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THE ORIGINS OF ROMAN DRAMA
declaimed without musical accompaniment, were the normal medium for
speeches, dialogue, and debates. Trochaic tetrameters catalectic 1
T^KVOV, )(°!lp'' f) yop &PX^1 To ^ ^6yOU TTp^TTOUcA |JLO1
longer lines using the same diction and articulation as iambic trimeters, 2 were
'chanted' in some way to a musical ground, and indicated a rise in the emotional
temperature. Lastly there was polymetric song, of two kinds. Choral odes were
normally strophic in construction, i.e. written in pairs of' stanzas' (strophe and
antistrophe, 'turn* and 're-turn') which corresponded to the choreography of
the dance. One also finds passages of polymetric lyric without strophic construction,
a style used for highly emotional monodies, duets, and exchanges
between a character and the chorus.
New Comedy was very different. The chorus no longer participated in the
action, and there was virtually no lyric song. Only iambic trimeters, freer in
structure than those of tragedy, and 'recitative' in trochaic and also iambic
tetrameters catalectic, accompanied by the musician, were used. The rhythms
and diction of tragedy and comedy were distinct, formal and elevated in
tragedy, freer and more prosaic in comedy. In both, especially in comedy,
spoken iambic trimeters were the norm.
The earliest Roman dramatists composed both light and serious plays, and
they developed a dramatic form and medium for both which in some ways was
a compromise between the two Greek styles, and in others was new. In comedy
they dropped the chorus altogether; as its only function in New Comedy had
been to ma^k the entr'actes, a consequence of this was to obscure the main
aesthetic articulations, the 'acts', normally five. More than two-thirds of
Plautus is divided between the equivalent of iambic trimeters (referred to in
Latin as senarii 'sixers') and the equivalent of trochaic tetrameters catalectic
(trochaic septenarii 'seveners'). The rest consists of iambic tetrameters and
anapaests (if they are anapaests) written by the line, and lyric songs for up to
four parts, which may be polymetric, or written by the line in cretic (— »-> —) or
bacchiac (y ) tetrameters, or in a mixture. The analysis of these songs is
still far from fully understood. 3 Everything except senarii was musically accompanied
by the tibicen. This style of presentation involved three basic modes
(like Greek Tragedy), which we may denote as S (= speech, the senarii),
1
'Cut short by one place.'
2
Trochaic tetrameters catalectic may be analysed as iambic trimeters with a cretic element — yj —
(bridged or unbridged) at the head: (Socrates) beatus ille qulprocul negotils..., cf. Marius Victorinus
in GLK vi 131.17, Fraenkel (1928) 91. Whether or not it is historically justified, this analysis
has the advantages that it works, and that it enables one to use the same terms to describe both
metres.
3
Leo (1897a), Lindsay (1922) 274—316, Drexler (1967) 67—78, MacCary and Willcock (1976)
219-31.
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