prosody and ordinary speech

Greek Learning Greek
1

I’m trying to get a grasp of Greek poetic metre in more sociocultural terms. A lot of what I read about metre online and in West (e.g.) is very technical and explains metre in rather mechanical ways.

What I’m wondering is how “natural” meter would have come to Greeks – both from the perspective of a playwright creating poetry and also from the perspective of ordinary audience members who were listening to the poetry.

My sense is that iambic trimeters somehow reflect daily speech/ordinary language more than lyric meters given that the dialogic bits in comedy are often in trimeters. But that doesn’t mean that Greeks spoke, consciously or unconsciously, iambic trimeters in day-to-day speech, right?

Also do we know how natural or easy it was for a playwright to put together choral odes? Would they have been trying out different words to fit, say, Anacreontic or Aeolic, or would words have come naturally to mind to fit precisely those metres? Presumably more easily than to a modern student in Classics in Greek composition, but how much easier?

I’m sorry for these basic questions but I can’t seem to find very much discussion of this on the basis of a google search. If any of you knows of a good accessible article on the topic, I would be very grateful!

Thank you.

2

Interesting question. As evidence for the un-naturalness of meter, there are cases where a word has a special poetic form that seems to exist only in order to make it usable in a certain meter or in a certain position in a certain meter:

οὐλόμενην / ὀλόμενην
εἰνί / ἐν

It seems unlikely to me that a word like εἰνί had a life of its own in ordinary speech, since Homer only uses it a small number of times, and only in order to make his set phrase εἰνὶ θρόνῳ fit the meter.

There are also words like Σωκράτης that can’t be made to fit certain meters.

Hephaestion wrote a long book, in Greek, on on Greek meter. It seems like that would not be needed if meter sprang so naturally from speech, although I guess it’s possible that the meter was originally more natural but had become less so by his time.

I would think that the mnemonic function of metrical chanting in Homer would depend on the fact that the correct version of the verse fit the meter, whereas many other equally natural sounding versions would be rejected as errors because they didn’t fit it.