The last post should still have been in draft mode, but I’ll let it stand since people have presumably read it, and it makes sense as it goes.
The basic argument, I think, is sound: the meters of Greek and Latin poetry are a tricky business, still rife with controversy and theories and still a fertile field for further study.
A lot of good and important books were left out of the last post. The Sounds of Greek by W.B. Stanford comes to mind, though it isn’t really about meter. That gives you a clue that meter alone isn’t much of a study. Even when prosody is given its due attention (cf. the work of Devine & Stephens) the work is inadequate. When you talk about ‘the prosody of Greek speech’ which Greeks in which era speaking which dialect do you mean, and how does that impact, say, the analysis of the metrical practices of a Hellenistic poet mimicking those of an archaic model?
It’s for reasons like these that I’ll always remain a positivist, however dirty a word it has become in the academy. Imagine the sort of synchronistic analysis found in this area applied to numismatics: we take coins of all periods, because, afterall, COINAGE is our concern, and extrapolate a set of rules and laws, then publish countless articles about how individual coins break the rules.
The kind of rudimentary diachronic work that West did in his Greek Metre is a step in the right direction, but what’s really needed is for students to look at the individual texts of individual poets.
Having done that with Nicander I learned more about meter in general than I ever had by reading manuals, but I also learned that the statistics published in every relevant source–e.g., Lingenberg’s dissertation and it’s followers (Kroll’s RE entry, West in GM) and J.-M. Jacques–are demonstrably incorrect and that it’s not accurate to classify Nicander as ‘very Callimachean’ as everyone does.
This isn’t going anywhere … just another rambling post.