Abstract

It is sufficiently probable that quantitative scansion in Latin, imposed on a language in which accentuation by stress was alone significant originally, not only gave way to the earlier principle in the decline of Latin literature, but scarcely tended to suppress it at any time in common speech and in familiar writing. It is also probable therefore that even in literature dominated by quantity stress-accentuation was not obliterated altogether. In fact the incidences of it, in Vergilian verse at least, seemed so characteristic that in late Antiquity the Vergilian stress-rhythms were apparently copied without any knowledge of the prosody of the hexameter. In modern expositions, the variety of Vergil's rhythms is generally referred, not only to scansion, but also to stress-accentuation: and it has recently been shown that lines in which stress and metrical ictus predominantly coincide are different in quality and expressiveness from lines in which they do not. Since however no general explanation or definition of this difference in quality seemed to have been offered, I lately attempted a simple theory which would account for the different aesthetic values of lines of these two classes, and which would define, if possible, what these different values are