Language and Rhythm in Plautus: Synchronic and Diachronic Studies (Sozomena Studies in the Recovery of Ancient Texts - Vol. 3)

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Benjamin W. Fortson IV Language and Rhythm in Plautus

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Sozomena Studies in the Recovery of Ancient Texts Edited on behalf of the Herculaneum Society by Alessandro Barchiesi, Robert Fowler, Dirk Obbink and Nigel Wilson Vol. 3

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Benjamin W. Fortson IV

Language and Rhythm in Plautus Synchronic and Diachronic Studies

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines 앪 of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

ISBN 978-3-11-020593-0 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. 쑔 Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen. Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin.

Contents Preface and Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII Abbreviations and Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XI Chapter One: Preliminaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter Two: Plautine Iambo-Trochaics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter Three: The Linguistic Background of Luchss Law . . . . . . . Chapter Four: Meyers and Jacobsohns Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter Five: Enjambement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter Six: The Aphaeresis of Est . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter Seven: Breuis Breuians I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter Eight: Breuis Breuians II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter Nine: Towards a Reconstruction of the Prosody of Plautine Latin Speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index Locorum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 20 34 54 98 134 176 217 259 271 289

Preface and Acknowledgments It has been slightly over a decade since I wrote the original version of these studies as my doctoral thesis, Studies in the Prosody of Plautine Latin (Harvard, 1996). The intervening years required not only consideration of a good deal of new secondary literature but also many substantial changes over several drafts—in the end more than enough to justify a new title. Most of my original conclusions have remained as they were, but many sections both long and short have been partly or completely reworked, scrapped, or added, and the argumentation throughout has been revised, updated, and tightened wherever possible. The longer chapters were split up to accommodate the numerous additions; the bulk of Ch. 8 is entirely new. So as not to reinvent the wheel entirely, I had to be selective in what material to revise; hopefully, the fact that the resultant book was not written in einem Zug has not led to too many inconsistencies in style or content. I must first thank Andrew Dyke for initially spurring me to publish this work and for the many helpful comments and suggestions he made from his reading of the then unrevised thesis. Brent Vine also read through the unrevised work with his customary care and insightfulness, allowing me to improve the discussion of many parts of it and, by dint of his own enthusiastic support, renewing my desire to wrangle with some issues that I had essentially given up trying to solve. (I still may not have solved them all, but at least I believe the book is better as a result of the renewed wrangling.) More recently, Mark Hale read through the antepenultimate draft and suggested a number of important improvements especially in my reasoning and argumentation, and commented extensively on many sections. My greatest debt of gratitude, though, goes to Lucio Ceccarelli, who, without having previously made my acquaintance, very kindly acquiesced to my request to read the same draft and subject it to his metricians careful eye. He generated dozens of pages of invaluable commentary, saved me from countless errors, and directed me to important works and views in the metrical literature that I had overlooked or not considered carefully enough. I take this opportunity to express global thanks for his exhaustive input, most of which is reflected in one way or another in the

VIII

Preface and Acknowledgments

final product. I trust he will forgive me if some of the more minor of his contributions have been incorporated silently, if for no other reason than to lower the number of distracting footnotes acknowledging him. Needless to say, neither he nor my other colleagues are to be held responsible for the works shortcomings, and they do not necessarily agree with all my approaches or claims.1 I must rely on the sharp eyes and minds of my readers to identify (and perhaps solve) the remaining problems. For help with individual issues scattered throughout I am additionally indebted to the participants at several conferences and other settings where some sections of the work were presented in earlier form. Dirk Obbink receives my gratitude for inviting me to publish this book in the new series Sozomena, and I am indebted both to him and to Dr. Sabine Vogt for so ably seeing it through the editorial and production process at de Gruyter. The final research and writing were completed during a year spent in Halle an der Saale as a visiting research associate at the Seminar fr Indogermanistik und Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Martin-LutherUniversitt. This research stay was made possible through a generous fellowship administered by the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, supplemented by a Horace G. Rackham Travel Fellowship and Faculty Fellowship Enhancement Award bestowed by the University of Michigan. I would like to thank the head of the Seminar, Prof. Gerhard Meiser, for so graciously hosting me and for affording me access to all the facilities that I needed at the university. My colleagues Olav Hackstein and Sabine Husler were also invaluable in numberless ways, both scholarly and practical, prior to my arrival and during my completion of this project. My stay in Halle additionally would not have been possible without the aid of Richard Janko, Brent Vine, and my erstwhile dissertation director Calvert Watkins, for whose efforts and support I remain deeply appreciative. Finally, the fact that my family—Kelly, Christopher, and Halle-born Cecilia—could be with me in Germany made the time spent completing this book all the more enjoyable.

1

During my writing of the original dissertation I was aided greatly by discussions with A. S. Gratwick during the semester that he was in residence at Harvard. Regrettably he was unable to comment on the revised work, so some of the views that he imparted to me a decade ago and that I still cite in this revision may not reflect his current thinking.

Preface and Acknowledgments

IX

Plautus wrote to make us laugh, and he might well have found it funny that generations of scholars have sweated blood trying to understand the workings of his numeri innumeri. Without those luminaries, both past and present, this book could never have been imagined. I may depart from some or all of them at times, but there is little of which I stand in greater awe than their dedication to and insightfulness in unraveling the mysteries of this one Roman authors art. I hope this modest contribution is worthy of their imposing company. But long before I had ever heard of the likes of Bentley, Ritschl, and Lindsay came another sine quo non, Raymond R. Fitzgerald, now S.J., who taught me my first Latin in grade school and inspired me to do what I do now. To him this book is most gratefully dedicated. Ben Fortson Halle an der Saale, July 2007

Abbreviations and Symbols Comedies by Plautus Am. As. Aul. Bac. Cap. Cas. Cist. Cur. Ep. Men. Mer.

Amphitruo Asinaria Aulularia Bacchides Captiui Casina Cistellaria Curculio Epidicus Menaechmi Mercator

Mil. Mos. Per. Poen. Ps. Rud. St. Trin. Truc. Vid.

Miles gloriosus Mostellaria Persa Poenulus Pseudolus Rudens Stichus Trinummus Truculentus Vidularia

Other Classical texts Ad. Aen. Agr. And. Ann. Ars Div. Dysk. Hau.

Terence, Adelphoe Vergil, Aeneid Cato, De agri cultura Terence, Andria Ennius, Annales Horace, Ars poetica Cicero, De diuinatione Menander, Dyskolos Terence, Heauton timorumenos Hec. Terence, Hecuba Il. Iliad

in Geor.

Servius, In Vergili Georgica commentarii Inst. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria L.L. Varro, De lingua latina Met. Ovid, Metamorphoses Mon. Anc. Monumentum Ancyranum Ph. Terence, Phormio R.N. Lucretius, De rerum natura Sat. Horace, Saturae Scaen. Ennius, Scaenica Tab.Ig. Tabulae Iguuinae Trag. Naevius, Tragoediae

Except for the Iguvine Tables, inscriptions in Sabellic languages are referred to by their catalogue numbers in Rix 2002; equivalent numbers in Vetter 1953 are also given where they have hitherto been standard.

XII

Abbreviations and Symbols

Abbreviations of collections and reference works See the Bibliography for fuller information where relevant. CIL Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum CLE Carmina Latina Epigraphica (Bcheler 1895) Ernout-Meillet Dictionnaire tymologique de la langue latine (Ernout and Meillet 1979) KBo Keilschrifttexte aus Boghazkçi KUB Keilschrifturkunden aus Boghazkçi Lodge Lexicon Plautinum (Lodge 1924 – 33) Neue-Wagener Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache (Neue 1892 – 1902) OLD Oxford Latin Dictionary P.Mich. Michigan Papyri Sommer-Pfister Handbuch der lateinischen Laut- und Formenlehre (Sommer 1977) TLL Thesaurus Linguae Latinae Other abbreviations NP PIE PP VP

noun phrase Proto-Indo-European prepositional phrase verb phrase

Symbols [] † * :: ’

encloses material added by editors encloses material deleted by editors corrupt or incomprehensible form (1) lacuna; (2) reconstructed (unattested) form; (3) ungrammatical or disallowed form or utterance change of speaker verse-ictus

Chapter One Preliminaries Plautus Titus Maccius Plautus (ca. 254 – 184 B.C.) is the first Roman author whose works are preserved in any considerable quantity. His output consists of Latin adaptations of comedies by Menander, Demophilus, Diphilus, Philemon, and doubtless other exponents of Greek New Comedy. In this he was no mere translator, as used to be believed; while still adhering to the main outlines of the original plots and thematic developments, Plautus introduced much original material of specifically Roman flavor, along the way changing everything from the characters names to the meters used.1 The stylistic and comic language of Plautuss plays is therefore his, not Menanders, and Latin, not translated Greek. Preserved for us in the plays is thus a precious trove of the colloquial Archaic Latin of the third and early second centuries B.C. Mining Plautus to recover the prosodic and syntactic behavior of that language is the subject of this book.

1

Martin (1976, 3) instructively notes that Plautuss adaptations are about as close to his Greek originals as Shakespeares Comedy of Errors is to Plautuss Menaechmi. That Plautus was an adapter and not a translator was suspected for quite some time (most famously by Eduard Fraenkel; see Fraenkel 1922, supplemented in his 1960 Italian translation, as well as Csapo 1989) and was established as fact with the discovery of an extensive papyrus fragment of Menanders Dis exapaton, the model for Plautuss Bacchides. I do not follow the view of Lefvre et al. (1991) and their adherents that some of Plautuss plays had no Greek model; see Brown 1995 and Gratwick 2001, 47 n. 9. We will not be concerned in this book with determining what passages of Plautus are “Plautine” or “Greek”, a topic that has exercised scholars down to the present day (e. g. Lowe 2003) but which is rather risky to tackle absent the Greek models. The fragment of Menanders Dis exapaton corresponds to Bac. 494 – 562; it has been edited and published piecemeal (Handley 1968; Sandbach 1972 [revised 1990]; Handley 1997). Among more recent treatments may be mentioned Lefvre 2001 and the second set of essays in Questa and Raffaelli 2002. Other treatments and comparisons of the Menandrian and Plautine passages include Gaiser 1970, 57 f.; Wright 1974, 138 – 41; and Questa 1985, 13 – 86, to name just a few.

