Note 12 — Chapter III
Reading edition
A brief description of some of the feet and metres most frequently used by Roman poets may be useful. These were, with the exception of the Saturnian verse (see p. 7), borrowed, with certain modifications, from the Greek. The most usual feet are the iambus (◡—), the trochee (—◡), the spondee (——), the dactyl (—◡◡), the anapæst (◡◡—), and the choriambus (—◡◡—). The dactylic hexameter consists of six feet, each of which is either a dactyl or a spondee, though the sixth is always a spondee and the fifth almost always a dactyl. An illustration of this is the line from Lucilius,
Maior erat natu; non omnia possumus omnes,
the rhythm of which is retained in this translation:
He was the elder by birth; not all of us all things can compass.
The iambic senarius consists of six iambics, as
Hominem inter vivos quaéritamus mórtuom.
(Plautus, Menaechmi, 240.)
Among the living we do seek a man who’s dead.
This is a common metre in the dialogue parts of dramas. It is one foot longer than the line in English blank verse. The trochaic septenarius, also a common metre in the drama, consists of seven trochees and an additional long syllable. The English line
Do not lift him from the bracken; leave him lying where he fell
gives an idea of the rhythm.
The elegiac distich consists of an hexameter followed by a so-called pentameter, that is, a line made up of six dactyls or spondees, with the omission of the last half of the third and of the sixth feet. This is illustrated and described by Coleridge in the lines,
In the hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery column. In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.
In the iambic and trochaic metres other feet are often substituted for the iambus and the trochee, but without change of rhythm.
Some of the other metres will be explained or illustrated as they occur.