Context: I post this scan for critique. Macrons mark the vowels scanned as long-by-nature. But note that I scanned one of them as short, the one followed by “(!)” For the first four feet, I give rationales.
bus pro: spondee, u is long by position, o by nature
dest locu: dactyl, e is long by position; the u is long by nature, but
I read it as short, citing this rule:
If the two consonants are a stop (p, t, c, b, d, g) followed by a
liquid (l, r) the syllable coming before can be treated as either long
or short for metrical purposes, and you will often see the author take
advantage of this. > http://hexameter.co/rules.php >
The u in locupletibus is short, but is scanned as long in one passage by Martial, according to the Oxford Latin Dictionary. I’m not sure whether Martial simply applied the rule you cite, which allows a syllable with a short vowel followed by a mute (or more rarely, a voiced obstruent) + liquid to be scanned as either long or short. At any rate, you’ve scanned the first four feet correctly. Why not the last two, which shouldn’t be difficult? The verse is an integrated whole, and you really shouldn’t try to scan it piecemeal, a few feet at a time, like this. And when you’re marking the scansion, you should always note the caesura, which is a critical feature of the verse form–actually I would say the most critical feature.
Work out the scansion of, say, five to ten lines a day, marking caesuras, and read the lines aloud giving effect to the meter several times, and you’ll soon have it down, so that you can scan as you read. Then you can concentrate on noticing how the meter works to enhance the sense, so that the meter is an integral part of the poetry, not just an overlay.
But ultimately, you should try to read Latin verse giving effect to the stress accent, in addition to syllable length. The Latin hexameter generally creates a tension between the long syllable in the first part of the verse and the Latin stress accent, and resolves the tension towards the end of the verse. Sometimes, though, this tendency is violated for effect:
Q. 1. In my previous efforts, the dah-di-di-dah-dah effect in the last two feet in the line seemed easy, so I just assumed that I’d have more trouble with the first four. The last two feet were not problematic for me, so I didn’t ask about them. Because I try to bother textkit only with perplexities, my posts contain errors, for this very reason. So I did scan the last two feet, but I didn’t report them. Often while typing a query into the textkit message box, I decide that my proposal is good enough, so I drop the query and move on.
Q.2. I don’t understand the relevance of the caesura to scansion. I do understand that most lines have logical breaks that coincide with grammatical divisions, and that help one find the literal meaning of the line. If that’s what the caesura is, then it would be present if you wrote the verse out as prose, right?
Finally on locuples. Lewis & Short print it like this lŏcū^ples , ētis (ū, Mart. 5, 36, 6, which was my authority for the u being naturally long. But this threw me into doubt about the division, so I applied the rule I cited, and escaped the difficulty. Doubt about this caused me to submit the scan for review.
Finally Hylander, I must express my gratitude for your generous help. I can see that you do this with care. You con references for authoritative precepts, in addition to giving your own perceptive observations. Thank you.
Metri gratia it has to be parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus, has it not? But now I see it might be even parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus, so with two futures. Which version is best?
I’m submitting a statement about the caesura for critique. As the good students must know, when I wrote the following in my previous post, my thoughts about the caesura were in a hopeless jumble:
Q.2. I don’t understand the relevance of the caesura to scansion. I do understand that most lines have logical breaks that coincide with grammatical divisions, and that help one find the literal meaning of the line. If that’s what the caesura is, then it would be present if you wrote the verse out as prose, right?
As I now understand, a caesura is a point in the line of verse where a word ends, but that end does not coincide with boundary of the foot. To aid scansion, we want to spot the Principal Caesura, which frequently occurs in the third foot, perhaps less frequently in the fourth. There’s more I don’t understand about the P.C., but I want to stop here, to get (hopefully) a check on how I’m doing so far.