2

Chapter One: Preliminaries

Plautus stands toward the beginning of the tradition of adapting Greek comedies for the Roman stage, and of adapting Greek meters to Latin usage. It is to Livius Andronicus (ca. 284 – 204 B.C.) that the Romans ascribed the first Latin adaptation of a Greek comedy, including the important step of using Greek meters instead of native Roman ones.2 One encounters the characterization that the Greek meters were fresh in Plautuss hands, and that his metrical practice was untrammeled by any strict adherence to many of the Greek rules; the differences between him and later Roman poets then get labeled as “licenses” or “liberties” on his part. It is true that the metrical practice of the early Latin dramatists is different both from that of their Greek models and from that of their Roman successors, who—as a natural consequence of the gradual Hellenization of Roman culture—strove to adhere ever more tightly to revered Hellenic tradition. But any implication that these differences were due to “licenses” or “freedoms” is very misleading. Where Plautus differs from later Roman poetic practice he is not being merely capricious; rather, as has in fact long been recognized by some for certain Plautine metrical phenomena, his usage reflected linguistic properties of the living speech of the day. As these properties were of course different from those of Greek, when the Romans came to make their poetry

2

Not accidentally, Livius was a semigraecus (according to tradition, he came from Tarentum, though that is somewhat dubious for chronological reasons; see Beare 1964, 26 – 7). We do not really know when Greek meters were first used to write Latin poetry; Greek poetry and Greek culture had been present on Italic soil for many centuries before Livius. Arguments have been adduced to show that some of the South Picene inscriptions (from Picenum, east of Rome, saec. vi B.C. and later) were written in Greek meters, as well as the ancient Latin “Duenos” inscription (Eichner 1988 – 90 [1992]), but I think the material is too poorly understood, especially in the case of South Picene, for such conclusions to be anything more than intriguing Arbeitshypothesen. I should mention an alternative view that considers the meters of Roman comedy to be indigenous Roman meters that underwent Greek influence, rather than Greek meters transplanted to Rome and subsequently adapted (see for example Ceccarelli 1998 and 2000). While I am fully convinced that there is strong influence from native Roman poetic traditions in Plautus, a topic I plan to treat extensively elsewhere (for one preliminary claim, see Fortson 2003a, 73 n. 35), I am at present sceptical of views that Plautus was not using Greek meters as his models. For the purposes of this book, this issue is of no significance, for under either view the deviations from Greek metrical practice that are seen in Plautus are a source of information about Latin speech, which is my main concern.


3

more Hellenic in character, they systematically eliminated many of the “licenses” that would not have been proper in Greek meter.3 Metrical “laws” and the prosodic organization of speech The study of ancient metrics is an inordinately complicated affair; many learned tomes have been written on it, detailing an intricate system of rules and allowable exceptions to them.4 The laws that metricians have made their gospel are usually not laid out for us by the ancients,5 and it is important to keep in mind that many of what we now call metrical laws are simply the natural outcomes of fitting particular linguistic sequences to particular more or less artificial templates that themselves were based on the rhythms of natural speech to begin with.6 For instance, the avoidance of setting a certain linguistic form in a certain metrical position (something that we would term a “law” of some kind) is not necessarily due to the poet having been taught that that form was forbidden there, but can rather be due to the combined properties of that linguistic form and the particular rhythmic slot in the line. As Otto Skutsch once remarked (1934, 91) concerning the metrical “law” of iambic shortening (discussed in Chs. 7 and 8): Wir wissen nicht, wie weit der Dichter b e w u ß t [Sperrdruck in original, BWF] von der Mçglichkeit, eine i. a. lange Silbe als Krze zu verwenden, 3 4

5

6

For a general overview see Jocelyn 1996. For Plautus, the standard modern reference work is Questa 1967, largely superseding Lindsay 1922 (which is, however, still a critically important work). Questa has since revised this work as Questa 2007, but it appeared too late for me to use; as Questa 1967 is cited very frequently in these pages, readers should consult the newer work for any changes in Questas thinking. Also very useful is Questa 1973, which also covers other Archaic poets. My book only deals with a small selection of the metrical phenomena in Plautus; readers interested in seeing the full breadth of topics that scholarship on Archaic Latin meter has dealt with in recent decades may consult the extremely useful and heavily annotated bibliography of Ceccarelli 1991, treating the scholarship of the years 1956 – 91. Cf. Maass dismissive assessment (1962, 5): “Ancient metrical theory offers nothing but superficial description, mechanical classification, and unprofitable speculation. Only a few of the technical terms it used are of value today, and the most useful are those which make no claim to express any essential characteristic of the thing described.” For a demonstration of the closeness of the relationship between the phonological system of a language and the poetry written in it, see Hanson and Kiparsky 1996 on Finnish and English poetics.

4


Gebrauch machte. Die Annahme, daß ihm eine Regel von der Art vorgeschwebt habe, wie wir heute das Iambenkrzungsgesetz formulieren, verbietet sich bereits dadurch, daß kein Grammatiker eine solche kennt …

What we call a “law” is therefore more of a default situation that is deducible from the nature of the language being versified, and so not every regular characteristic of ancient verse must be attributed to the poets conscious adherence to a set of clearly-defined prescriptive procedures.7 To give a musical analogy, it would be pointless to find fault with many of the finest first movements in Franz Joseph Haydns œuvre for not “strictly” following the sonata-allegro form of the Viennese Classical style:8 sonata-allegro form was not codified until well after that masters death, and is essentially an artificial reification of a cluster of organizational properties that fall out quite automatically from the nature of the musical discourse of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.9 Haydn no more consciously followed a prescribed “sonata-allegro form” (as we would understand the term) in composing a “sonata-allegro” movement than he knew of Schoenbergian rows. This is not to deny that he knew and applied a set of compositional rules and principles, some of which had been acquired through explicit instruction, others of which he had unconsciously internalized through exposure to countless exponents of the forms. For these reasons, it will be my fundamental assumption that the statistical distributional tendencies that we call metrical rules or laws have no explanatory power in themselves; that is, they are purely descriptive and do not account for10 the patterns of word-placement that we see, but are epiphenomenal, reflecting the allowable rhythms of natural speech. Such rhythms, comprising what linguists term prosody,11 are de-

7 I provide an example below after dealing with a few more preliminaries. 8 As, for instance, in his “mixing up” of the order of subsections in recapitulations. For a set of case studies, see Larson 2003. 9 See in general Rosen 1988 and 1997. 10 That is, explain. In some linguistics circles, the phrase “account for” regrettably has meant little more than “describe” or “recast in a different representational system”. 11 Not to be confused with prosody in the sense of a system of versification. Throughout this work, I use prosody to refer to the phonological organization of natural speech, and meter to refer to the organization of verse.


5

termined by a complex interaction of phonological and syntactic rules.12 The rhythms of speech result from the construction of prosodic domains, the organizational units into which flowing speech is grouped. According to the most generally accepted models (as represented by such works as Kaisse 1985; Nespor and Vogel 1986; Inkelas and Zec 1990; and Devine and Stephens 1994), at least six domains are posited: the smallest is the mora, followed by the domains of the syllable, the word,13 the clitic group (composed of a word and one or more clitics), the phrase, the clause, and the utterance (consisting of one or more sentences).14 Each successive domain is built hierarchically out of the preceding ones. The pronunciation of speech sounds varies depending on the nature of surrounding sounds; thus in Latin, an n becomes l before another l, as in colloquium from con-loquium. Such changes are the result of phonological rules. Each phonological rule in a language applies within a specific prosodic domain. To put it another way, each level of prosody is the domain of a set of phonological rules. Between two neighboring domains comes what is termed a prosodic break. This is not a pause in the flow of speech (though it can be accompanied by one); rather, a prosodic break is a boundary at or across which phonological rules applying within each neighboring domain do not apply. For example, in French a plural subject pronoun like ils they is proclitic to a following verb, whereas a plural subject noun phrase like les personnes the people is not; in the former case, the pronoun and verb are united in a single prosodic domain within which the phonological rule of liaison applies (il[z]-iront they will go), whereas in the latter case, the noun phrase and verb each project their own domains and no liaison occurs between them. The prosodic break between the two domains is therefore defined by the absence of liaison. It is by no means an original assumption on my part that the language and meters of Plautus can afford us a window on the prosody of his Latin. 12 In this book, I use “rule” to signify a principle or algorithm forming part of a native speakers unconscious linguistic knowledge, not some rule taught prescriptively in school or the like. 13 Usually called phonological or prosodic word to avoid confusion, since phonological words can consist of more than one lexeme or orthographic word (e. g. Eng. dont, German heutzutage). 14 Some theoreticians posit more or fewer domains. In particular, the need for positing a clitic group domain, as something distinct from the phonological word, has been repeatedly questioned (originally by Selkirk in 1995 [non uidi] and then again Selkirk 1996, 188 n. 3), but I have found it useful to distinguish the two. These debates at any rate do not concern us here.

6


But as far as I know, no systematic examination of the corpus has been undertaken whose express aim is to reconstruct the prosody of Plautine Latin and that combines metrics, philology, and modern linguistics in the process. Part of the goal of this book is to see just how far we can push the strong version of our assumption, which states that every “metrical” phenomenon except the bare-bones requirements of a line (how a line must be structured in order to be well-formed) results from the operation of prosodic rules and therefore reflects the prosody of natural speech. If some of the results obtained through such a study point in favor of this assumption, but others do not, it does not falsify the assumption; this may simply mean that we do not yet know what underlies the difficult cases—it could on the one hand be an artificial metrical rule, but it could also be an aspect of Plautine Latin prosody that is not recoverable.15 The method I will be using to reconstruct the prosody of Plautine Latin is essentially the same as that used by Andrew M. Devine and Laurence D. Stephens in a series of articles and books to reconstruct the prosodic phonology of Ancient Greek, culminating in Devine and Stephens 1994.16 They succinctly put the premise of the method as follows: “although different languages have different prosodic systems, prosodic structure does not by and large vary crosslinguistically in a random, unlimited and unpredictable fashion” (1994, vii). One of the greatest contributions that the linguistic sciences have made, especially in more recent times, is the demonstration that superficially very different languages are in fact astoundingly similar at practically every level of grammar. Linguists have collected masses of data showing that an enormous number of structural properties—phonological, morphological, and syntactic—recur in language after language. Given that the cognitive capacity of Homo sapiens has been qualitatively identical across time and space, and that the language faculty is a part of the human cognitive capacity, we expect that as-yet undiscovered languages as well as dead languages should share (or have shared) these properties as well. The surface phonetics and prosody of a dead language are for obvious reasons difficult to recover, but evi15 For help in the exposition of the material in this paragraph I am indebted to Mark Hale. 16 See my review (Fortson 1995) for a fairly detailed summary and some critical commentary. More recently Devine and Stephens have turned their attention to Latin word-order (2006), a topic that will also be important at various points in this book. Regrettably this work appeared too late for me to use extensively; I have incorporated some of their findings where I could.


