—-- 
Accentual Cursus in Byzantine Greek Prose. * 449 
writer who belongs to this class it is a matter of importance to 
define as closely as possible the extent of the law’s application. 
Procopius of Czesarea is one of the writers whom Litzica con- 
sidered entirely outside the circle of those who made use of the 
accentual cursus rhythm—one of those who know nothing of the 
cursus.! It must always be borne in mind that Litzica’s understand- 
ing of the law of the cursus was based wholly on Meyer's first 
statement. Proceeding on the hypothesis that forms 2, 3, 4, 5 and 
6 are all regular, Litzica pointed out that the clausule of Procopius 
show scarcely any more regularity than those of a writer of the 
classical period. The statistics seem amply to justify his statement, 
but his hypothesis is wrong; all his figures represent only totals of 
regular and irregular cases, without distinction of the particular 
forms. It is clear from the above that of the five forms which he 
massed together as regular only two (or three) are in fact regular. 
It is therefore necessary to make a new test of Procopius with the 
understanding that only forms 2 and 4 (and possibly form 6) are regular. 
The Persian War, ed. Haury, 1905, was used for the test which 
is described in the following. It should here be noted that this 
edition does not give us a text which is beyond question,? although 
it is based on a careful study of the Procopius manuscripts, nor is 
the apparatus criticus full enough to furnish all the evidence needed. 
All conclusions must therefore be made with reserve, and must 
constantly be regarded as conditioned by the judgment of an editor 
who takes no thought for the cursus law. 
In order to be on safe ground, only the clausule before periods 
are taken into account. It is reasonable to overlook the clausulz 
before the weaker marks of punctuation until complete certainty is 
reached with regard to the writer’s usage in clausule where it is 
absolutely certain that the cursus rhythm must be present, if it is 
present at all. 
There are 4098 clausulz before periods in the four books of the . 
Persian War; these are classed according to the various forms, 
without any deviation from the written accents; the last two written 
accents are provisionally treated as the theses of the clausulz, without 
regard to the kind of accent, or the apparent insignificance of the 
word on which the accent stands. The forms are distributed as 
follows : 

1 Compare the judgment of W. Crénert on Procopius: “—bei Zulassung 
jeglicher Hiate eine wohlberechnete Akzentrhythmik herrscht.”. Zur 
griechischen Satzrhythmik, Rhein. Mus. 54 (1899), p. 593 ff. 
2 Cf. W. Croénert, G6tt. gel. Anz. 1906, p. 396. 
