LATIN INSCRIPTION AT CIRTA. 397 



The golden harp of Apollo transmuted into a vile droning hurdy-gurdy ! A modern 

 Greek gives to these verses the identical rhythm of 



A captain bold of Halifax who lived in country quarters: 

 as well as to this Ithyphallic, 



Ou /3£y3»j\0C, 0? T£\£Tai TOW UtOV AlOI/l/g-OV. 



The writer of a well-meant book on Greek pronunciation, a member of this university, 

 finding this quoted by Dionysius, has committed the enormous blunder of supposing that 

 Dionysius is talking of accentual verse which to him was a nonentity ; and of asserting 

 that the people of old Greece employed them, because they were unable to appreciate 

 quantity. When that verse was written, the meanest peasant had as perfect a knowledge 

 of quantity as Plato. But the Hellenes and Philhellenes of to-day tell us in vain that 

 they speak and write the language of Xenophon. You might as well take the language 

 of Dante and Ariosto, had Dante and Ariosto never lived; mix it up with the Latin of 

 the schoolmen and canonists of the middle ages, add some half-understood purple patches 

 from Cicero and Virgil, and say, Here you have the language of Caesar, Cicero and 

 VirgiL jj Kev yr]9)]<Tat Hpiano^ ! In spite of all passionate protestations to the contrary, 

 Italian has retained far more of the old Latin than genuine Romaic has of the old Greek ; 

 and for this reason among others that Greek is a much more copious language than 

 Latin, Romaic a much poorer one than Italian. The latter has preserved much more of 

 the old vocabulary and the old pronunciation ; has even changed in much fewer cases 

 the place of the old accent : the point on which the modern Hellenes most boast of their 

 close adherence to antiquity. In sober truth the debased Latin accent may be said to 

 have created the Italian and the other Romanic tongues. Siede la terra dove nata fui 

 represents exactly the pronunciation and accentuation of Sedet ilia, terra de-ubi nata fui 

 in the sixth or seventh century. The Hellenic of Tzetzes, Tricoupi or the Vretannikos 

 Astir is as much a dead language as the Latin of Dante or Petrarch, Bentley or Lach- 

 mann. 



After this lengthened introduction I will now make a more minute dissection of our 

 epitaph. It is, as I have said, decidedly a purer and a better specimen of accentual 

 verse than the corrupt poems of Commodian ; and far more complete than the many later 

 inscriptions to be found on tombs and other monuments, where the writers seldom break 

 so entirely with quantity as Praecilius does. 



The key to the right understanding of these and similar verses is to remember that 

 Praecilius in studying his Virgil read him by accent and not by quantity, for which he 

 had no natural feeling whatever, and which neither his nurse nor his schoolmaster had 

 ever taught him artificially. What struck him in every line of Virgil was first the caesura, 

 the keystone of the whole ; or rather that which he took to be the caesura ; a point on 

 which he often differed from Virgil ; and secondly, owing to the peculiar nature of the 

 Latin accent and the usual cadence of the Virgilian hexameter the dactylic fall of the 

 end of the verse whether read accentually or according to quantity. Of the portion pre- 

 ceding the caesura he had a far less distinct conception. 'Arma virumque had to him the 