7

dence for it does indeed exist if we look in the right places and if we approach the texts against the backdrop of well-established cross-linguistic principles and prosodic behaviors. Let me now give a specific example. There is a metrical phenomenon in Plautus known as the “law of the split resolution” (or Ritschls Law). By way of very brief background (to be expanded in the next chapter), the Greco-Roman meters were quantitative in nature, organized around particular sequences of light and heavy syllables.17 Heavy syllables were metrically equivalent to, and could be substituted by, two light syllables. Filling a metrical position that is underlyingly heavy with two light syllables is called resolution. In Plautine iambo-trochaic meters (the type we will be concerned with in this book), the two short syllables comprising a resolution generally belong to the same word, and are not split between two words; this is the law of the split resolution (also called Ritschls Law). Thus a sequence like the underlined short syllables in dı¯cit elepha¯ns does not occur in a position normally filled by a single heavy syllable, whereas the underlined sequence in utinam can. However, there are a number of exceptions to the “law”: for instance, the underlined sequences in ut opı¯nio¯ne (Mil. 1238) and nam quid ego (Am. 41) are split resolutions, but they and many others like them occur with no apparent difficulty. Why then is the split in dı¯cit elepha¯ns not allowed, but the one in ut opı¯nio¯ne licensed? It has long been recognized (see for instance Lindsay 1922, 86 and 96) that the first of the short syllables in these resolutions is usually a monosyllabic word. This means that the explanation cannot be purely metrical: even a mere description of the facts must make reference to non-metrical (linguistic) terms such as “monosyllable”. If part of the description is linguistic, then part of the explanation must also be; and the methodologically straightest path would be to strive for an explanation that is purely linguistic, not half-linguistic and half-metrical.18 The explanation cannot lie in the phonological segments involved: the underlined sequences of both dı¯cit elepha¯ns and ut opı¯nio¯ne are segmentally nearly identical (they both consist of a short high vowel plus t 17 “Light” and “heavy” are defined in the usual way: a syllable ending in a short vowel was light, and all others were heavy. 18 Of course, a metrical consideration always lurks in the background, since linguistic sequences have to be fit to a given metrical template; thus what I mean by a “purely linguistic explanation” really means a purely linguistic reason for a sound-sequences (in)ability to fit a particular part of the template (as opposed to the template itself being encoded with such information).

8


plus short mid vowel). Lexically, though, there is an important difference: in dı¯cit elepha¯ns, both words are full-content lexemes, whereas in ut opı¯nio¯ne, the first word is a function word.19 All the monosyllables that violate the law of the split resolution, in fact, are function words. This suggests that the phenomenon is rooted in prosodic domain construction: cross-linguistically, the prosodic properties of function words differ from those of lexical words in that the former are often unstressed and unite prosodically with either preceding or following stressed words, while lexical words receive full stress and project their own prosodic domains. (Compare English today, tonight, tomorrow, in which the unstressed function word to has become univerbated with its object.) This typological fact suggests that in ut opı¯nio¯ne the conjunction ut was incorporated into the prosodic domain of the stressed opı¯nio¯ne, forming a clitic group ut-opı¯nio¯ne that was either phonologically identical to a single word, or similar enough so as to behave like one for the purposes of satisfying the scansional requirements of the verse.20 The two adjacent full lexemes dı¯cit and elepha¯ns, however, would have been separated by a prosodic domain-boundary (prosodic break) because they projected their own prosodic domains. In that example, the syllables -it e- were thus not joined tightly enough prosodically to be metrically equivalent to a heavy syllable or to a sequence of two light syllables within the same word or clitic group.21 19 Full-content lexemes are an open class of words that includes nouns, verbs, adjectives, and most adverbs; function words are a closed class comprising pronouns, conjunctions, adpositions, and particles. 20 A more specific account of the prosodic behavior involved will be suggested in Ch. 4. 21 An objection to this argument might be that the Latin distribution of split resolutions was simply borrowed from Greek, as Greek has an exact parallel (see Sobolevskij 1964). This cannot be excluded, of course, but is unlikely for two reasons. First, the restriction on allowable split resolutions is common to both traditions even though there are much stronger constraints on the occurrence of resolutions in Greek meters than in Latin ones (this will be discussed in more detail in Ch. 4); that Latin poetrys freer use of resolutions is nonetheless constrained by Ritschls Law suggests that the prosodic basis for it in Latin is real. Second, it is difficult to believe that Latin behaved differently from Greek with respect to the prosodic nature of proclitics and the junctures they formed with following material. In other words, once Roman authors borrowed the basic quantitative framework of Greek meters, the rule (consciously learned or not) against the split resolution did not “need” to be borrowed in addition. There are some split resolutions such as sitis et hominem Aul. 714, ped(em) ut efferres Bac. 422, where the juncture is not between full content word and enclit-


9

If this line of inquiry is correct, it has the very important implication that the mapping of Latin linguistic sequences onto the Roman meters reflects subphonemic distinctions, subtle differences in the phonetic implementation of sequences that were segmentally or moraically identical but differently grouped prosodically. Studies have confirmed that such is the case with a great variety of the worlds metrical forms; they will be cited as the need arises. The law of the split resolution is clearly sensitive to phonetic differences between junctures internal to clitic groups and those internal to other kinds of phrases. What exactly the differences were can be debated, and may not be recoverable; what is more important is that we see the effects of those differences being played out in the versification. This does not mean that Plautus himself consciously recognized these subphonemic distinctions, but it does mean that he was attuned to them: such subtle acoustic cues are used by speakers of all languages to parse sentences and to recognize the demarcation of structural boundaries. Differences in segmental duration, for example, are used to distinguish Le bas r(e)trouv hier from Le bar trouv hier in French: in the former, the a is considerably shorter and the r considerably longer and more prominent than in the latter (Rialland 1986, 195 – 6, with many more similar examples). In English also, the salient difference between phrases like grade A and gray day consists in the longer duration of initial (post-junctural) allophones (Lehiste 1959, 77 et passim).22 Recovering such details about a dead language is valuable enough, but the grouping of words into prosodic domains gains even more interest for both synchronic and diachronic linguistics by virtue of the fact that it is affected by syntactic structure. The interaction of syntax and prosody is often called the “phonology-syntax interface” and has been the subject of extensive research for well over two decades. Syntactic theory has established that sentences are generated by a many-stepped process, whereby an abstract, underlying representation of a sentence is modified in various ways to produce the surface form that is actually spoken. Specialists differ on the details, but it is generally agreed that during this derivational procic, but between full content word and (following) proclitic; if the proclitic joined prosodically with the following word, as is generally assumed, then this would be tantamount to the disallowed split resolutions of the dicit elephans type. But it is also possible that function words could lean both ways and form prosodic “bridges”, a topic I return to in Ch. 5. (I am indebted to Lucio Ceccarelli for pointing these examples out to me.) 22 The body of experimental phonetic work on junctures is substantial; for an overview, see Devine and Stephens 1994, 26 – 31 and Maddieson 1985.

10


ess, among other things words can get moved from one position to another: question words, for example, get moved to the front of a sentence (whmovement), as can contrasted or focused elements. Such syntactic phenomena have an effect on prosodic organization. Fronted elements, for example, can project their own prosodic domains, rather than uniting prosodically with a preceding or following word. Phrases that are hierarchically complex are often mapped onto the prosody differently from simpler phrases. Both hierarchical structure and syntactic movement can also affect the positioning of clitics and even the ability of words to undergo clisis. I contend that Plautuss poetry provides evidence for precisely these sorts of phenomena, as we will see in the course of this book. Plautuss poetry therefore is invaluable for the light it can shed on the phonology-syntax interface of the spoken Latin of his time. The transmission of the plays We possess twenty complete or nearly complete plays of Plautus, plus somewhat over one hundred lines of a twenty-first (the Vidularia).23 This amounts to roughly twenty thousand verses—close to the combined length of the Homeric epics. Much ink has been spilled on how many of the lines are original to Plautus, and how much was added by later hands. This issue looms especially large in Plautuss case because for a time the plays surely circulated among stagehands and dramaturges, who (it is thought) modified them at will to suit the purposes of particular productions. It was not until the middle of the second century B.C. at the earliest that actual editions would have been published, by which point a certain amount of corruption, interpolation, and modernization had already crept in.24 We know this directly from at least two of the plays themselves: a passage in the Prologue to the Casina (5 – 20) was manifestly written a generation or more after Plautuss day for a revival of the play, and the Poenulus has two endings, one of which must stem from a separate and later redaction. The debate concerning the amount of interpolation in Plautus was renewed in the 1990s thanks to a number of publications by Otto Zwier23 Isolated fragments of more than thirty others have been attributed to Plautus; their authenticity is doubtful, and they are not considered in this book. 24 For a brief but insightful study on the modernization of the spelling in the manuscript tradition, see Redard 1956. For a specific case-study (archaic versus archaizing ei for ¯ı) see Marouzeau 1910.


11

lein25 in which he called into question the authenticity of many hundreds of lines. While it is not my intention to enter into this debate except where necessary to discuss a particular verse, I remain quite unconvinced by Zwierleins athetizing bent. I am in general struck rather by the stylistic unity of the plays, and my examinations of particular features of Plautine metrics in the chapters that follow reveal mostly consistent practice that argues for, rather than against, a single author for the great bulk of what survives.26 The earliest extant manuscript of Plautus is the Ambrosian Palimpsest (Ambrosianus G 82 sup.), referred to as A, dating from the fourth or fifth century A.D. Its importance was not recognized until 1815, at which point chemicals were applied in an attempt to read it; unfortunately they reacted with the ink, causing holes to be burned in the parchment. While many passages remained legible, the damage was extensive. The standard transcription of the palimpsest is that of Wilhelm Studemund, published posthumously by O. Seyffert in 1889.27 It was the great 19thand early 20th-century scholar Wallace Lindsays strong belief, reflected in his edition of the plays, that A was stemmatically separate from, and 25 Especially the four monographs in his series Kritik und Exegese des Plautus (Zwierlein 1990, 1991a, 1991b, and 1992). 26 Lefvre 2001, 147 – 51 is a good critique of Zwierleins views concerning passages of the Bacchides for which the Menandrian original is extant; see also Lowe 1992, 242. I do not, however, deny the existence of interpolations and revisions to the text from the decades following the playwrights death. I shall not be concerned here with the question of whether “Titus Maccius Plautus” was a comic stage-name or not (rendered by Gratwick 1993, 3 as “Dickie Clownson Tumbler”, or “Dickie Dopeson the Mime-artist” in 2000, 322 n. 1). See in general Gratwick 1973, and for an opposing point of view, Steinbauer 1989, 221 n. 7; on the name see now also Pansiri 1997, 160 – 70, though he seems not to know of Gratwicks work on the subject. The name matters as little for our understanding of the text as Homers does for the Iliad. 27 According to the traditional account, the herculean task of transcribing the palimpsest cost Studemund his eyesight (e. g. recently Gratwick 1993, 35), but fide Gordon Fain, M.D. (as reported to me by Andrew Dyke, p.c.), and contrary to popular wisdom, it is not physiologically possible to go blind in this fashion; more likely, Studemund suffered from macular degeneration. An independent collation was undertaken by Gustav Loewe, Georg Goetz, and Friedrich Schoell, differing from Studemunds in some respects, that underlies their edition of the plays (though they adopted some of Studemunds readings). Leo and Lindsays editions depend entirely on their collation of the Palatine manuscripts (see below in main text), but generally follow Studemund for the readings in A. See in detail Gratwick 2000, 324 – 7, who also discusses (passim) the shortcomings of Leo and Lindsay.

