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The Metrical Units of Greek Lyric Verse. III

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

A. M. Dale
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Extract

I Am not proposing in this essay to treat at length and in detail of the metric of other lyric poets. In most cases questions of metre are intimately involved with questions of text, into which so many other considerations enter that in dealing with them proportion would be lost, while metrical analysis of such material would still remain largely speculative. What follows is therefore little more than a general account of the principles of composition which these poets appear to me to follow; I have, however, indicated a few passages where emendations made purely on metrical grounds and widely accepted seem to me, in the absence of responsion, based on too ready a desire to reduce all poems to the best-known formulas of versification.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 1 , Issue 3-4 , July 1951 , pp. 119 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1951

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References

1 Possibly we should read , dddd.

1 So Mass for.

1 In the second line the short second syllable of . 51 can, as Maas points out, be accounted simply a special licence in an un-hellenic proper name.

2 See my Lyric Metres of Greek Drama, ch. iv.

1 ‘Minor period’ in my Lyric Metres of Greek Drama.

1 I regard Sappho 135–6 D2 as incapable of metrical arrangement as it stands; probably some words have been omitted. The worst of all shifts is to make a single line of Apart from the dubious quantity such a conjunction of two adoneans is a metrical impossibility in any kind of verse at any time.

1 There are two apparent exceptions to this rule, Sapph. 98, 1. 4 and Alc. 54, 1. 5, but I doubt if either is admissible. The former is in any caseslightly corrupt and the letters not quite certainly decipherable; in the latter, if some such form as Bergk's is not adopted, we should perhaps emend to with Kaibel.

2 Supra, Part II, p. 25, n. 1.

1 Sappho 152 D2. is so full of uncertainties that I hesitate to formulate it. If it is to be tidied up (by unparalleled synizeses) into lekythion + ithyphallic I should be very doubtful of the attribution to Sappho of such a dicolon; the full+catalectic, typical of Archilochus and Anacreon, is as indicated above un-Lesbian so far as our evidence reaches.

1 This is more probable than the form in which it is quoted, on both metrical and stylistic grounds.