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

THE ORIGINS OF ROMAN DRAMA
a well-defined but unexplained exception: lines might run out with the rhythm
CD/ ccD /
. . .plebeio piaculumst, . . . despiciunt Euripidem, "where a single word follows the
irregularity without breathpause. This 'limping' effect was sometimes deliberately
used to express emotions, as in Pamphilus' lines about his estranged wife:
— J. — J. — J. — — v£"_>— ^
quae numquara quicqu(am) erga-me commeritast, pater,
— J. - lu - C 15 viw— O—
quod noll(em), et saepe quod uellem • meritam scio;
w -L - J. - - 9LR -j.vamoqu(e)
et laud(o) et uementer • desidero.
(Terence, Hecyra 488-90)
She never did anything to displease me, father, and I know that she often did things
in order to please me — I love and praise andoh, so badly miss her.
This licence is so rare in Terence that two consecutive cases are certainly deliberate.
Statistical tests show that combined with breathpause or change of speaker the licence
is a strong departure from the norm, as in
J. - -
T. non dat, non debet. a. non debet? • T. ne frit quidem.
(Plautus, Mostellaria 595)
TRANIO He's not paying, he owes nothing.
MONEYLENDER He owes nothing.''
TRANIO Not a bean. . .
- S'H
To 'correct' this by reading non dabit ('Won't he pay?') would be to throw away
what is a deliberate dragged rhythm intended to mark the speaker's outrage (cf. Ter.
An. 767 for a similar effect).
Roman dramatists established norms of rhythm for tragedy and comedy the parameters
of which, as with the diction, overlapped; within the genres, individual playwrights
had their own norms and idiosyncrasies, 1 the ground against which their
departures and their irregularities are highlighted. These were delicate matters of
more or less, i.e. of style; we must listen to Plautus, as he would say, perpurigatis
auribus, with clean ears. By varying the rhythms between the poles of the harmonious
free style and the dissonant strict style, and by exploiting the quite separate resource
of resolution and contraction, a playwright could render a passage fast, slow, pleasant,
ugly, monotonous, or surprising. Here is Pseudolus at the very moment of Die
Rntfiihrung aus dem Serail:
1
Clash of word-accent and verse-movement is distributed thus in the senarii of Plautus and
Terence, with negligible mean deviations between plays:
istfoot 2nd 3rd 4th 5U1
Plautus 10% 3% i% 15% 30%
Terence 10% 7% i% 8% 25%
These figures denote a basic difference between Plautus' and Terence's styles.
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