12


intrinsically superior to, the other tradition, that of the Palatine family (see below); where the Palatine tradition differed from A, he more or less automatically assumed that the reading in A was correct (Lindsay 1904). An early criticism of the circularity of this approach is found in Sonnenschein 1905, 313, and it has since been established that both A and the ancestor of the Palatine family stem from the same archetype.28 Modern scholarship has tended to place both traditions on an equal footing, judging differences between the two on a case-by-case basis. Our next-oldest manuscripts are B (Palatinus Vaticanus 1615, known as the “Codex vetus”), C (Palatinus Heidelbergensis 1613, known as the “Codex decurtatus” because of its incompleteness), and D (Vaticanus 3870, known as the “Codex Ursinianus” since it was owned at one point by Fulvio Orsini); these date from the tenth or eleventh centuries29 and are referred to as the Palatine manuscripts. They are descended from a lost original, designated P. Of the three, B is of the best quality. The relationship of these manuscripts to one another is complicated by the fact that early in the Middle Ages P or a descendant was split into two parts for easier copying, one part containing plays 1 – 8 (Amphitruo through Epidicus), the other, 9 – 20 (Menaechmi through Truculentus; the Vidularia had been lost). Each of these parts has its own subsequent history, but B and D contain both of these separate lineages recombined. For plays 9–20, B is a direct copy of P, while C and D are copied from an intermediate archetype (labeled PCD) that contained only these plays. For the first eight plays, however, B is a copy of an intermediate descendant of P (called PBD) but contains corrections in another hand (labeled B2 or B3, depending on the scholar) added by someone who had access to P; D contains the first three plays and part of the fourth, copied from the same intermediate source as those plays in B. (In other words, B is the only direct witness to [part of] P.) C does not contain the first eight plays. Additional medieval manuscripts descended either directly or indirectly from PBD that have received attention in the literature are E (Ambrosianus I 257 inf., late twelfth century), J (Royal 15 C. xi, around 1100), O (Ottobo-

28 This is proved by the existence of shared nontrivial errors in both traditions (Tarrant 1983, 305). 29 C and D are generally regarded as being a bit younger than B, but Chelius (1989, xi) dates D as far back as the ninth century, C to the end of the tenth, and B to the tenth or eleventh. Cheliuss early dating of D is disputed by Questa (1991, 693 n. 3), who however thinks the traditional dating is a bit too late.


13

nensis latinus 687, early eleventh century), and V (Vossianus latinus Q. 30, eleventh century). I have given variant readings from these as necessary.30 A and P go back to a common archetype, dubbed y, apparently a booksellers edition written perhaps in the second century A.D.; it conceivably goes back to the first ancient edition of the first or late second century B.C.31 Also descended from an early copy of y ancestral to P was T, the so-called “Codex Turnebus,” a now-lost manuscript that was still in circulation in the sixteenth century.32 The further details of the transmission do not concern us here;33 for reference I provide the following simplified stemma, with lost manuscripts given in parentheses:34

30 On these manuscripts in general see Chelius 1989. 31 Our knowledge of these early days of the transmission is nonexistent, but we do know that a canon of twenty-five plays was established by L. Aelius Stilo (fl. 100 B.C.), a teacher of Varro, and that Varro himself recognized as genuine the same twenty-one plays that have come down to us. 32 Our only information about it comes from notes made by Adrien Turnbe, published in his Adversaria (1564), and from marginalia reproducing part of Turnbes collation of the manuscript written in a copy of a sixteenth-century Plautus edition (see Lindsay 1898). 33 There are a number of good overviews of the Plautine manuscript tradition. From earlier scholarship may be mentioned especially F. Ritschls massive Prolegomena to his 1848 edition of the Trinummus, and pp. 1 – 12 of the introduction to Lindsays edition of the Captiui (Lindsay 1900a). Important from more recent years are especially Questa 1984 and 1985; see also the useful summary in Tarrant 1983, 302 – 7. Lists of divergent readings in A and P can be found in Niemeyer 1877, which Lindsay (1904, 143) characterizes as capable of being improved upon (it was, after all, made before Studemunds transcription of A). Compare also Baier 1885. 34 For a more detailed stemma, see Tarrant 1983, 306.

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Issues of method 35 Among the various eternal frustrations about working with Plautus, as with texts in ancient languages in general, is one that will be confronted throughout the present book and that deserves comment at the outset. The problem concerns the evaluation of linguistic and metrical deviations: How many instances of a particular problematic or unusual form should there be before we accept it as genuine? How are exceptions to a proposed metrical principle to be judged? It is natural to want to emend deviant forms and scansions out of existence, as editors have indeed tended to do. But many remain, dotting the editions and handbooks, defended by some editors and deemed spurious by others, surrounded with question marks or daggers: contractions like re¯st < re¯s est, stressed heavy syllables like senecta and molestus scanning as light, and so forth. Often one encounters the view that if these forms were real and metrically unproblematic, surely they would be met with more frequently. This line of reasoning can sometimes lead to correct conclusions, but we must be aware that it conceals a number of difficult assumptions. First of all, it assumes a relationship between linguistic well-formedness (a property of grammar) and frequency of usage (an artifact of behavior) such that the former has a direct effect on the latter. But there is no such relationship; grammaticality or metrical well-formedness does not determine frequency of usage. Compounding that difficulty are the twin considerations that there is no obvious way to quantify “frequently” and that one must explicitly define “linguistically/metrically unproblematic”. For example, the subjunctives duim, duı¯s, etc. in one sense are “unproblematic” because they are demonstrably real linguistic forms that are easily accommodated to Plautine meter; but in another sense they are “problematic” (read “marked”) because they were probably already archaic in Plautuss day36 and therefore belonged to a particular sty-

35 For discussion of some of the material in this section I am indebted to H. Don Cameron, Lucio Ceccarelli, Mark Hale, and Richard Janko, none of whom necessarily subscribes to all the views herein. 36 That is to say, their use was restricted vis--vis that of the regular forms dem de¯s etc. In another sense, they were not archaic at all, since they were part of Plautuss linguistic competence (synchronic grammar), much like 3rd sing. -(e)th is for many educated speakers of English, where it is restricted to phrases like my cup runneth over, (the lady) doth protest too much and their imitations. Cf. also the next footnote.


15

listic level that found only restricted use in his poetry.37 In most cases, we are in the dark about what nuances were associated with particular forms, pronunciations, and scansions, which means we do not know how frequently to expect them to occur. But even applying such knowledge (if we had it) would still miss the point that frequency is not a piece of linguistic knowledge encoded in the grammar, but an artifact of such variables as choice, audience, discourse situation, and topic—none of which can be predicted or quantified. Like any native speaker, Plautus commanded a variety of different sociolects or grammars. His linguistic output would have been varied in a superficial sense of the term, but not unsystematically so, no more than when certain Modern English speakers use isnt in some contexts and aint in others; the human linguistic faculty is not a random-number generator. Since Plautuss medium was poetry, these considerations are complicated by the necessity of fitting linguistic forms to the meter, and indeed metrical necessity is often cited as the reason for particular instances of variation (as between poplus and populus, or between passive infinitives in -ı¯ and -ier). But (as is of course generally acknowledged) this explanation often dangerously assumes that our author was not skilled enough to have done otherwise. While metrical necessity surely accounts for some of the variation that we see, the default assumption should be rather that a poet of his caliber generally had a choice in what he did, and that if he used a particular variant, he had a reason to beyond simple necessity. The problem of deviant scansions is paralleled by that of deviant linguistic forms. All principles and “laws” that have been proposed for Plautine meter are violated by at least a small number of exceptional verses.38 There are three theoretically possible explanations for these exceptions. First, they could result from alterations to Plautuss words due to disturbances in the transmission of the plays—copyists errors, interpolations, 37 Forms of (-)duim occur forty times in the extant plays, almost always in optative/ jussive usage and in certain clauses introduced by ne, as well as twice in the fixed expression ciccum/floccum non interduim I couldnt care one bit and once (Am. 72) in a passage of mock-legalese, where archaic flavor can be expected. The only possible exceptional case is Aul. 672 (tam duim quam perduim), if this is not also a fixed expression. On the distribution of duim see now de Melo 2007, 255 – 60. 38 Thus leading to statements such as the unintentionally comic “si pu parlare di un vero e proprio divieto (anche se con qualche eccezione)” (Bettini 1990, 370)—how vero e proprio indeed.

