LATIN INSCRIPTION AT CIRTA. 377 



fore think that this vague expression of Gennadius is sufficient 'to outweigh the strong 

 internal evidence that Commodian lived in the days of persecution, at the very latest in the 

 beginning of the fourth century. 



I should be inclined to infer that our inscription was of about the same date. Praecilius 

 speaks of his Cirtensian home. Now Cirta, the old capital of Numidia, was very flourishing 

 in the third century. During the civil wars of the fourth century waged by Constantine 

 and his rivals it fell into entire decay, and was rebuilt by him under its present name of 

 Constantina. If Praecilius had written after these events, he would perhaps have given the 

 city its new name ; and besides this a wealthy banker of all men would have been least likely 

 to have enjoyed the uninterrupted peace of mind and outward prosperity of which he 

 speaks so feelingly. 



To Mr Blakesley's copy, followed by his explanation, I have appended my own arrange- 

 ment of the verses with the accents, and the quantity marked where it differs from the true 

 prosody. Of course Praecilius himself did not know what the quantity was. His verses are 

 a mere reproduction of his own idea of what those of Virgil were, read by him according 

 to accent. But this shall presently be explained at greater length. I wish first to say 

 a few words about the Latin accent generally ; next to shew that before the third century 

 Latin verses of every kind, popular as well as learned, were written by quantity alone ; that 

 on the different kinds of metre accent had no direct influence at all ; that however sometimes 

 consciously, sometimes unconsciously, certain poets sought sometimes a coincidence, sometimes 

 on the other hand a contradiction between the ictus metricus of the verse and the accent ; 

 that in the course of the third century by some extraordinary degeneracy of the language, 

 accent began entirely to supersede quantity which practically became a dead thing and was 

 kept up only by artificial training, and that this led necessarily to the destruction of the 

 old language and to the formation of its daughters the modern Romance languages ; that 

 nearly about the same time the same strange change came over the Greek and occasioned its 

 total disorganisation, and that it was owing to the utter effeteness of the learned at Con- 

 stantinople and the absence of national life in the people, that the Romaic could never 

 extricate itself like the Romance languages, but always had and still has to struggle with 

 a dead, spurious, abortive Hellenic. Having touched on these topics as briefly as possible, 

 I will conclude with a special comment on each line of our Inscription. 



The rules of the Latin accent may be told in a few words. Like the Greek, it had no 

 relation to quantity or the length of the syllable, but was a mere raising or sharpening of the 

 tone of voice at the syllable on which it was placed. As in Greek too, there was both a 

 circumflex and an acute; every independent word had one of these two accents. All the 

 unaccentuated syllables were supposed to have the grave accent. Whether the rules of the 

 Greek and Latin accent were ever different from what we know them to have been in histo- 

 rical times, more resembling for instance that of theSr common sister the Sanscrit, I shall not 

 stop to enquire. Within the records of history the two had this in common, that the accent 

 could never go farther back than the third syllable from the end of the word. It is an 

 instructive fact, that Cicero, who knew only his own language and Greek, in the Orator, 18, 

 declares it to be inconceivable that this should not be so. ♦ Nature herself, he says, ' has so 



48—2 



