What is the origin of the 'cuts' and
'divisions' in the Homeric hexameter, the trochaic
caesura and the bucolic diaeresis? A commendable instinct
in linguists suggests that the answers to metrical
questions should be found in the structure of language
itself. But as Pierre Chantraine has said, "il
apparaît que le rhythme naturel de la langue
grecque s'adaptait mal à la métrique rigide
de l'hexamètre dactylique."
Linguistic
theories of metre can account for a mid-line break as a
kind of spontaneity, based on instincts for symmetry.
Hence the caesura at least is predictable typologically.
But the phenomenon needs to be rethought, in the terms of
a new theory of the Greek accent that I developed in my
dissertation ("The Dance of the Muses: Choral Theory and
Greek Poetics," to be published by Brill). I showed how
W. Sidney Allen's discovery of an apparent stress pattern
in Ancient Greek, derived from the study of line ends in
ancient poetry, was connected to the received system of
accent marks introduced by Aristophanes of Byzantium.
There must have been in Greek, as in the cognate
Sanskrit, a svarita, or automatic down-glide following the
rise in the voice that was marked by Aristophanes' acutes
and circumflexes. Hence the Greek accent was a
'contonation,' with both a rising and a falling element.
Where this down-glide occurred on a long vowel or heavy
syllable&emdash;not just in the case of vowels marked
with the circumflex, but also in the case of long
syllables that followed
the acute mark, syllables that were themselves
unmarked&emdash;they were in fact the most prominently
stressed elements in a word. Such syllables were
described as barús, 'heavy,' a designation that is currently
interpreted, somewhat counter-intuitively, as
'unaccented'. In words where the acute was followed by a
short vowel, however, the svarita was deemphasised, and it was the 'sharp' (oxús) syllable itself that was the most
prominent.
A
newly possible rhythmic-harmonic analysis of sample
passages in Homer discloses clear evidence of a tendency
towards agreement between accent and ictus not just at
the end of the line, where one should expect it in any
case, but also in the third foot. Caesura can now
therefore be seen as an automatic consequence of the
desire to accent the thesis of the third foot with a
barytone, to produce
a mid-line cadence. Caesura results from the prosodic
placements that produce a sense of agreement&emdash;a
concrete musical motivation&emdash;not from a desire to
pour words into metrical moulds. The Greek recessive
rules allow for only two possible locations of barytonic
(heavy) stress: on a long penult (followed by a short)
and on a long ultima. Hence barytonic prominence placed
on the third thesis, producing either a masculine or a
feminine cadence at that point of the line, entails
either a penthemimeral or a trochaic caesura. That is why
there are the two of them. That is why these word breaks
exist in the hexameter.
The
Ancients themselves have bequeathed us the notion that
the elements of a metrical pattern are 'feet,' and here
is a clue to a possibly significant extralinguistic cause
of metrical articulations. Ancient Greek verse was either
danced or danceable. There is a modern remnant of ancient
dance that survives in the folk tradition of Greece, a
dactylic round dance called the syrtós. What is remarkable is that the favoured
locations of these divisions of the epic line, trochaic
caesura and bucolic diaeresis, frame a distinctive
leftward retrogression in this dance's rightward circling
step. Diaeresis
marks the beginning of a line, and hence constitutes an
inceptive cue. A resumption of rightward movement after
the retrogression in the dance corresponds to the 'second
beginning' in the words. Hence dance may be the source of
this peculiar feature. It is perhaps not a coincidence
that the word polútropon ('of many a turn') fills in the
retrogression between caesura and diaeresis in the
opening line of the Odyssey. Not only the man, but the verse itself
turns here.