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and so forth. Or the exceptions could have been in the text from the start, that is, stem from Plautuss own hand; he might have purposely introduced a metrical irregularity for humorous effect, to render a different stylistic register, to indicate a quicker or slower delivery of a line, or any of a number of other reasons that we moderns usually cannot recover. The third possible explanation is that the proposed principle is simply wrong. The essential and inescapable fact is that metrical and linguistic variation is present in these works as far back as we can trace their history with any confidence, and it cannot be willed away. Since it is also usually impossible to determine the source of the variation, we have no choice but to accept it as part of the text. It bears emphasizing that, given how much of the historical record has been lost, any exceptional form or scansion could be Plautuss own choice; and as long as it cannot be proved otherwise (or as long as significant doubts independent of an editors taste cannot be raised concerning it), it must be taken seriously and subjected to linguistic analysis. The danger, of course, is that the editorial aporia that this approach potentially leads to can open the door to a wholesale acceptance of every odd form or scansion in the plays, assuming independent reasons for rejecting them do not exist. Philologists, reasonably enough, have not been comfortable with that level of permissiveness, and so a complex set of criteria has been developed over the centuries designed to help diagnose when a form is suspect and when it is not. But since these criteria can often be subjective and the results of their application not falsifiable (we have no access to autographs of the plays, nor can we listen to how Plautus and his countrymen spoke), many such judgments are a matter of taste39 and inevitably engender controversy when other scholars have different tastes. Our present state of knowledge offers no objective solution to these problems.40 Though I find myself inexorably reaching for some of the very arguments that I have just challenged, in the main I consider discretion to be the better part of valor: we must be as conservative as possible when deciding whether to emend a passage containing an unusual form. This is 39 See Ch. 4, n. 74, for a telling example. 40 Richard Janko (p.c.) informs me of the discovery of a number of Roman papyri dating in his opinion to no later than the mid-first century B.C., including, most valuably for Plautine studies, fragments of a comedy by Caecilius Statius (see Kleve 1996). The paleographical analysis, when completed (the letter-shapes are in some cases quite different from later hands), may well shed light on some corruptions in Plautus.


17

especially true given the fact that, in spite of all the years that have been devoted to the study of his poetry, Plautine meter is far from giving up all its secrets. No voices from the ancient world have instructed us; the metrical laws are theories born of Renaissance and post-Renaissance scholarship and represent the collective best efforts of generations of metricians to figure out how lines of Plautus can actually scan. Many lines allow more than one possible scansion, each one involving a metrical irregularity of some kind; we as yet do not have a reliable way of weighing the possibilities and determining which irregularity is the lesser of the two evils (or the more humorous of two modes of delivery). The fact that variation is present in these texts and often resists attempts to establish hard-and-fast rules does not vitiate those attempts. This is, oddly, a disputed point. A minor but representative example of a contrary voice can be found in Griffiths (1972) review of Drexler 1969a. Citing the latters previously stated view (1932, 1:242 n. 1) that Plautus contains no licenses, only laws, and that the laws sometimes get analogically extended, Griffith opined (70), “Here is the confirmed analogist, seeking for rules to cover the exceptions to the rules he is already saddled with; the sombre fact is that in this field the anomalists approach pays every time.” He goes on to quote Questa 1967, 29 approvingly (“la parola mai deve essere bandita nel trattare di prosodia plautina”) and to underscore “the mincemeat [made] of Jachmanns rules for limiting the scope of [iambic shortening] by O. Skutsch,” concluding, “[I]t is all too clear that serviceable Rahmengesetze are the most one should aim for.” Why aim so low? The fact that no one has yet succeeded in devising a principle or set of principles that convincingly accounts for every instance of, e. g., iambic shortening means neither that no such principle(s) can be discovered, nor (most importantly) that we should not try to discover them. It is also wrong to criticize an approach that devises rules to account for the exceptions to other rules, which is simply the way of science.41 The plays of Plautus are a set of linguistic data generated by a set of principles and algorithms (the grammatical rules of the registers of Latin that he chose to use) modulated by an artistic will and disturbed by transmission errors, etc. If we succeed in accurately discovering those

41 The quote from Questa actually comes from a discussion that demonstrates this point quite nicely: in it, he talks about a rule of syllabification that has only one potential exception in all of Plautus, but the exception, if real, can be explained as a survival of an earlier rule. I discuss it in Ch. 7, n. 75.

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principles, we can diagnose where Plautuss will or transmission errors have interfered with predicted outcomes. As a brief coda to these deliberations, it may be helpful to put all this in the context of the philology of more recent texts where the autograph manuscript and the first edition survive. Such is the case with Nathaniel Hawthornes The House of the Seven Gables. According to Bowers (1964, 226), Hawthornes novel evinces “an average of ten to fifteen differences per page between the manuscript and the print, many of them consistent alterations from the manuscript system of punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and word division.” It can be partly determined which of these differences stem from the editor/publisher, since we can compare the manuscripts of other works by Hawthorne, but some of differences could also stem from changes made by Hawthorne himself. How much of the final product represents his intention is impossible to say; for that reason, Bowers says that the basis for a critical edition should be Hawthornes original, whose readings may be substituted by the textual critic with readings from printed editions only when evidence exists that the latter readings represent changes on the authors part. Even here, though, editorial decisions and editorial tastes affect the outcome: a textual critic who suspects that a particular deviation (in the printed edition) from the manuscript stems from a correction by Hawthorne, but cannot prove it, may or may not use that reading in his or her critical edition. Matters can quickly become very complicated when additional editions exist with different readings. I have no intention of pronouncing on how to construct a critical edition of Plautus, which is outside our scope and has been ably discussed elsewhere (as recently in Gratwick 2000); I merely wish to repeat that any critical editor of any work, ancient or modern, no matter how much evidence is available, does not have direct access to the full intentions of the author. I also differ from Bowers in one crucial respect: I would print as part of the fair text all deviations from the manuscript that could stem from the author, not just the proven ones. For Plautus we have no choice but to do this. Editions used; general guide and abbreviations I have relied in the main upon two editions of Plautuss comedies, Leos and Lindsays. Especially in those investigations where the data set was small, I was careful to consult both editions (and where necessary others as well). Normally when citing a line I give Lindsays reading unless stat-


19

ed otherwise. For electronic searches I used the Ibycus computer files. I refer to editions by the name of the editor only; a list of these can be found in the first part of the Bibliography. As I have used a variety of editions in gathering the material, I have not striven for absolute consistency in matters of spelling or punctuation.42 In general I have followed Lindsay unless otherwise noted, though I have (silently) not always maintained his spellings. Because I deemed it important for the linguistic discussions and generally useful that the reader be aware of where sentence boundaries are, I have departed from all the standard editions in capitalizing the first letter of every sentence. Most lines are cited in isolation, so if a line-beginning is not capitalized, it can safely be assumed that the line begins in mid-sentence. I have normally provided no translations of the quoted textual passages due to their number, so as to keep this book at a moderate length; where they have been included they are my own unless otherwise noted.

42 As pointed out by Redard (1956, 297), none of the standard editors has been consistent in these matters either (partly because of the state of the manuscripts, which offer a hodgepodge of truly archaic, modernized, and archaizing spellings). This inconsistency goes back to the Romans themselves. As Ernout (1993, 1:xxvii) wrote, “Il est impossible de donner pour le latin des rgles orthographiques tout fait strictes et uniformes, lorthographie latine nayant jamais te compltement unifie. Lorthographie en usage dans nos ditions classiques est souvent arbitraire et conventionnelle, quand elle nest pas simplement vicieuse.” (For this reference I am indebted to L. Ceccarelli.)

Chapter Two Plautine Iambo-Trochaics Plautine scansion As this book is directed not only towards Classicists but also towards linguists, it will be useful to outline the basic facts of Plautine scansion and versification. This overview is, of course, not meant to be exhaustive. In the previous chapter, it was mentioned that the Greco-Roman meters were quantitative, organized around alternations of light and heavy syllables.1 In a line of verse, syllabification normally proceeded as though there were no word-breaks, with any single consonant being syllabified as a syllable onset (that is, syllabified together with a following vowel). Thus a sequence like sed iste was syllabified se.dis.te. Most consonant clusters were divided down the middle—the first consonant being syllabified with the preceding vowel (rendering that syllable heavy), the second with the following.2 The only exception was muta cum liquida clusters, which consisted of a stop plus a resonant and were normally3 syllabified as onsets. Thus words like patrem were syllabified pa.trem. Certain word-ends are subject to elision, that is, are not reflected in the scansion. In Latin, any word-final syllable ending in a vowel, diphthong, or -m is ignored in the scansion if it is followed by a syllable beginning with a vowel, diphthong, or h-.4 Thus, to take a famous phrase from Vergil 1

2 3 4

“Short” and “long” can informally be used interchangeably with “light” and “heavy”, but strictly speaking the first pair refers just to vowels, the second to syllables. The terms “light” and “heavy” are imported from Sanskrit grammatical terminology by Allen (1973, 61 – 2, and see his preceding discussion, 53 ff.). Not all scholars have found the application of these terms to Classical metrics particularly useful (see the brief but incisive critique of Gratwick 1999, 221 n. 6). Consonant clusters included x (really [ks]); n.b. qu represented a single segment, the labiovelar stop [kw]. Exceptions are noted below. H was weakly pronounced and often disappeared entirely in Latin; word-initial h- counts for nothing in Latin poetry. However, there is some evidence that initial h- was at least a contributing factor to hiatus in Plautus (see the balanced appraisal of Ceccarelli 1991, 264, taking a middle road between Soubiran 1966, 97 ff. and the opposing views of Porzio Gernia 1974b). It is possible that h- was more strongly pronounced in Plautuss day than in later Latin (which is

Chapter Two: Plautine Iambo-Trochaics

21

(Aen. 3.658), where the lumbering blinded Cyclops is described as monstrum horrendum informe ingens, the final syllables of the first three words elide: monstr(um) horrend(um) inform(e) ingens. We do not know exactly how elided syllables were pronounced—whether they were dropped entirely (as in English don, doff < d(o) on, d(o) off, or poetic th offended King Shakespeare), or whether they “blended” somehow with the initial of the following word (technically called synaloephe). Sometimes elidable syllables did not undergo elision, a phenomenon called hiatus. Hiatus is far more frequent in Plautus than in Classical Latin poetry; the factors that caused elision to be blocked are not yet fully clear.5 There are a few differences between the scansion of Plautus and that of Classical Latin poetry. For references sake, I list the important ones; more detailed discussions can be found in the handbooks. A sequence of muta cum liquida, as noted above, does not make position (that is, close a preceding syllable) in Plautus, although it does if the cluster straddles a morpheme or word boundary6 (as, sub.linit, ab.ripuit, ut. rem versus pa.trem, po.plum).7 Etymologically long vowels before final -t, -r, and -l normally retain their length8 (thus, third singulars to stems in long vowels like the presents -a¯t

5

6 7

to say, it was pronounced as [h], as it is consistently written in Latin inscriptions up until the mid-first century B.C. (when it begins to be occasionally omitted) and appears to have participated in alliteration like other consonants (Birt 1899 and 1901, though his claim that it actually made position in Plautus is untenable). Sometimes hiatus corresponds to obvious prosodic breaks like end of sentence or change of speaker, but at other times prosodic conditions are difficult to motivate. I discuss one example in Ch. 5, p. 114 ff. For an in-depth treatment of elision in Latin, see Soubiran 1966. An old but still useful study of the pronunciation of elided syllables with a listing of words in which elision was lexicalized is Sturtevant and Kent 1915. Under this term I am including also clitic-group boundaries. Later practice fell under Greek influence and allowed either scansion, not infrequently in the same line, as marvelously (and iconically) exemplified by Ovid, Met. 13.607: et primo similis uolu.cri, mox uera uoluc.ris “and at first (it was) like a bird, (but) soon (it was) a real bird”

8

The syllabification of muta cum liquida and other consonant clusters will be discussed in greater detail in Ch. 7. See Ceccarelli 1991, 295 – 8 for an overview of some of the issues involved. Except when undergoing iambic shortening (Ch. 7). The scansion of final -Vt and -Vr is not entirely without controversy, though, and in this necessarily brief overview I must gloss over the problems. I return to some of the issues in Ch. 9. In general, see Ceccarelli 1999.

