As suggested by many respondents to my question about starting on The Aeneid, I have switched to Ovid and selected Pyramus and Thisbe as my very first poem. I have several sources, but “A Term of Ovid” (Gleason, 1900) gives some scanning help early on, marking feet and caesuras, but not dactyls or spondees. But it also raised questions about caesuras. In general. how often are there multiple caesuras in a line?
In Pyramus and Thisbe, I found Gleason marked 14 lines with two caesuras and one line with four! Also two lines have none at all. Here are three contiguous lines with Gleason’s caesuras with his punctuation:
repperit. “Una duos,” | inquit, | “nox perdet amantes:
e quibus illa | fuit longa | dignissima vita,
nostra nocens | anima est: | ego te, | misernda, | peremi,
What is going on here? Is he just placing these at the punctuation? Is this common in Ovid or other poets? Is Gleason off base (this is over 100 years old after all!)?
As to the placement of the caesuras, and without counting all the instances, I estimate about 20% of the lines do not have the caesura in the middle of the third foot. Is this normal also?
What I do like about the book is that for the first three stories he gives the Latin prose version to show how words are related.
Nearly all hexameters, especially Ovid’s, have a caesura within the 3rd foot. Gleason evidently privileged the syntax over this standard structural feature, but there is often tension between meter and syntax, so I would simply aim for the 3rd-foot caesura while respecting the syntactical articulation.
repperit. “Una duos,” inquit, “nox perdet amantes has a secondary 4th foot caesura after inquit in addition to the regular 3rd-foot one after duos.
e quibus illa fuit longa dignissima vita has the regular 3rd-foot caesura after fuit (contrary to Gleason). Meter and sense alike show that illa and dignissima are nominative and that longa and vita are ablative. (Ad.j and noun distributed either side of major word is a favorite pattern.)
nostra nocens anima est: ego te, miseranda, peremi again has the regular 3rd-foot caesura after est. Gleason commas off the vocative miseranda, gratuitously.
I think your 20% estimate must be wrong. If you post any lines you find without a 3rd-foot caesura we’ll resolve the issue for you.
And if you learn to read metrically you’ll quickly come to despise reorganization of Ovid’s words into prose. We must take them in the order he put them in!
I went back to count lines in which Gleason does not have a caesura in the third foot and I grossly underestimated the percentage. It is 44 lines or roughly 40%. Clearly he did something unconventional. Using your advice, I will ignore his markings.
However here is a line in which I cannot see a caesura in the middle of the third foot. Unless I am doing something wrong, it occurs in an odd position: splitting the two short syllables (I’ve included Gleason’s caesura with | for fun, and a / to mark the feet as I saw them, long syllables underlined):
Notitiam | primosque gradus | vicinia fecit:
No ti ti / ampri /mos que gra /dusvi /ci ni a / fecit:
Looking for a caesura in the third foot, where would it be in this line? Is it possible that the caesura would break up a word, or that it would occur between two short syllables? Or maybe I’ve scanned it incorrectly.
Finally, I will avoid the Latin prose as you suggest.
Thanks
I suggest you ignore Gleason’s divisions. They’re confused and misleading.
Notitiam primosque gradus vicinia fecit.
The 3rd-foot caesura falls after primosque, i.e. between the two shorts. A caesura falls either after the long or between the two shorts (if the foot has two shorts), i.e. anywhere within the foot. What’s avoided is word-end between the 3rd foot and the 4th; that would split the line into two halves, something of a no-no for hexameter poets (with some significant exceptions). So the almost invariable structure is two not-quite-halves.
If there’s no 3rd-foot caesura (as there almost always is) there’ll be a 4th-foot one—and often both, as here with primosque gradus. But no mid-line break between feet.
primosque gradus go together syntactically, but that does not inhibit caesura. Word-end is all that’s needed.
PS. Readiing quickly through, I’m frankly surprised to see that so few of the verses have caesura in this position (the so-called “feminine” caesura).
But some do, e.g.
contiguas tenuere domos, ubi dicitur altam …
and
egreditur fallitque suos, adopertaque vultum, (cf. primosque in our verse)
and here are two in succession (133-4):
Dum dubitat, tremebunda videt pulsare cruentum
membra solum, retroque pedem tulit, …