of substitution in the Greek comic iambic trimeter, that of grace notes, and they seem to occur about as often in the text. Without trying to prove any of this as irrefutably true, here’s one thing I can guarantee: if you read the Latin senarius just as you would the Greek iambic trimeter, as a series of anceps plus cretics sprinkled with a number of substitutions pronounced as grace notes, it reads very smoothly and with a rhythmical sense otherwise utterly lacking.

Alcaeus

The edition I read of this poet was an old East German book I found in the library here in Berlin that had no commentary, no translation, and almost no apparatus criticus. One result of that was I had to figure out all the meters by deduction, by just scanning the lines and finding the pattern. Meter in ancient poetry, especially Greek poetry, always intrigued me because it played such a big role but could be amazingly complicated. Besides meters like the dactylic hexameter that have a definite and regular rhythm, most Ancient Greek meters seem to be irregular and almost impossible to keep track of. Even a simple meter like the iambic trimeter can admit so many varieties due to anceps (either short or long) positions that it seems to defy any kind of rhythmical sense. So how did the Greeks themselves make sense of the meters? How did audience members enjoy the meters they heard performed without laboriously scanning each line like we have to?

To take a look at the iambic trimeter to begin with, it can be written as:

x_v_x_v_x_v_

x is an anceps, v is a short, _ is a long. Now an iamb is defined as v_. But it’s immediately clear to me looking at the sample line above that v_ is not the rhythmic unit repeated across the line. The unit repeated is _v_. Anyone listening to poetry in iambic trimeter would probably keep track of that recurrent motif of _v_ not v_, which is fading in and out of the rhythm depending on whether the anceps positions are short or not.

I find that if I imagine the anceps positions as being discreet from the rhythm, somehow separate in my mind from the other shorts and longs I follow across the line, I can keep track of the rhythm. For example, I imagine anceps positions as percussion, say a cymbal hit, while the others are musical notes. In that way, the anceps positions become in my mind what they actually seem to be in the meter: not EITHER short or long, but NEITHER short nor long, not a part of the meter at all. That’s why I’ve made the last positions here long, not anceps as they usually are. Because in reality, they’re not anceps, they were pronounced longer or felt as longer because there was a pause at the end of the line, even if the syllable was short.

Now to extend this to a more complicated rhythm, let’s take a line from Alcaeus:

x_v_x_vv_v_

Again, I just imagined _v_ _vv_v_ as the repeating rhythm, punctuated by anceps moments. If you look at the meter this way it makes a whole lot more sense: now it’s actually two _v_ on either side of one _vv.

Maybe even the music that accompanied this kind of poetry played the same function, distinguishing with a certain note, series of notes, or different quality of sound where an anceps position was in the rhythm. Either way, if I use that system I can read the poetry and actually begin to feel the rhythm.

One question I still have is why, for example, the iambic trimeter is called iambic at all, when the repeating rhythmical motif is a cretic. Trying to discover the origin of the word iambic, I couldn’t find any instances of the word “iamb” in Perseus before Aristotle, but it could just be the right texts aren’t on the site. Still, I can’t ever recall reading in a Greek poem the name of a meter, including iambic. In Latin poetry it’s common, but that was after Hellenistic scholars began to systematize the meters. Could it be that this whole idea of the iambic trimeter being iambic has nothing to with the poetry itself, but only with academic theories of meter that were invented after the fact? Could our reading habits of that and the other meters be the casualties of those theories? Unfortunately, this is where my research abilities reach their limit. I just don’t know how we got these terms and whether the lyric Greek poets themselves and their audiences were aware of them.