Note 16 — Chapter II · EARLY TRAGEDY AND EPIC
Reading edition
Robert Bridges, Ibant Obscuri. Such hexameters as
They were amid the shadows by night in loneliness obscure Walking forth i’ the void and vasty dominyon of Ades: As by an uncertain moonray secretly illumin’d—
do not represent what happened to Latin in Ennius, for the reason that in Latin pronunciation the quantity was the dominant element controlling even the accent. In English the reverse is true. Fraenkel, Iktus und Akzent, has recently committed a similar mistake in judgment, influenced apparently by the high respect that speakers of German must necessarily have for stress. He has resorted to daring hypotheses in trying to prove that Plautus always correctly observes a species of stress (see Sonnenschein in Class. Quart., 1929, 81). It is significant that the French, who feel little stress in their diction, go to the other extreme and find stress insignificant in Latin. Latin in fact was like neither; it resembled Hungarian in being primarily quantitative, and in its word accent had a moderate stress not without a rather noticeable pitch such as is found in some parts of Sweden.