the CAMPVS

Schol­ars have a ten­dency to see them­selves in their work. This is why Hel­lenis­tic poets were once thought to be proto-Romantics, and later became proto-pomo. This explains the Pes­simists who argued, begin­ning in an age dom­i­nated by the fear of total­i­tar­i­an­ism, that Vergil was a sub­ver­sive voice weav­ing verses which secretly opposed the tyranny of Augustus.

If schol­ars tend to asso­ciate them­selves with works and fig­ures of the past, they also con­trast them­selves with oth­ers. 19th cen­tury philol­o­gists, espe­cially Ger­man philol­o­gists, have been fash­ion­able tar­gets for some time. They were ‘pos­i­tivists,’ a term of reproach to some. Die Philolo­gen were so hubris­tic as to think true knowl­edge (of a kind) attain­able or at least pur­su­ing. In short, positivists—like the dark lords of the Sith—believed in absolutes. As some schol­ars today have been known to say, ‘that way leads fascism.’

The philol­o­gists, it is true, had a lot of con­vo­luted the­o­ries about poetic meter, and schol­ars today are eager to dis­so­ci­ate them­selves in this area as well. Some have found a par­al­lel in the sup­posed argu­ment between Metrici, slav­ish foot-counters with­out an ear for poetry, and Rhyth­mici, who were ‘more sophis­ti­cated.’ The trou­ble is that noth­ing sub­stan­tial from the Rhyth­mici sur­vives. We rely almost entirely on the tes­ti­mony of Diony­sius of Halicarnassus.

M.L. West takes for granted that the Rhyth­mici were in fact ‘more sophis­ti­cated,’ and he accepts the state­ment by Diony­sius that the long of the dactylic hexa­m­e­ter was shorter by an inde­ter­mi­nate amount than the long of other meters, or than the long which may fill the biceps posi­tion, because it allowed for ‘irra­tional syl­la­bles.’ This strikes me as a false infer­ence. I incline to believe that the prin­ceps was actu­ally marked by a slight, arti­fi­cial length­en­ing which defined the rhythm. This arti­fi­cial length­en­ing would in fact allow for the sub­sti­tu­tion of a length­ened breve in the prin­ceps posi­tion. Arti­fi­cial length­en­ing in the biceps posi­tion, which never occurs, would not only obscure but destroy the rhythm (the ‘flow’).

The Rhyth­mici, like their mod­ern fol­low­ers, incor­rectly assumed that the pos­si­bil­ity of breve in prin­ceps posi­tion must point toward some­thing less than the ‘true’ longum, and thus have called it an ‘irra­tional’ posi­tion. In this they have com­pletely ignored the impli­ca­tions of an imposed rhythm. Why shouldn’t we sim­ply mark this posi­tion anceps, which is truly an irra­tional posi­tion? The assig­na­tion of a spe­cific time value which both length­ens a breve and short­ens a longum is not only unlikely, but itself irrational.

Those who adhere to such a view are likely to accept that Greek poetry is good evi­dence for the phonol­ogy and prosody of Greek speech, yet the remark­able con­sis­tency in met­ri­cal prac­tice from archaic to impe­r­ial times argues against this. The changes and so-called refine­ments of suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tions fail to alter sig­nif­i­cantly the fun­da­men­tal rhythm of the line.

Fur­ther, the colo­met­ric struc­ture (hemiepes + paroemiac), though appar­ently unrec­og­nized by the the­o­reti­cians (whether Metrici or Rhyth­mici, ancient or mod­ern) was never entirely lost on prac­tic­ing poets. Wit­ness the prac­tice of the Roman satirist Perisus who employed the native cola to great styl­is­tic effect (pre­sented with hemiepes and paroemiac on suc­ces­sive lines):

omne vafer vitium
ridenti Flac­cus amico

tan­git et admis­sus
cir­cum praecor­dia ludit,

cal­lidus excusso
pop­u­lum sus­pendere naso.

(Per­sius Satire 1. 116–118)

In verse 116 the hemiepes con­tains the direct object flank­ing an appos­i­tive, the paroemiac a dative of inter­est flank­ing the sub­ject (B-A-B | C-A-C, we might say). Verse 117 is entirely com­posed of verb phrases. Verse 118 shows the very com­mon prac­tice of respec­tively link­ing the begin­ning and the end of each colon (A-B | A-B). The abla­tives, excusso and naso, are a syn­tac­tic unit, while cal­lidus sus­pendere pop­ulo is another. Pro­saically the sequence is ‘cal­lidus pop­u­lum sus­pendere excusso naso,’ i.e., ‘skilled to sus­pend the pub­lic upon his blown nose.’

The struc­ture for the three lines may be rep­re­sented in this way

o-S-o | a-S-a ||
V | V ||
S-a | S-a ||

where ‘V’ = verb phrase, ‘o’ = object, ‘S’ = sub­ject (really any­thing refer­ring to the sub­ject, includ­ing sub­stan­tive phrases such as ‘cal­lidus pop­u­lum sus­pendere,’ in which the acc./inf. phrase is essen­tially attribu­tive), and ‘a’ refers to cases with spe­cial adver­bial rela­tion­ships (dative and ablative).

Per­sius’ obser­vance of the colo­met­ric struc­ture of the hexa­m­e­ter is unde­ni­able. Recog­ni­tion of the orig­i­nal struc­ture of the verse (i.e., hemiepes + paroemiac) is evi­dent in the read­ing of all good poets, and I some­times point this out to stu­dents in my AP Latin classes who strug­gle at times with the hyper­ba­ton and the like.

So what was I get­ting at in writ­ing these ram­bling notes? Our knowl­edge of the nature and com­po­si­tion of verse is not nearly as secure as you might think, or as many hand­books make it seem. All of us, includ­ing the best schol­ars, bring a world of prej­u­dices, guesses, and igno­rance to the prob­lems. But that’s half the fun. It remains a puzzle.