Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

DRAMA
It is immaterial whether the Latin accent was of stress, musical pitch, or both: its
placing was a direct function of quantity, and therefore an audible expression of the
arrangement of words in a line; if accents fell on arses (or their first elements if resolved),
the essential sequence '. . . never light, maybe light, never light, maybe light..."
was reinforced; if accents fell on theses, there was a contradiction. These opposed
articulations are respectively represented by the first and second halves of the above
lines. Too much of the first articulation would be motonous and flabby, as if the poet
were apologizing for using a verse-medium at all; too much of the second would be
artificial. It is on the blending of these two opposed articulations that an important
aspect of the art of dramatic and indeed all Latin quantitative verse depends. The working
hypothesis formulated by Bentley that 'Roman dramatists sought to reconcile
ictus and accent as far as possible' is a mistaken inference from the fact that the first
articulation is in the majority. 1 On the contrary, the second articulation is the salt to
the meat, and attempts to explain away as many as possible of the apparent cases of
clash as actual reflections of prose-pronunciation start from a false premiss; not but
what there are many cases where a clash is only apparent and a linguistic explanation
is right — as, for example, when enclitic particles are involved {uirum quidem, like
uiriimque).
The vital relationship between word-accentuation and quantitative progression is
that the opposed articulations are subject to opposed prosodical treatments which
emphasize their characters. In a sequence like exorat, aufert..., the unaccented
theses may be light, heavy, or double light (subject to the general rule given above,
p. 87), as long as the thesis in question is next to an accented arsis. This is where
Roman metric is fundamentally different from Greek. The freedom is extreme; the
verse-form as such yields to the flow of the phrase, and the only quantitative pattern
is '... maybe light, never light. . .', a binary movement quite properly analysed in
'feet'.
On the other hand, the treatment of theses was highly determined in sequences like
. . .de'tulit. . ., •where an unaccented final syllable falls in arsis, and like . . .rectg.
domum, where in addition word-accents are falling in theses. To formulate the rule,
is best to regard the senarius as a trimeter ABC D/A B C D/A BCD, since it
applies over a sequence of four places: if an unaccented -word-end falls in an arsis D,
the cadence should run . . .c £>, not . . .cc D nor . . .CD; conversely, if unaccented
word-end falls in the last B-place, the cadence should run . . . A B or ... aa B, not
. . .aB. The latter principle, 'Luchs's law', is a mirror image of the first, and its effect
is to impose a strongly quaternary quantitative rhythm at line-end, '. . . never light,
never light, • always light, never light'. That is stricter even than in Greek tragedy.
Luchs's law does not apply earlier in the line — so lines may begin a Bj— but the other
aaB/cD AB/cD aB/
principle does. Hence lines may begin e.g. lepido seni... or duro seni. . . but not seni
ccD aB/CD
lepido or seni duro, unless an enclitic follows (e.g. quidem), in which case the wordaccent
is in harmony widi the arsis, and we have moved into the 'free' articulation.
The principle also applies strongly in the middle of the line; here, however, there is
1 Bentley (1726) xvii-xviii, cf. Meyer (1886) 10—18. The hypothesis has been fundamental to
virtually all Anglo-German study of early dramatic verse, notably Fraenkel (1928), Drexler (1932/3),
and is still widely taken to be axiomatic (Allen (1973) I53f.).
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