22


-e¯t -ı¯t of conjugations I, II, and IV; imperfect -ba¯t; subjunctives in -a¯t, -e¯t, -ı¯t;9 perfect indicative -ı¯t;10 imperative passives in -(n)to¯r; animate consonantstem nominative singulars like pate¯r,11 impera¯to¯r, soro¯r, facilio¯r; and neuters like calca¯r, anima¯l). The final syllables of the following words also scan as heavy: miles, hospes and other animate t-stems (probably really still miless, hospess < *milets, *hospets); the neuters hoc, istuc (really hocc istucc < *hod-c(e) *istud-c(e)), and cor (= corr < *cord); the adverb ter (= terr < *ters,12 cp. terr-uncius coin worth three unciae); and the 2nd singular verb form es thou art (also spelled ess on occasion).13 The iambo-trochaic meters of Sprechvers The metrical makeup of Plautuss plays departs significantly from that of his Greek models. Greek New Comedy consisted of two types of verse: spoken verse and recitative. Spoken verse makes up the vast majority, while recitative, which had simple musical accompaniment, constitutes the rest. The use of lyric sung meters was virtually unknown. The plays of Plautus, by contrast, contain about 38 % spoken verse, 48 % recitative, and 14 % lyric song. (The later playwright Terence was more Menandrian as far as lyric was concerned—his six plays have only three short lyric passages among them— but the amount of recitative is about the same as in Plautus.) In Plautus, spoken dialogue (also known as diuerbium or Sprechvers)14 was written in one meter, iambic senarius.15 Recitative consists of “long verse”, most commonly trochaic septenarius, but also iambic septenarius and iambic and trochaic octonarius. The lyric passages (cantica)16 9 So subjunctive faxı¯t, dı¯xerı¯t versus future faxı˘t, future perfect dı¯xerı˘t. 10 A possible, though controversial, exception is exconcinna¯uı˘t at Cist. 312. 11 Only once (Aul. 779); otherwise pate˘ r, presumably the normal pronunciation already in Plautuss day. Whether this pronunciation is to be attributed to iambic shortening or is actually an old vocative is disputed (cf. Lindsay 1922, 124 – 5; Gerschner 2002, 97). 12 Note that other words in -er from earlier *-ers (e. g. ager < *agers < *agr) s < *agros) scan with a light ultima; presumably shortening of *-err to -er occurred in polysyllables earlier than in the monosyllable ter. Cf. Gerschner 2002, 60. 13 This is also a feature of aphaeretized (see Ch. 6) 2nd sing. s: the last syllable of ama¯tus scans long (< ama¯tu(s e)ss). 14 Some authors distinguish the two, limiting diuerbium to verse recited without musical accompaniment and Sprechvers to any spoken (as opposed to sung) verse. 15 The meters will be described below. 16 In antiquity, canticum referred to any verse accompanied by music (i. e., anything besides diuerbium), but nowadays is generally used more limitedly. The is-


23

exhibit a prodigious variety of meters; because their scansion is not always agreed upon, they shall not concern us in this book except on occasion.17 As the behavior of the iambic and trochaic meters in Plautus is quite similar (see further below), they are usually treated together terminologically under the general rubric of “iambo-trochaics”. The iambic and trochaic meters are based on sequences of iambs (shortlong, [ –) and trochees (long-short, – [), respectively. In practice, pure iambs and trochees appear relatively rarely, owing to the frequent use of various allowable substitutions; it is best to think of iambs and trochees as simply the underlying template. The underlying long or heavy position of either an iamb or a trochee can be realized not only as a heavy syllable, but also as two light syllables (resolution; recall the previous chapter), yielding a tribrach ([[[). In addition, the short or light position of an iamb or trochee can be replaced by a heavy syllable, which in turn can be resolved as two light syllables. This yields four more possible feet: spondee (– –), dactyl (– [[), anapest ([[ –), and (with both positions resolved) proceleusmatic ([[[[). Note that an iamb cannot be substituted for by a trochee or vice versa (because an underlying heavy position cannot be substituted for by a single light syllable), but otherwise the two feet share the same set of possible substitutions. The underlying heavy position of an iamb or trochee is termed the strong time or arsis (Hebung in German) of the foot; the light, the weak time or thesis (Senkung).18 Thus if an iambic word ama¯s filled an iambic foot, the syllable a- would occupy the weak time or thesis, and -ma¯s the strong time or arsis. Likewise, if the iambic position were filled by hominibus (a proceleusmatic),19 homi-, being the resolution of a long substituted for the underlying short position, fills the weak time, and -nibus fills the strong time. If hominibus filled a trochaic foot, however, the reverse would be the case, since now homi- is the resolution of the underlying long of the trochee (strong time), and -nibus the resolution of a long substituted for the underlying short syllable (weak time). The commonest iambo-trochaic meters are the trochaic septenarius (or “septenarius” for short), the iambic senarius (“senarius” for short), sues surrounding the identification of cantica are rather complex; see Duckworth 1952, 362; Questa 1984, 161 – 91 passim; and Moore 1998 (with references to other literature). 17 The authoritative full edition of the Plautine cantica, complete with scansions, is Questa 1995. 18 Confusingly, these terms have sometimes been used with the opposite meanings. 19 In practice this happens only very rarely (Questa 1967, 129 ff.).

24


and the iambic septenarius.20 Plautus has roughly 8800 trochaic septenarii, 8000 senarii,21 and 1300 iambic septenarii. We shall discuss and exemplify each of these in turn. The trochaic septenarius is the Roman version of the Greek trochaic tetrameter catalectic:22 four measures of two trochees each, with the last position of the last measure omitted.The basic scheme is therefore seven trochees plus one syllable: – [ j – [ j – [ j – [ jj – [ j – [ j – [ j § jj The symbol jj indicates an obligatory word-break; the one after the fourth foot is called a diaeresis. The symbol § represents an anceps23 position—a position indifferent to quantity, able to be filled by a light or a heavy syllable (though no other substitutions were possible, i. e. it could not be resolved into two syllables). All the feet could be substituted for in the manner outlined above save the last full trochee, whose thesis must be a light syllable. Due to the substitutability of a long syllable for the other underlying short positions, one often sees the above line scheme represented as sequences of – § j – § j etc., but a distinction must be maintained between those positions that were resolvable as two short syllables and the last position in the line, which was not. Some examples (elided syllables are enclosed in parentheses):

The trochaic septenarius, Plautuss favorite meter, enjoyed popularity in many other forms of Latin poetry as well, especially in “lower” genres 20 Other iambo-trochaic meters, most notably the iambic octonarius (about 400 lines) and trochaic octonarius (about 150 lines) are used as well, but we shall not concern ourselves with them in detail. See n. 34 below. 21 The figure 8200 is sometimes given instead (as by Duckworth 1952, 362) but is erroneous. 22 In this discussion, I am taking for granted the traditional view that the Roman comic meters are Greek-derived rather than native (recall my remarks in Ch. 1, n. 2, and cf. further discussion in the notes below). 23 In keeping with common practice, I use the term anceps for any quantity-indifferent position in the line, even though strict usage requires indifferens for the line-final position (Rossi 1963, 61 ff.).


25

such as riddles, satirical songs, and folk tunes, where its common name was the uersus quadratus. 24 The iambic senarius, the Roman version of the Greek iambic trimeter (three measures of two iambs each), consists of six iambs: [ – j [ – j [ jj – j [ – j [ – j [ § jj The line-internal word-break is here termed a caesura, technically different from the diaeresis because it occurs within a foot and not between feet (more on which below). The caesura is nearly always present in Plautus, in contrast with the comic Greek trimeter, where it is less frequent (see e. g. Soubiran 1988, 122).25 The last iamb of the line must begin with a short, but aside from that the various substitutions discussed above are all possible. Some examples:

The alphabetic notation The analysis of the septenarius and the senarius presented above is the traditional one, datable to the first century B.C. or before,26 and is called a podic analysis because it breaks the line down into feet. However, dividing the line up this way is misleading for two principal reasons. First of all, it obscures certain identical structural points that the two meters hold in common. It may have been noticed that the senarius and septenarius both have an identical cadence ([ §), and if one counts backwards from that, ignoring foot-divisions, one sees the essential identity of the senarius with all of the septenarius after the latters opening cretic (– [ –): 24 See in general Gerick 1996. It has often been averred that the popular usage of the uersus quadratus points to a native origin of the meter rather than a Greek one (e. g. Duckworth 1952, 8), but this is not assured. 25 In my representational scheme, I have shown the canonical placement of the caesura after the fifth place in the senarius and of the diaeresis after the eighth place in the septenarius; less often, it is two places farther to the right. 26 As implied in Horace, Ars 251 – 60; see Gratwick 1993, 45 n. 57 and Gratwick 1999, 211, with a detailed critique of Horaces views of early Latin trimetrists in the latter work on pp. 233 – 7.

