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Light and Heavy Syllables as Dramatic Colouring in Plautus and Others

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

A. S. Gratwick  and
S. J. Lightley
A. S. Gratwick
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews
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Extract

Our purpose is protreptic, to broach a subject neglected by researchers and consequently by commentators on Plautus and Terence.1 We mean the relation of rhythm and dramatic meaning in the ordinary stichic iambo-trochaic metres. It is of course a longstanding convention that a commentator writing in usum scholarum will include some account of the basic rules of scansion and prosody and a conspectus metrorum of sorts. Ambitious efforts may be made to analyse the polymetric songs in Plautus, if to label cola is analysis; but there are notorious difficulties in this, for the songs are astrophic and polymorphous, the colometry is uncertain, and it cannot be said that we fully understand the range or relationship of the elements out of which the songs are constructed, or that the rules of prosody in the cantica have been definitively established. Under the circumstances it is understandable that commentators refrain except in the most general terms from relating rhythm to dramatic context in the songs. But it is different with the iambo-trochaic metres. We are on firmer ground here, and there is more of it. Commentators will draw attention to aspects of the playwright's diction such as alliteration, assonance, triadic expression, hyperbaton, and so on, by which emphasis and dramatic ‘colouring’ may be indicated. But very little attention is given to the dramatic and tonal implications of the texture of the iambo-trochaic metres as used for whole scenes or in particular exchanges. This is a pity, because Plautus and the tragedians and even Terence can be shown to have exploited the latitude of realization allowed by ‘the rules’ to underpin the sense of a passage or an exchange.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , May 1982 , pp. 124 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1982

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References

1 See Hughes, J. D., A Bibliography of Scholarship on Plautus (Amsterdam, 1975), pp. 127–35Google Scholar; Fogazza, D., Lustrum 19 (1979), 198–201Google Scholar; Harsh, P. W., Lustrum 3 (1958), 215–50.Google Scholar

2 Plautus, Casina, ed. MacCary, W. T. and Willcock, M. M. (Cambridge, 1976)Google Scholar; Terence, , Adelphoe, ed. Martin, R. H. (Cambridge, 1976).Google Scholar

3 E.g. 168 (at enim necessary), 313 (<meo> modo required for sense and metre).

4 Arses are the places which must always count for two morae in the metrical scheme (even when occupied by brevis in longo at colon or line-end); theses are the rest, alternating with arses; they may be represented by one or two morae according to circumstance. Note that these definitions are purely quantitative and imply nothing about metrical ‘beats’.

5 Here and passim the subscript dot marks the arsis (more exactly, its first mora), i.e. the beginning of the quantitatively definite element. This seems preferable to the bad old convention by which acute accents were used, and does not commit one to the view that a dynamic pulse is intrinsic to these places.

6 His ‘dancing-girl’ fragment (Tarentilla, fr. 74–9 Warmington) is badly damaged in the transmission, but enough is clear to show that its rhythm was light and elegant; contrast the ponderous severity of the harsh father's senarii in Triphallus (fr. 94–6 Warmington).

7 Plautinische Akzentstudien (Breslau, 1932), i. 196 n. 1.Google Scholar

8 We discount vv. 543–6, 567–75, which taken together and joined to 507 are an alternative, shorter version of the scene.

9 Another noticeably ‘slow’ passage is the lugubrious exit-monologue of Charmides, Rud. 584–92, where, in nine verses, there are only 37 light syllables altogether, and the resolutions per verse are 0, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1.

10 See MacCary and Willcock, Plautus, Casina, p. 219.

11 Fraenkel, E., Iktus und Akzent im lateinischen Sprechvers (Berlin, 1928), p. 259 n. 1.Google Scholar

12 Questa, C., Introduzione alla metrica di Plauto (Bologna, 1967). p. 132.Google Scholar

13 Sic scandendum, not…uolo qu***t mih*** sint….as Martin.

14 So editors, following the MSS; but MS evidence on change of speaker is no evidence at all.

15 N.A. 1. 24. 3.