Such findings are immensely helpful, to everyone apart from yourself, who should focus on 1) PROSE, 2) vowel lengths and hexameter/elegy (pace mwh), 3) other meters, with hugely diminishing attention going down that list.
You started learning Latin 17 days ago. Why are people explaining ictus to you? I’d wager that at this point neither the accent nor quantities of the words you know are sufficiently ingrained to be of any use reading poetry. Your only chance will be to have a mentally-inbuilt idea of the rhythm of the line and then force-fit every line to that. (This is actually a good way to start. Personally I didn’t bother learning vowel lengths and just fudged it like this until they finally started to sink in after some tens of thousands of hexameters. Not that I recommend that if you have the fortitude to learn every vowel length as you go, but consider what your challenges as a Latin really are/should be at this stage.)
After years of reading hexameter in Latin, I had to retrain myself to read it correctly in Greek. It’s quite similar, of course, but just different enough to be jarring, like twins who are almost identical.
That’s all good. But the real test is Plautus and Terence, in earlier Republican times. Try reading them metrically. When you can do that naturally, then you understand how Latin actually worked.
(See my earlier posts above.)
Intriguing. Typical curricula at both the secondary and university levels start with epic through Vergil or Ovid. Does this mean you think it would be better start with Plautus and Terence?
Perhaps we start with Vergil or Ovid because the metre is a little easier, but if we want to understand how Latin was spoken then Plautus’ use of metrical substitutions resulting in somewhat irregular rhythms comes far closer to approximating everyday speech. At least I think that’s what mwh is getting at. To read Plautus metrically, I think it’s really hard to just apply a template. You just have to know the values of the syllables. I’ve noticed that in Seneca, too, although he’s not quite as free and easy with iambic trimeter (senarius)as Plautus.
Aetos gets what I meant. However, it’s best just to get the basic rhythm of the line into your head and make the syllables fit it, fudging the proper quantities as necessary. Working out the value of the syllables beforehand is laborious and you can easily go wrong (especially if you’re a schoolteacher).
Classical rules don’t fully apply to Plautus (but they do to Seneca).
Hi, Califf’s book is useful and it does have exercises—I can’t see any answers straight away though, and so not sure how helpful it would be for a beginner.
The best intro I’ve seen is David Butterfield’s recent series of lectures posted on Antigone: he gives several verses in the linked handouts for you to practice scanning, and he then scans them on the videos, marking quantities, caesurae etc. Check out the intro article here: