quis tibi, saeve puer, dedit hoc in carmina iuris?
1.5
If you scan this line, you will see that hoc is ablative. How is it being used in this sentence?
quis tibi, saeve puer, dedit hoc in carmina iuris?
1.5
Wow I’m impressed! I never would have guesed that hoc could be ablative as scanning with its attendant rules is just too challenging for me at least for now. Okay… I’ll take a pure guess: hoc goes with in as in in hoc and refers to something unspecified or only referred to abstractly.
carmina is the object of in
my bad … ! I was just thinking that hoc could maybe depend on in and carmina could be the object of dedit ? so much for off the wall guesses… how is the line translated anyway ?
“Who gave to you, wild boy, this power over songs?”
hoc is not ablative, although it is scanned long. It is accusative (iuris is partitive genitive with hoc). There exists an earlier form hocc, and that is the justification for this. You can see also Met IV.150 (hic) and throughout the Aeneid.
Perhaps this is a tangential, not to mention futile, question - but why must all deviations from meter in Latin poetry be justified, often by extreme and hardly plausible rationalizations? At least in English meter, even in, say, Wordsworth or Tennyson, ther are frequent points where the line doesn’t scan. As I recall, this is usually praised as pleasing variety, not feverishly explained away.
Was there such a fetish in ancient times about always having a line that scans?
-David
Was there such a fetish in ancient times about always having a line that scans?
I think, basically, that yes there was. I would point out as evidence that nearly every single line by every single important poet scans perfectly, and that the exceptions can usually be explained, but this is circular reasoning: after all, we constitute a text based on the meter, so of course it will scan! You can look at the apparatus for plenty of unscannable variants.
If we take it as a given that every line was supposed to scan perfectly (and maybe we have ancient statements to that effect), then I suppose the question becomes “why were they so concerned about the meter?” I don’t have a good answer to that question, except to note that recently in the “form vs. content” battle content has been winning, but perhaps it has not always been so. Form may simply have been considered very important.
This particular oddity in Ovid seems to me to have a clear and (relatively) easy explanation. There do exist some odd Homeric lengthenings that are difficult to explain, and it is possible that similar problems exist in other authors whom I have not read. If anyone knows more about metrically deficient lines and whether ancient authors make any statements to the effect that “if it can’t be scanned, then it isn’t poetry,” I’d be very interested.
At least in English meter, even in, say, Wordsworth or Tennyson, ther are frequent points where the line doesn’t scan. As I recall, this is usually praised as pleasing variety, not feverishly explained away.
The reason the meter is nearly always consistent in Latin is that there is no reason to deviate from it. In iambic pentameter, there is virtually no room for variation, so, in order to prevent a poem from becoming “sing-songy,” poets like Tennyson and Milton would use trochees or other types of feet. In dactylic hexameter, however, there is plenty of room for variation be merely variegating the mixture of spondees and dactyls. That is why I believe a quantitative system such as that of Latin and Greek is so superior to a qualitative system such as that of English. One cannot just keep putting stressed syllable after stressed syllable in succession, whereas a line can consist of purely long syllables placed one after the other if the line is spondaic. When you say that some of Tennyson’s lines don’t scan, you are not taking into account that the lines probably do scan but in a different meter.
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I don’t think it’s ablative, or it certainly doesn’t have to be. “hoc” in the nominative as we know it is actually short for “hocc,” and is always long, just like “h?c,” so there is no difference that we can tell from scansion. By analogy “hic” became pronounced “hicc.”
The reason the meter is nearly always consistent in Latin is that there is no reason to deviate from it…In dactylic hexameter, however, there is plenty of room for variation [by] merely variegating the mixture of spondees and dactyls.
I grant your point. The meter itself allows a lot of variation.
-David
The reason the meter is nearly always consistent in Latin is that there is no reason to deviate from it…In dactylic hexameter, however, there is plenty of room for variation [by] merely variegating the mixture of spondees and dactyls.
I grant your point. The meter itself allows a lot of variation.
There is, to be sure, a fair amount of room for variation in the first four feet of dactylic hexameter. But consider hendecasyllables: there really appears to be no deviation from the metrical scheme, at least in Catullus (I’m not familiar with other Latin hendecasyllables). Or consider the pure iambics of Catullus 4 and 29, whose only irregularities occur in 4.9, 4.18, and 29.4, and in every case are the same irregularity: a final syllable short in thesis lengthened before a mute followed by an “r” (phrasing from Merrill’s commentary).
To leave Catullus, what about Horace’s lyric meters? Alcaics are really quite strict, admitting of variation only in the first syllable of the first three lines (considering the last syllable of the line “free”), and Horace shows a marked preference for a long first syllable. Asclepiadic meters show about the same degree of variation.
In English iambic verse it is not at all odd to find the occasional trochaic word or section of a line; the rhythm falls into place afterwards. In Latin verse this never (I shouldn’t say never, I guess, but …) happens. For English readers this variation is indeed pleasant. I would speculate, and this is pure speculation, that much of the monotony of Latin verse – which in English is removed by metrical variation – is in Latin alleviated by the playing off of ictus and accent. These are typically at variance somewhere in the line and fall back into place at the end, just as the English meter eventually falls back into place.
I do not in any way deny the fact that the hexameter line allows some variation within itself, I simply think that the strict Roman adherence to meter goes much deeper than that.
I think you are comparing apples to oranges though. Meter, in the strictest sense of the word, does not even exist in English poetry. You are juxtaposing variation in measure with that of stress, two very different systems of measuring verse. Furthermore, even one syllaba anceps is more variation than iambic pentameter allows, and I think spondaic verses should be considered an example of lines that do not follow the given metrical patterns. I think the reason we believe Latin poetry always follows the meters is because classicists have given fancy terms to every variation and found a way to say that they fit within the metrical scheme.
You are probably right about comparing apples to oranges. To leave aside the comparison, I still think Latin poetry (almost) always follows the given meters, and I still cite some of the lyric meters as good examples of that: hendecasyllables, Sapphics, Alcaics, and Asclepiadics.
As to the ancipites, Horace’s Sapphics, for example, always (? maybe almost always) treat the one anceps position as long. Catullus’s trimeters admit of no variations. These examples can be multiplied. Many of these meters are pretty strict.
Classicists certainly have developed an inordinate amount of metrical terminology, and I am far from able to discuss most of it. What is really guiding me here is the Classical authors I’ve read, and their seeming affinity for strict meter. Writing metrically correct poetry would seem to have been a requisite mark of technical competence.