Iliad scansion5/20/2023 Pollas d’ iphthimous psychas Aidi proiapsenĪgonies and hurled many mighty shades of heroes into Hades, The accursed anger which brought the Achaeans countless Oulomenen, he myri’ Achaiois alge’ etheke,Īccursed, that countless to-the-Achaeans agonies brought Sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles, Peleus' son, Then look more closely at the Greek word order, and see if you can spot any interesting effects.Īnger sing goddess son-of-Peleus Achilles Take a few minutes to study each line and see how the English translation relates to the original Greek word order. For each line, you are given the Greek text, then the transliteration (the Greek text rendered in English letters), then the literal word order in English and finally the good English translation. You are not expected to be able to read the Greek here (though if you’ve studied ancient Greek before, you may be able to recognise some words) a literal translation to illustrate the original word order is provided. West in his Introduction to Greek Metre says that it in early poetry it usually occurs only in the first syllable of a word (as you note in the comments) or in "words which the verse would not otherwise permit." I would say that θρόνῳ would be considered such a word.Now return to those first seven lines, but this time you’re going to look at the order of the words in Greek, and how they’ve been translated into English. However, calling it Attic correption is a bit of a misnomer. They do note that lyric poets would have " always" (their emphasis) scanned that epsilon long, and Homer typically follows that pattern. Since the next word is theta-rho in your example, the second iota in εἰνὶ scans short by position. With πέτροισι, -έτρ- here scan short, while with πέτρον, -έτρ- scans long, both by the same author, in the same play, in the same line. The first syllable of a word like πέτρος is counted either short or long the treatment of the combination of a mute (γ, β, δ, κ, π, τ, χ, φ, θ), with a liquid (λ, ρ, more rarely μ, ν) varies depending on whether the mute is felt to close the preceding syllable (πετ-ρος) or, in association with the liquid, to begin the next syllable (πε-τρος). This is known as correption, and in particular Attic correption, which displays this more frequently than Homeric verse.įrom Halporn, Ostwald, and Rosenmeyer (a great little student reference guide) p.5: (The genitive βροτῶν is extremely common.) Looking around for words that had the same phonetic pattern, I found ξένος, which seems to evade the metrical difficulties because in Homer it's ξεῖνος, so we get ξείνῳ and ξείνων rather than ξένῳ and ξένων. The wiktionary entry for βροτός specifically remarks that the initial βρ of this word has to be treated anomalously, the evidence being the meter of this line. It does seem like it would be odd artistically to devote an entire ponderous spondee to a humble preposition like εἰνὶ.Ī similar situation seems to come up here: I have Pharr, who lists a long list of rules, but it's not clear whether the rules are absolute or can be bent, and some of the rules seem like they can contradict one another, so it's not obvious what priority to give them. I'm having a hard time understanding the logic of the subject. I'm new to this kind of thing, and one thing I'm not really very clear on is how strictly the rules apply, or to what extent you can just make a vowel long or short because it's necessary. (In ἀΐξαντε, the α is long phonetically.) I would think that the second ι in εἰνὶ would be long by position, but if I do that, I can't make the rest of the line scan. The only way to scan the first one seems to be this: Scanning Homeric verse is something I'm not very experienced at yet, and I have a question about these two lines involving the phrase εἰνὶ θρόνῳ:
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