If you haven’t listened yet, you’ll want to check out professor Francese’s latest Latin Poetry Podcast on various lists in Latin hexameters, which includes the following by Ennius (which it would be good for students to memorize):
- Iuno Vesta Minerva Ceres Diana Venus Mars
- Mercurius Iovis Neptunus Volcanus Apollo
(My students and I had fun with these on Friday.)
Prof. Francese notes the odd prosody of the second line, but Ennius allows the names to fit by exploiting the juncture of -s and n-, pronouncing Iovis Neptunus as Io – vi – sNep – tu – nus.
Here it is again with macrons and syllable divisions:
- Iū|nō | Ves|ta | Mi|ner|va | Ce|rēs | Dī|ā|na | Ve|nus | Mars
- Mer|cu|ri|us | Io|vi|s Nep|tū|nus | Vol|cā|nu|s A|pol|lō
This syllabification necessitates a hephthemimeral caesura.
Prof. Francese also discusses a recipe in hexameter, a hexameter line composed of one word from each part of speech, and one that contains every letter of the Latin alphabet.
It was that one that reminded me of my own post on Latin hexameter pangrams, in which I composed my own:
- heu Zama, quam Scipio celeber dux frangit inique!
MEA CVLPA:
A colleague and I were just corresponding about some of the metrical features of the two lines by Ennius on the gods, and I realized in the exchange that I was wrong about the second line, which I analyzed thus:
- Mer|cu|ri|us | Io|vi|s Nep|tū|nus | Vol|cā|nu|s A|pol|lō
In reality, it was possible in early Latin to drop final -s, so that the line would actually be pronounced like this:
- Mer|cu|ri|us | Io|vi’| Nep|tū|nus | Vol|cā|nu|s A|pol|lō
Notice that the final -s of Iovis is not pronounced, and so does not ‘make position.’
I had just carelessly assumed that Ennius was applying a rude, young form of the Latin hexameter, but I should have remembered that final -s could be elided in early Latin. You see it as an archaism in Lucretius, for example, but we’re all so used to reading Augustan poetry that we forget features like this. (These lines are sometimes actually printed with Iovi’ instead of Iovis.)
Edgar Sturtevant’s notes in his Pronunciation of Greek and Latin are very instructive on this final -s, as he includes what the Romans themselves had to say on the matter:
And then there’s William Lindsay’s Early Latin Verse. You can download a PDF (curiously not available on Google Books). He has lots to say on the subject, and treats S specifically from p. 126. He’s a lot of fun to read. He can sound at times like Housman when he finds scholarship not up to his standards.