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Pauses in the Tragic Senarius1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

J. D. Denniston
J. D. Denniston
Affiliation:
Hertford College, Oxford
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Extract

In the tragic senarius the divisions of the sense normally coincide with the main divisions of the metrical structure. Punctuation is most frequently found at the end of the line, or at the penthemimeral or hephthemimeral caesura. There are few traces of any desire to produce a persistent clash (as in the Vergilian hexameter) between verse structure and sentence structure. Thus at Med. 446–50 and 709–13 five consecutive lines, at Med. 364–71 eight consecutive lines, are more or less self-contained in sense. But this principle, while valid in some degree for all three tragedians, is not equally valid for all. Sophocles, as is well known, is far suppler in his iambic technique than Aeschylus and Euripides, and far more prone to write sentences which over-run the main metrical divisions.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , April 1936 , pp. 73 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1936

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References

page 73 note 2 Flagg, Isaac, in an interesting paper in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, XII (1901) 59–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, observes that ‘in iambic composition, pure and simple, Sophocles is superior to Aeschylus and, generally, to Euripides.’ That is true: and the reservation, ‘generally,’ is warranted by a passage of such striking rhythmic beauty as Eur. Or. 211–14.

Wilamowitz observes (on H.F. 280) that Sophocles ‘verwischt die trennung der einzelnen verse, der komödie darin näher stehend. The second statement is one of those hasty generalizations in which a great scholar sometimes indulged. In the Acharnians and Frogs (the only two comedies that I have examined) I find 35 and 48 examples of the pauses tabulated in Table I, a proportion far lower than that obtaining in Aeschylus and Euripides, not to mention Sophocles. Of the 83 pauses a notably large proportion (13) are at the end of the second foot. Remarkably few (7) are at the end of the first foot, a pause which, as the table shows, is very frequent in tragedy. (The rarity of this pause in the Cyclops, our one complete satyric drama, is worth noticing.) Only in its free use of antilabe, not in any general blurring of the verse-structure by irregular pauses, does comedy approximate to prose. In all the long speeches in the Acharnians (1–42, 366–84, 496–556) punctuation follows verse-end and caesura with rarely swerving fidelity.

page 77 note 1 This is a factor which may be taken into account in emending Ion 286.

page 79 note 1 The rhythm of Bacch. 807 is remarkably harsh: ξυνέθεσθε κονε тάδ', ǐνα βακχεύηт' ἀεl.