The versus in Greek Metrics and Music

In his 1811 edition of Pindar, August Boeckh explained the signi ficance of the verse (or period) in the metrical construction of Greek lyric poetry. In the intervening generations, the nature and implica tions of Boeckh's discovery were sometimes overlooked, as metrists labored to construct a consensus on lyric meter. Stated crudely, this opinio communis holds that in the years that stretch between the death of Euripides and the activities of Alexandrian scholars who worked on their editions of Attic dramatists, knowledge of fifth century lyric com position was lost. As a result, Aristophanes Byzantinus and the others who divided the texts of the choral odes into short lines or cola, ignored the division into verses, which are the true units of lyric meter: La jour o? les Grecs cess?rent d'?crire la po?sie chorale comme la prose (scriptio continua), les ?diteurs d'?poque alexandrine et leurs successeurs divis?rent les po?sie en kola... Pratiquement, ils faisaient dispara?tre la notion de verse pour n'attacher apparamment d'impor tance qu'? la division en kola, qui n'a pas une r?elle valeur m?trique1. According to the more extreme forms of this thesis, even if cola were a basic element of lyric verse, the Alexandrian cola were general ly wrong, because they were based on false metrical and rhetorical theories2, since by some time in the fourth century the Greeks had lost all knowledge of the musical composition of the classical and archaic period3. A new science of metrics was needed to restore the proper verses and cola to the texts of dramatic and lyric poetry

Art · Literature · Classical Antiquity Studies

• Reconsidering Reuven Tsur’s Poetic Rhythm

  Open Access•Steven J Willett•Journal of Pragmatics•2004

  Add to list