Musa Pedestris

Abstract

The wealth of metrical forms adopted by classical poetry is one of its characteristic features. Yet metre features only sporadically in contemporary criticism of ancient poetry. This book makes the case that metre was central to the Roman experience of literature, and should be restored to a central position also in interpretation of that poetry. By the time Roman poets came to write hexameters, choliambics, and sapphics, these metres could all claim rich histories, and consequently brought a wealth of associations in their own right to the poems they carried. Powerful effects can be achieved by manipulation of the established characters of their metrical media: by giving the metre of classical Latin poetry its proper weight, critics can restore to that poetry a critical, neglected dimension. In four main chapters on representative metres or metre groups, this book considers how Roman poets exploited the connotations of metrical form: the ‘Catullan’ associations of the Flavian hendecasyllable; the logic that produced the ‘pure’ iambic trimeter; the sapphic stanza between Catullus, Horace, and Statius; and the various strategies attempted by poets to subvert the superlative status of the benchmark metre, the dactylic hexameter. Also considered are sotadeans, priapeans, saturnians, elegiacs, and Horace's epodic structures. Connections between poetic practice and the academic study of metre in antiquity are highlighted, and attention is also given both to Greek perceptions of the metres they bequeathed to Rome, and to the effect on Roman versification of the perception that these forms were irreducibly Greek.