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THE GENESIS OF POETRY IN ROME
Versus quadrants 1
Porphyrio, commenting on Horace, 2 quotes a children's rhyme:
rex erit qui recte faciet: qui non faciet non erit
He shall be king who shall act correctly: who shall not so act, shall not be king.
This is analogous to 'I'm king of this castle: get down you dirty rascal', with
its play on the etymology of rex, regere, and rectus. It has a memorable metrical
form: a trochaic septenarius, with coincidence of syntactical units and metra.
Petronius (about A.D. 66) quotes a riddle: 3
qui de nobis longe uenio late uenio: solue me
/ am one who comes out from us in great length, in great depth: solve me.
(The answer is probably 'hair'.) The pattern is the same, and there are many
similar examples belonging to the spheres of popular sayings, witticisms and
obscenities; for example:
j_ — j_ — _L *«*_£. J- w JL — -L *~> Jpostquam
Crassus carbo factus, Carbo crassus factus est
After Crassus became a cinder, Carbo became dull,
that is, the enmity between the two men was the only thing that kept them at
all sharp. 4
Both the metrical pattern and the uses to which it was put suggest a preliterary
or non-literary origin. There are many lines of the early Roman
dramatists which, without slavishly following it, clearly show the influence of
the pattern. The technique is quantitative and related closely to Greek practices.
There are, further, quite a few examples of oracular sayings, witticisms and
lampoons in Greek which display the same metrical pattern, and it is very
significant that these (no less than the Latin analogues) differ in certain precise
technical features from the norm established for trochaic septenarii by Archilochus
and followed by all later Greek poets and tragedians. The simplest
hypothesis is that the metrical form was picked up by Romans in early contacts
with Greek culture in Italy at a sub-literary level; this would be just one of
very many ways in which Roman culture was indebted to Greek in its earliest
stages of growth. A similar hypothesis, which does not involve the assumption
of direct imitation at a literary level, would give a satisfactory explanation of
certain persistent differences in technique between the iambic senarius and the
Greek trimeter 5 which are hard to explain on the hypothesis that Roman
dramatists directly imitated the metrical techniques of their Greek models.
1 Cf. Fraenkel (1927). * Epist. 1.1.62. 3 Sat. 58.8.
4 Sacerdos in GLK vi 46i.2(Sff. ' Cf. Klotz (1947).
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