INDICATING VOWEL LENGTH IN LATIN. 81 



nent among whom was the late Professor Bennett, of Cornell Uni- 

 versity, have maintained^ that there was no ictus at all, its place being 

 taken by what Bennett called "quantitative predominance." Of 

 those who believe in the existence of an ictus — and they are at present 

 in the majority — some think that both ictus and accent consisted of 

 a very slight stress; that in verse the ictus took the place of the 

 accent, which was disregarded in the reading of poetry. Others be- 

 lieve that, owing to the adoption of Greek literary models and Greek 

 verse forms, educated Romans of the period from about lOO B.C. to 

 300 A.D. used the Greek musical or pitch accent. Since the ictus, if 

 it existed, was unquestionably stress, this view also disposes of the 

 " conflicts " between accent and ictus. It may be said in passing that 

 the only strong argument which has been advanced against Professor 

 Bennett's view is the statement, based upon experiments in the psy- 

 chological laboratories, that rhythm without ictus is an impossibility. 

 This statement Professor Bennett, in an unpublished paper to which 

 I have had access,^ questions on the ground that the experiments were 

 made upon subjects of Teutonic race, to whom a stress accent was 

 familiar and a pronunciation without stress was unnatural. 



For many scholars the question of the nature of the classical 

 Latin accent was settled by Professor Abbott's paper on " The Accent 

 in Vulgar and Formal Latin," ^ in which he maintained that while the 

 accent of the common people continued to be one of stress, the edu- 

 cated Romans developed an accent in which pitch predominated. 

 This view, which at first, seems startling, if not improbable, is reason- 

 able enough when we consider the extent to which Roman literature 

 was based upon Greek, as well as the fact that to Romans of good 

 education Greek was a second language, which was almost as familiar 

 as the vernacular. Thus the emperor Claudius said to a foreigner 

 who spoke both Greek and Latin : " cum utroque sermone nostro sis 



1 See Bennett, in Amer. Jour, of Phil., XIX., pp. 361 ff. and XX., 412 ff. 

 This view was expressed by Madvig, in his Latin Grammar of 1847, and it is 

 supported by John Williams White in his work on The Verse of Greek 

 Comedy, p. 9, and by others. 



2 " Theory and Practice in the Reading of Classical Verse." An abstract 

 appears in Univ. of Penna. Bulletin, XX., i (Oct. i, 1919), pp. 362 ff. 



3 Classical Philology, II., pp. 444 ff. 



PROG. AMER. PHIL. SOC, VOL. LXI, F, AUG. 30, I922. 



