404 APPENDIX. 



to certain laws. Of the six long syllables [forming the six metrical beats] the two last must 

 be accented. Of the remaining four, any one, two, or three may be accented. All four must 

 not. Subject to these conditions, the accent may be placed any where, and the rhythmical 

 effect depends mainly upon the management of it.' He adds in a note : ' The rule with regard 

 to caesura is, I believe, involved in the rule for the accent.' But on this last point he 

 does not explain himself any farther. I have already discussed this question so fully, that 

 I will only here repeat that accent has nothing to do with the Virgilian hexameter. Its 

 rhythm depends entirely on caesura, pause and a due arrangement of words. Accent may agree 

 or disagree with the metrical beat throughout. Surely too the Virgilian is constructed on 

 the model of the Homeric verse, and with it accent could have had nothing to do. But no. 

 ' All that we know of the Greek pronunciation, is that the rule of accentuation was in Quin- 

 tilian's time different from the Latin. What it was in Homer's time, Quintilian himself 

 probably did not know.' Quintilian knew this rule as well as Homer, and so do I know it; 

 and so does J. S. ; otherwise what is the meaning of those marks which he so carefully places 

 over all the Greek words quoted by him .'' This casual, and, because casual, most important 

 remark of Quintilian I shall presently say more of. Meanwhile let us concede for the moment 

 that by a miraculous anachronism Homer read his verses with the Latin accent. Yet surely 

 it was with Virgil's, not with our or Dante's Latin accent. However 'in Homer we do find 

 now and then a line which reads like an English hexameter — viz. a line in which all the six 

 long syllables are accented, as uvtk eireiTa ireSovSe etc' ' Such lines are rare even in Homer, 

 as any one may satisfy himself if he will read a few pages of the Iliad.' To this I would 

 reply: I. Our English reading of Homer and Virgil has in itself no meaning. All the won- 

 drous harmony we feel is derived from the mental process by which we superinduce our 

 acquired knowledge of the quantity and rhythm. 2. Verses like those just mentioned, instead 

 of being rare, are among the very commonest types of Homeric rhythm. There must be in 

 Homer thousands of verses like Toe S' i^/ue'ifieT eTretra Tro^apKtj^ ^loy 'A^tXXeJs, or "Qj ecpar 

 ov^' airl6t]ae Fepiji'ioi nnroTa NecrTtojo. I have counted sixteen or seventeen of them between 

 vv. 78 and 178 of the first book of the Iliad. If the same proportion holds throughout, there 

 must be as many as four thousand in the Iliad and Odyssey together. But I confess that to 

 me this obtruding of the Anglo-Latin accent on Homer seems almost an absurdity. And 

 where I would ask is this said Anglo-Latin accent in words like YYriKtjia^eii} or tem,pestatumque ? 

 Does it outrage Cicero's ' Nature of things' and occur more than once in the same word ? 



Let us now recur to the pregnant passage of Quintilian. What he says is simply this. 

 Even the most learned old people in his youth pronounced all Greek words with the Latin 

 accent, as 'Atreus. In his time, and ever after as we know from abundant testimony, Greek 

 words, provided they retained their Greek form, retained their Greek accent, as Atreus, aer, 

 aether (? Atreus, etc.) ; Atrea, aera ; but deris, Achilles. Quintilian and his contemporaries 

 gave a pedantic preference to everything Greek, even in points where their own language had 

 the advantage. They naturally therefore liked the more varied and flexible Greek accent. 

 But everything proves that this change in the place of the accent made no real difference to 

 their ears in the metrical movement of the verse. Let us write down these two verses froui 

 the fourth Georgic with Virgil's accentuation : 



