Greek and Latin metre is an overall term used for the various rhythms in which Greek and Latin poems were composed. The individual rhythmical patterns used in Greek and Latin poetry are also known as "metres" (US "meters").

Greek poetry developed first, starting as early as the 8th century BC with the epic poems of Homer and didactic poems of Hesiod, which were composed in the dactylic hexameter. A variety of other metres were used for lyric poetry and for classical Greek drama.

Some of the earliest Latin poems, dating from the 3rd century BC, were composed in Saturnian verse, which is not used in Greek. Apart from these Saturnian poems, which today survive only in fragments, all Latin poetry is written in adaptations of various Greek metres. Although a large number of Greek metres were adapted, Latin verse tends to imitate only the simpler forms, and complex stanzas in irregular and rapidly changing metres such as the dactylo-epitrite used in many of Pindar's choral odes are not found in Latin.[1]

Prosody

Apart from Saturnian verse, whose basis is not well understood, and some types of medieval rhythmic verse, all classical Greek and Latin metre is quantitative, that is, based on different patterns of long and short syllables, rather than syllabic-accentual, that is, based on patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Prosody, that is, the rules for deciding which syllables are short and which are long, is more or less the same in Greek and Latin. Syllables which end in a short vowel, like the first syllable of Greek πα-τήρ or Latin pa-ter 'father', are treated as short; syllables which contain a long vowel or diphthong, or which ended with a consonant, like the first syllable of Rō-ma 'Rome', sae-pe 'often', or stul-tus 'foolish', were treated as long.

If a single consonant comes between two vowels, it is usually taken with the second syllable, even at the end of a word: thus miser est 'he is wretched' is divided mi-se-rest (short, short, long). If two consonants came between two vowels, they are usually divided between the syllables, e.g. stul-tus 'foolish'. However, there are some ambiguous cases; for example, the first syllable of patrem 'father (accusative case)' can be treated as either long (pat-rem) or short (pa-trem) in Virgil.[2]

An important feature of both Greek and Latin prosody is elision. If a word ending in a short vowel (or -m in Latin) is followed by a word beginning with a vowel (or h-), the final vowel is usually not regarded as a separate syllable. In Greek the vowel is replaced by an apostrophe. Thus the word δὲ 'and' is reduced to δ' in the phrase: πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς[3] (pollàs d' iphthímous psukhàs) 'and many mighty souls' (seven long syllables). In Latin the elided vowel continued to be written, but was presumably not pronounced or else pronounced very rapidly.[4] Occasionally even a long vowel was elided, as in the following example, which also illustrates the ambiguity of patr-, since pa-tris has a short first syllable here and pat-rem a long one:

nāt(um) ant(e) ōra patris, patrem qu(ī) obtruncat ad ārās.[5]
'who cuts down the son in front of his father, and the father at the altars'

The process of determining which syllables are long and which are short, and showing how the words of a poem match a metrical pattern, is known as scansion. The above line of Virgil is scanned as follows, where – represents a long syllable, and ᴗ a short one:

– – | – ᴗ ᴗ | – – | – – | – ᴗ ᴗ | – –

Rhythmic types

The different individual metres can be classified according to their predominant rhythmic type. In the examples below, the symbol x represents a syllable that can be either long or short. For example:

  • Iambic: x – ᴗ – ...
  • Trochaic: – ᴗ – x ...
  • Dactylic: – ᴗ ᴗ – ᴗ ᴗ ...
  • Anapaestic: ᴗ ᴗ – ᴗ ᴗ – ...
  • Choriambic: – ᴗ ᴗ – – ᴗ ᴗ – ...
  • Ionic: ᴗ ᴗ – – ᴗ ᴗ – – ...
  • Anacreontic: ᴗ – ᴗ – ᴗ ᴗ – – ...
  • Bacchiac: ᴗ – – ᴗ – – ...
  • Dochmiac: ᴗ – – ᴗ – ... or ᴗ ᴗ ᴗ – ᴗ – ... etc.
  • Cretic: – ᴗ – – ᴗ – ...
  • Spondaic: – – – – ...
  • Aeolic: x x – ᴗ ᴗ – ᴗ – (and variations)

There are also metres which combine different rhythms, for example the dactylo-epitrite, which combines trochaic and dactylic elements.

Major forms

The greater part of Ancient Greek poetry is composed of stichic (/ˈstɪkɪk/) metres, which are those in which the same verse-pattern is repeated line after line with no strophic structure.[6] The six main stichic metres used in Greek are these:[7] (Strictly speaking, the elegiac couplet is strophic, not stichic, but its use in extended poems makes it suitable for inclusion here.)[8]

Aeolics

Other meters

Bibliography

  • Allen, W. S. (1978). Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin (2nd edition). Cambridge.
  • Maas, P. (translated H. Lloyd-Jones) (1962). Greek Metre. Oxford.
  • Raven, D. S. (1962). Greek Metre: An Introduction. Faber & Faber.
  • Raven, D. S. (1965). Latin Metre: An Introduction. Faber & Faber.
  • West, M. L. (1982). Greek Metre. Oxford.
  • West, M. L. (1987). An Introduction to Greek Metre. Oxford.

References

  1. ↑ Raven (1965), pp. 18–19.
  2. ↑ e.g. Aeneid 2.663, quoted below.
  3. ↑ Homer, Iliad 1.3.
  4. ↑ See discussion in Allen (1978), pp. 78–82.
  5. ↑ Virgil, Aeneid 2.663.
  6. ↑ West (1987), p. 19.
  7. ↑ West (1987), pp. 19–30.
  8. ↑ West (1987), pp. 23–24.
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