I started casually reading an old anthology of Latin poetry (A Book of Latin Poetry, edd. Basore & Weber, 1925) because I’ve been spending too much time with textbooks and not enough with real literature. It’s a small dose for a minor ailment. Of course, the reading is giving me lots of ideas for the classroom, but thist passage made me think of one of my favorite blogs, Laudator Temporis Acti. It’s a fragment of Ennius, which the editors note serves as intermediary between Homer and Vergil:
- Incedunt arbusta per alta, securibus caedunt,
- Percellunt magnas quercus, exciditur ilex,
- Fraxinus frangitur atque abies consternitur alta.
- Pinus proceras pervortunt: omne sonabat
- Arbustum fremitu silvai frondosai.
(NB: The -ai endings of the phrase silvai frondosai are disyllabic. The meter does work.)
They advance through the lofty trees, fell them with their axes,
destroy the great oaks; the holm-oak is cut down,
the ash is shattered and the tall fir falls;
they overturn the high-grown pines. The whole plantation
was filled with the groaning of the leafy wood.
Ennius fills the passage with martial language, befitting soldiers attacking the wood that will provide the pyre for a fallen friend. But this is not the only way that he effectively communicates the violence of the felling of the forest. His sound effects are especially striking. Beyond the obvious (alliteration), the closing spondaic line has a haunting quality as we hear the forest’s long, lamenting groan:
AR-BUS-|-TVM FRE-MI-|-TV SIL-|-VA-I | FRON-DO-|-SA-I
It seems to stretch the hexameter, but it works because it evokes the magnitude of these enormous trees falling to the earth, and I find these verses to be incredibly moving.
(Cf. Homer, Iliad XXIII, 114 ff., and Vergil, Aeneid VI, 179 ff.)