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Trisyllabic Feet in the Dialogue of Aeschylus1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

E. C. Yorke
E. C. Yorke
Affiliation:
New College, Oxford
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Abstract

In R. C. Flickinger's ‘Greek Theater and its Drama’ (3rd ed. second impression 1929) we read on pp. 171–2, ‘In the iambic trimeters written by Aeschylus a trisyllabic substitution (tribrach, anapaest or dactyl) for the pure disyllabic iambus occurs only once in about twenty-five verses.’ A similar statement is found in other earlier writers, e.g. Haigh (‘Tragic Drama of the Greeks’ 1896 p. 372). The authors of the error appear to have been Rossbach and Westphal, who are quoted with approval by J. Rumpel (Philologus XXIV (1866) p. 407), and subsequently repudiated by him (Phil. XXV (1867) p. 54). When Rumpel found that he had been misled, he counted for himself the trimeters and the trisyllabic feet in Aeschylus, but his results are of dubious value owing to the fact that he counts as ‘trimeters’ lines like;

δαίμονά τε τὰν ἂμαχον ἀπόλεμον ἀνίερον (Ag. 769) and

αὐτοϕόνα δίμορα τέλεα τάδε πάθη. τί ϕῶ; (Sept. 850).

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , April 1936 , pp. 116 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1936

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References

page 116 note 2 Griechische Metrik (1856) p. 188, and 2nd ed. (1868) p. 484.

page 116 note 3 De pedibus solutis in dial senariis (1866).

page 117 note 1 The figures in this column are added only for the sake of completeness. No account is taken of them in the two preceding columns.

page 118 note 1 At Euripides Phoeniss. 208, where the glyconic 'Ιόνιον κατὰ πόντον έλᾰ– is answered by ισα δ' ἀλάμασι χρυσοτέυ– in the antistrophe, it is asserted by editors and metrists alike that the first syllable of 'Ιόνιον is short. But this is a very arbitrary ruling. There are two more acceptable possibilities; either – ∪∪ corresponds with ∪∪∪ here (as it appears to do at Iph. in Taur. 1148 also), or (less probably) we should read the familiar epic form ισα. There is no indubitable example of ισος in tragedy, but there certainly is ῑσόθεος. Either of these alternatives seems to me to be more likely than that 'Ιόνιον should be denied its habitual quantity.