399 Mb MONRO, ON A METRICAL 



degradation. After that time poetry, and prose when it has the least merit, are merely 

 imitative. Yet for centuries the prosody of the language continued safe. The first symptom 

 of decay, and a very noticeable one it is, with which I am acquainted, is afforded by the 

 choliambics or scazons of Babrius who appears to have flourished not later than the beginning 

 of the third century : Bentley calls him the last of the good writers. The most marked 

 feature of that verse is the concluding spondee. Now Babrius is not content, as Hipponax 

 and all the older writers of it were, with the simple quantity ; but the first syllable of 

 every concluding spondee has an accent acute or circumflex. That this could be accident 

 is of course out of the question in several thousand lines. There are a good many corrupt 

 verses, and when Lachmann published his edition, he, strange to say for a man so singularly 

 observant of such points, did not perceive this peculiarity ; and among the verses emended 

 by him and some others of the leading scholars of Germany, a large proportion, as might 

 be expected, neglect this law : which makes its constant observance by Babrius the more 

 striking. To Hipponax this would have had no meaning. The fact that this concluding 

 spondee could not trust to quantity alone, but required the support of the accent, shews 

 that the latter had then begun to be a stress ; and that the noblest language for form and 

 structure which the world has ever seen, was already stricken with a mortal malady. After 

 this period decay advanced with rapid strides ; Greek or rather Hellenic soon ceased to be 

 a spoken, a living tongue ; certainly as soon as the seventh century, probably long before, the 

 distinction between long and short syllables had been entirely lost. Yet the effete Con- 

 stantinopolitans still clung with tenacious pedantry to the galvanised corpse of the old Greek, 

 and would not allow the Romaic to develop itself freely, as the Romance tongues were doing. 

 As for verse, they had recourse to some of the basest expedients that have ever perhaps been 

 devised. For a long time they measured verse by the eye ; said rj, a>, and the diphthongs 

 shall be long, because the ancients said they were ; e, o shall be short, and the other vowels 

 long or short at discretion. Finally after struggling for centuries against it, they were 

 obliged to let accent have its rights and exercise the power it had acquired in their spurious 

 Hellenic as well as in the living Romaic. They adopted universally the old comic tetrameter 

 catalectic, written of course accentually, the accent making every alternate syllable long as well 

 as its own syllable, and all monosyllables being indifferent. 



is a good model, as it so chances that the accents of this line correspond to the quantity. 

 Had this not been so they would have had no idea of its rhythm. Thus if the accents 

 of a tragic tetrameter catalectic suited, it might be turned into a good accentual iambic 

 tetrameter, as for instance 



'n fiadv^mvuv avaacra Ilep<Tiiav virepraTti, 



thereby completely reversing the movement of the metre. Nay the majesty of Homer was 

 not safe, if these conditions were fulfilled by any of his verses : if they had fifteen 

 syllables, if there was a break after the eighth syllable, and if with all this the accents 

 suited. We need not look far in the Iliad to find the following : 



a\\' evCK ciptiTtjpo^ ov rir'tfitjff Aya/ienvuiv. 

 ^ Kev yt]di]crai Upia/xoi Upiapioto re ira^ei. 