26


iambic senarius trochaic septenarius

[ – [ – [ jj – [ – [ – [ § jj – [ – [ – [ – [ jj – [ – [ – [ § jj

That the septenarius is therefore nothing other than a senarius preceded by a cretic was clear to the ancients as well.27 The podic analysis also does not reflect the fact that the basic unit of the senarius and septenarius was the measure, not the foot.28 A measure (also called a metron or dipody; I shall be using the terms interchangeably) consisted of two iambic feet. It will be convenient, following Handley (1965, 57) and the modifications of Gratwick (1986, 19 and 1993, 56),29 to consider the senarius and all but the first three positions of the septenarius as consisting of three measures of four positions each, and to label the positions of each measure alphabetically as A B C D. 30 A light syllable is represented by the relevant lower27 Note that the similarities between these two meters are apparent only when going from right to left, a common property of phonological systems, but perhaps not so ordinary for metrical systems. As Andrea Calabrese points out to me (p.c.), the counting from right to left seems to have overridden the differences that normally distinguish iambic from trochaic meters in various languages— the two rhythms have substantially different psychological effects, as many studies have shown. I should indeed not leave the impression that the Plautine senarius and septenarius were identical in all respects, for they evince clear differences in tone and style: the longer septenarii are much more discursive and flowery, for example, than the cleaner senarii. See Haffter 1934. This is also explicitly stated by Aristotle, Poetics 1449a 20 ff. (for the reference I am indebted to Lucio Ceccarelli). 28 I should note that this is not universally accepted. In particular, this approach has come under fire by those who want to see behind the Roman terms senarius and septenarius a clear distinction in line construction. Additionally, as Lucio Ceccarelli (p.c.) points out to me, the difference in treatment between the even and odd places in the line makes a comparison with Greek practice difficult. However, I do not believe that the findings in this book will be materially affected by the outcomes of this debate. See, with statistics, Gratwick 1993, 55 – 6. 29 Adopted now also by Christenson in his edition of the Amphitruo (2000, 65 – 8), though regrettably his metrical analyses of specific passages often leave something to be desired. 30 This view of the senarius and septenarius is already in Caesius Bassus (saec. i A.D.), and was standard knowledge in Imperial times (Gratwick 1993, 45 with n. 58). That the septenarius is the same as the senarius except for the opening cretic in the former has long been known, but rarely reflected in the technical terminology; merely the alphabetic notation is relatively new. Note that this view brings the senarius closer to the Greek model (at least in the abstract; see n. 33 below), which after all was iambic trimeter. Viewing iambic and trochaic meters as the same entities, with different nomenclature depending on where


27

case letter, a heavy syllable by the relevant upper-case letter, and a resolved heavy syllable by a doubled lower case letter; a vertical stroke can be optionally used to separate metra. Thus an iambic line opening terram conspiciunt (Men. 228) can be represented A B C dd j A. We may therefore replace the podic representational scheme with the following: iambic senarius trochaic septenarius

a B c D j a jj B c D j a B c D jj B c D j a B c D j a jj B c D j a B c D jj

Compare, for the senarii and trochaic septenarii cited above: a) senarius

b) septenarius

This system has the advantage of allowing one to collapse a number of otherwise apparently unrelated metrical rules and positions. For example, the break in the middle of the line is traditionally termed differently (caesura or diaeresis) depending on whether it occurs in a senarius or septenarius; this is because a distinction is made in podic analyses between word-breaks within a foot (caesurae) and those between feet (diaereses).31 But, as probably noticed already, the metron-based analysis reveals them to be one and the same, viz. one draws the dividing lines, may in fact belong to the most ancient layer of Greek metrical theory, to judge for instance by the fact that the words Ualboi and Qalbe ?a comprehend both iambics and trochaics in Aristotle (see the discussion in Cole 1988, 10 et passim). 31 No distinction between caesura and diaeresis was made by the ancients, see West 1982a, 292. Drexler (1950, 359 et passim) argues that the two do have a functional distinction, but I do not know if this is generally accepted.

28


iambic senarius a B c D a jj B c D a B c D jj trochaic septenarius B c D a B c D a jj B c D a B c D jj Since one of the key advantages of the alphabetic notation is that it allows us to refer to parallel and analogously behaving positions in the senarius and septenarius identically, we can refer to both the caesura and diaeresis as a break after the second-to-last A position. As an additional example of this notational advantage, we saw above that the D position at line-end is an anceps position, allowing a short syllable in place of a long (the phenomenon known as breuis in longo) and followed by hiatus separating it from the beginning of the next line; but it also happens that the other D positions in the line can behave similarly, especially the second-to-last.32 One might protest that because of the nomenclatural difference between “trimeter” and “senarius”, and “tetrameter” and “septenarius”, the Latin senarius and septenarius were thought of by the Romans as consisting of six and seven feet, respectively, and not three and four measures, and that therefore the system adduced by Handley, whatever its merits for understanding the Greek trimeter and tetrameter, does not in fact carry over to Latin. The view that the names senarius and septenarius rest upon a podic structural conception is, of course, true at a basic level (where else would the labels have come from?), and is already found in the ancient grammarians (Atilius Fortunatianus 6.286.14 Keil: “Hic latine senarius, quod pedes sex simplices habeat, graece trimeter, quod tres sufuc_ar habeat, appellatur,” “This is called senarius in Latin because it has six single feet, [but] trimeter in Greek because it has three dipodies”); in more recent times, Halporn and Ostwald (1962, 19) have remarked, “Schon der Name [des Senars] … zeigt, daß die Rçmer beim iambischen Vers die Fße und nicht die Metren zhlten.” But a change in the way a meter is named (e. g. from trimeter to senarius), while it certainly reflects a change in descriptive analysis, does not necessarily imply a change in the nature of the meter; this was already pointed out by Lindsay (1922, 13). There is no evidence from Plautine metrical practice that would militate against adopting a Handleian representational framework; all the evidence, in fact, speaks strongly for it.33 32 This is Jacobsohns Law, treated in detail in Ch. 4. 33 This is not to imply that Roman practice was identical to Greek. There are numerous differences: in gross terms, the Greek iambic trimeter was more clearly


29

So much for the senarius and trochaic septenarius; we must now turn to the third common iambo-trochaic meter, the iambic septenarius. This meter is historically of a different structure. Technically it is an iambic tetrameter catalectic, that is, a line consisting of two iambic dimeters with the second dimeter lacking the last syllable. An iambic dimeter is a sequence of two iambic measures that obligatorily ends [ § . Thus an iambic septenarius is divided down the middle: [ – [ – j [ – [ § jj [ – [ – j [ – § jj As with the senarius, all the shorts can be replaced by longs, except the fourth. The break between the second and third metra is strong, and hiatus is common here. In the alphabetic analysis, the scheme translates to a B c D a B c D jj a B c D a B C jj Some examples:

In the alphabetic notation:

For descriptions of the rarer iambo-trochaic meters, as well as the meters of the cantica, see Lindsay 1922; Questa 1967; and Questa 1973.34

based on an alternation of short and long, while the Latin senarius is much more spondaic, lending it a different feel (as emphasized in Ceccarelli 1998 and 2000). For a convenient listing of the metrical rules of the stricter Latin iambic trimeter (closest to the Greek model) and the comic iambo-trochaic meters, see Raven 1965, 41 – 89, who also (47) defends the analysis of iambo-trochaics into metra rather than feet. 34 For reference purposes, I append here examples of the trochaic and iambic octonarius (without the alphabetic notation, which is mainly applicable to the sen-

30


So much for an introduction to the meters; in the next two chapters we shall turn to a linguistic examination of a selection of Plautine metrical practices to determine what information they provide us about the prosody of Latin speech. Before proceeding, I should recall my philosophical tenets about metrical laws stated in Ch. 1: these are modern labels, and refer to statistical tendencies; part of my claim is that their existence should fall out from basic properties of the prosody of Latin. For ease of exposition I shall however be using traditional terminology like law, violation, breach, allowed, etc., but these terms should not be taken too literally as necessarily reflecting either a poets obedience to, or his infraction of, explicitly dictated codes of Roman poetic behavior.35 The ictus-accent question One metrical phenomenon that historically has been used to investigate the phrasal articulation of Latin speech is the verse ictus, the beat of the line. There is great disagreement about its nature and whether there even was such a thing in Plautine poetry at all.36 In iambo-trochaics the ictus is said to have fallen on the strong time (arsis) of every foot, where it coincides more than half the time with a word-accent. But arius and septenarius). The trochaic octonarius is a trochaic tetrameter acatalectic, i. e. like the septenarius but without omission of the final arsis:

Similarly, the iambic octonarius is an iambic septenarius plus one position:

35 To the list of feet given above I append the following list of other feet that will occasionally be mentioned: pyrrhic bacchiac cretic

[[ [–– –[–

molossus first paeon fourth paeon

––– –[[[ [[[–

These are not substitutable for iambs or trochees, of course, but are useful as labels for certain sequences of syllables or the shapes of certain words. 36 Ictus is not mentioned by the ancients, though that is not sufficient to decide the question (various other phenomena, such as iambic shortening, are not mentioned by the ancients either, but are known to have been real). For an extensive recent study (with a negative result), see Stroh 1990.


31

since the number of cases where the two do not coincide is not small, a debate has arisen, dating back to Bentleys De metris Terentianis swed_asla in his 1726 edition of Terences comedies (pp. i–xix), over whether Plautus and the other Roman comic writers strove to match the ictus with word-accent. Bentleys edition included ictus marks for the didactic purpose of allowing schoolboys to put the beat on the lines correctly in recitation. He was certain of the historical correctness of this, and wrote (p. xvii), Iam vero id Latinis Comicis, qui Fabulas suas populo placere cuperent, magnopere cavendum erat, ne contra Linguae genium Ictus seu Accentus in quoque versu syllabas verborum ultimas occuparent.37

He did not trouble himself overly with the apparent exceptions to this statement, but did note cases of enclisis that could affect the position of the accent; in general he was of the opinion that the poets could take licenses (“nimirum aures vel invitae patienter id ferebant, sine quo ne una quidem in fabula scaena poterat edolari,” “doubtless even unwilling ears would patiently endure what not even a single scene of a play could be finished without”). Gottfried Hermann, in his Elementa doctrinae metricae (1816, 63 f.), expanded Bentleys teaching; he in turn was followed by his illustrious pupil Friedrich Ritschl, who famously wrote in the Prolegomena to his edition of the Trinummus (1848, ccvii) that, along with observing quantity, the comic poets also respected the position of the accent “quoad eius fieri posset” (“to the extent that [respecting] it could happen”; italics in original). The crux of the problem, of course, is how much of the time fieri poterat? Soon opponents of the Bentley-Hermann-Ritschl doctrine were asserting themselves. One of the first was Lucian Mller, who claimed the poets sometimes strove specifically for clash of ictus and accent (1869); he was followed by W. Corssen, who proved (1868 – 70, 2:948 – 1000) that the combined independent tendencies of both ictus and word-accent to fall on heavy syllables conspired to make the two coincide more frequently than not. The dispute has continued unabated to the present day. Contemporary voices against the theory of ictus-accent agreement include the Italian metrician Cesare Questa, while the princi37 “Furthermore, the Latin comic playwrights, desirous that their plays please the audience, had to take particular care that the ictus or accent in each verse did not occupy the final syllables of words against the spirit of the language.”

32


pal modern defenders of the Bentleyan doctrine were Eduard Fraenkel and Hans Drexler. Fraenkels and Drexlers most important contributions to the discussion were their investigations into phrasal accent. Under their approach, whole phrases are claimed to have cohered in such a way as to be stressed as a unit, with the result that individual lexemes within the phrase may or may not have had their stress shifted from its normal position; additionally, an ictus that falls on the last syllables of a word—a problem for anybodys theory of ictus-accent agreement—could be explained as reflecting secondary accentuation. Some of Fraenkels main conclusions were falsified in a famous review by the metrician P. Maas (1929), who showed that several of the metrical phenomena in Plautus on which Fraenkel based his findings are also present in Greek, where there was no stress-accent, and thus a Latin-specific explanation for them based on the positioning of the stress-accent is potentially misguided. Fraenkel himself later recanted many of his earlier claims on the subject. If there was such a thing as the verse ictus and if Plautus did strive to match it with a stress-accent, and if the placement of the ictus sometimes reflects phrasal accentuation rather than simply the accentuation of individual words, then we would be afforded an extremely valuable window onto the nature and structure of the prosodic domain–construction of Plautine Latin. A great difficulty with adducing the ictus-accent data as evidence for prosodic domain construction is the lack hitherto of independent controls. For example, the adjective malus generally appears with the ictus on the ultima in the common phrase malm rem. 38 Since malam should ordinarily be stressed on the first syllable, many people, naturally enough, have claimed that malam rem formed a tight phrase that was accented as a single word (malm-rem) by the Latin stress rule, and that it is this accentuation that is represented by the ictus on -m. (The Latin stress rule accents the antepenultimate syllable unless the penult is heavy, in which case the latter receives the stress: thus mlite¯s but soro´¯ re¯s.)39 But without independent evidence that malam rem formed

38 The ictus is represented by an acute accent. 39 I am being purposefully vague here, as strict distinctions between, and definitions of, “tight phrase”, “single word”, “clitic group”, “single accent group”, and similar terms are almost entirely lacking in the traditional literature. This is one of the great difficulties with assessing this scholarship. Most phonological theories, to my knowledge, would predict only single phonological words and clitic groups to have formed unitary accent domains, though the latter need


33

a single accentual domain, such claims are purely speculative, especially when special pleading is needed to account for the exceptions. In addition, as was noted already in the preceding chapter and is discussed further in Ch. 7, it is very unlikely that large phrases would have been accented according to the word-level accentuation rule. Without clear evidence that there even was a verse ictus in Roman poetry, we cannot depend upon it for information about Plautine Latin prosodic organization, and I will not be considering it in this book. Our goal will be rather to examine other, in my opinion more reliable, sources of information that are quite independent of the metrical ictus, and that have been underexploited in much of the literature. The results of these studies may provide evidence to bear on the ictus-accent question, but that is a matter that will be left to others to pursue. In this book, the ictus will generally not be indicated unless it is necessary for the discussion.40

not behave the same as phonological words (discussion of which follows in various sections of this book). 40 Editors generally indicate the ictus with an acute accent over the relevant syllable, but vary quite a bit as to how often they indicate it. In Leos and Lindsays editions, ictus marks are provided in iambo-trochaic meters as sparingly as possible—only to alert the reader to a scansional irregularity. Both the “large” and “small” Teubner editions of Loewe, Goetz and Schoell, however, regularly mark every odd-numbered ictus of a line.

Chapter Three The Linguistic Background of Luchss Law Introduction to Meyers and Luchss Laws In this and the following chapter, we shall investigate two interrelated laws, Meyers Law and Luchss Law, as well as a third, Jacobsohns Law. In traditional terms, Meyers Law1 can be stated as follows: If an unaccented word-end falls in the fourth or eighth position in the senarius, or the seventh or eleventh position in the septenarius, it cannot be preceded by a heavy syllable (or its resolution of two shorts).2 In the alphabetic notation, a D position if filled by unaccented word-end, i. e. by anything but a monosyllable (… D/; I shall use the slash to indicate word-end), should be approached … c D/ and not … C D/. Luchss Law3 states essentially the opposite for the second-to-last long in the line: if an unaccented word-end falls in the second-to-last long in the line, it should be preceded by a long rather than a short. In alphabetic notation, this means that a long B/ in the last metron should be approached … A B/ and not … a B/. The combination of these two laws yields a measure of the shape A B/ c D/; as it turns out, this is a subtype of the preferred shape for the Plautine dipody, which is A B c D regardless of word-end. Gratwick (1993, 57) has stated the situation as follows: 1

2

3

Meyer 1884 [1886]. It has not commonly been called “Meyers Law” until recently, following Questa (1967); in German the standard term for the phenomenon is Meyers own, namely the Dipodiengesetz. As Gratwick (1991) points out, this phenomenon, as so much else, seems to have been noticed already in the 1700s by Richard Bentley, and by Friedrich Bothe in the following century. According to the statistics in Soubiran 1988, 340, the law is actually observed much more consistently in Phaedrus than in Plautus or Terence. See Gratwick 1981, 348 – 9 for some discussion of the rule as it applies specifically to the fourth position in the senarius and the seventh in the septenarius (first D in the former, second D in the latter); he regards it as generally ignored in the literature for these earlier positions in the line. Luchs 1873. The rule was already noticed by Bentley in his second (1713) edition of Horace (ad Sat. 2.5.79, p. 513: “raro enim aut nusquam in sede quinta Jambum pedem usurpant Comici Latini,” “for rarely or never do the Latin comic writers use an iamb [= iambic word] in the fifth foot”), and is also called the Law of Bentley-Luchs.

Chapter Three: The Linguistic Background of Luchss Law

35

Cretic sequences [i.e., – [ –] should generally be set as … B c D … rather than as … D a B … passim, regardless of word-end … Meyers and Luchs laws are really only the most explicit cases of [this] basic preference. Their purpose is to reinforce a Roman sense that … – [ – j is properly a rhythm of metrical cadence, imposed on an otherwise undifferentiated matrix of even gait, – – – – – – …

Any sequence of B c D demarcates a colon-end4 and is therefore “rhythmically analogous to a real line-end” even in the middle of the line (ib.). The “ideal” measure A B c D is far more frequent than the double iambic a B c D;5 a holoiambic line such as Menander, Dysk. 52

is exceptionally rare in Plautus.6 In the 414 senarii of the Menaechmi, for instance, there is only one such (Men. 300), and it is additionally peculiar in not containing a caesura:7

4

5

6

7

A colon is an ancient rhetorical term for a unit of speech intermediate between a period (a complete, multi-clause sentence) and a comma (phrase or short clause), i. e. a syntactically but not logically complete clause or a sequence of words rhetorically equivalent to a clause. It typically consists of several words forming a syntactic or phonological phrase, sometimes a complete short sentence. Gratwick, ib. 260, claims a B c D is the preferred measure in the Greek trimeter; this is debatable. The figures in Ceccarelli 2000 show that spondees are marginally more common in A positions in the trimeter than iambs. To be sure, holoiambic lines are rare in Greek comedy too, with a rate of about one per seventy lines (based on the figures in White 1912, 37 and 58), but this is a good bit commoner than in Plautus. Men. 750 (Negas nouisse me? Negas patrem meum?) is said by Gratwick ad loc. to consist of pure iambs, but this is incorrect because of the long o¯ of no¯uisse. He also adduces line 91 (suo arbitratu, ad fatim, cottidie [with hiatus before ad]) as a possible further example if one reads quotı¯die¯ and if one reads arbitratu with short ultima before the hiatus. The latter is a generally accepted possibility, but not until Martial is the first syllable of cottidie (or, strictly speaking, the derived adjective cotidianus) securely attested as short, and anyway the expected cottidie gives a perfect A B c D cadence. (To be sure, as Lucio Ceccarelli points out to me [p. c.], cot(t)idie is poorly attested in poetry after Plautus because it is difficult to set in dactylic verse, and so the non-appearance of cotidie until Martial may not be very significant. However, inscriptional spellings with cott- are attested much earlier than cot- or quot-, which do not appear until Imperial times; see Sommer-Pfister 158.) Thus correct the top figures in Gratwicks table, p. 259.

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qui amicam habes eram meam hanc Erotium As the avoidance of pure iambic measures a B c D is peculiar to the Roman senarius and not true of its Greek model,8 the explanation for this must lie in some characteristic of Latin. The secondary literature on this subject generally cites the statistical preponderance of heavy syllables in Latin to explain both this and the greater frequency of spondees relative to dactyls in the Latin dactylic hexameter. This is unquestionably a contributing factor, although it does not explain specifically the particular preference for cadential – – [ §. I would here like to adduce Fraenkels observation (1968, 30 – 1, 91 – 3, and 190 – 2) that – – [ § is an extremely common rhythm of cola in Latin prose, especially when such cola are set apart from the rest of the sentence.9 Cola of the form [ – [ § are also observed, but are much rarer than – – [ § (p. 191). Fraenkel does not combine this observation with Plautuss preference for the same sequence in his poetry, and the two of course do not explain each other; but I would submit that if – – [ § was a rhythmic feature characteristic both of poetic line-ends and of prose, it must have been a feature of the prosody of Latin speech. Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, Fraenkel goes on to remark (p. 191) that the iambic metron – – [ § dient nicht als Klausel, das heisst es bildet niemals den rhythmischen Abschluss eines schon vorher begonnenen syntaktischen Kolons. Dagegen kann ein geschlossenes Kolon diesen Rhythmus ohne weiteres ans Ende einer Reihe oder eines Satzes treten.

This must be qualified in light of the findings of Aili 1979, however, who undertook a study of the structure of clausulae (ends of periods) in Cicero 8

9

So too are Meyers and Luchss laws peculiar to the Roman senarius, and not borrowed from Greek. The closest parallel in Greek of which I am aware is the Law of Wilamowitz-Knox, which states that the last A B cannot be a single word in the iambographers (but can be in tragedy), whether spondee or iamb; this of course is still quite different from Luchs, although one can imagine that the ultimate rationale for both Wilamowitz-Knox and Luchs could be identical—the desire to avoid a break directly before the cadential iamb. In any event, the Latin-specific manifestation of this rationale still requires its own account, independent of the Greek. “Besonders leicht ins Ohr fallen die Stellen, an denen es, innerhalb einer Aufzhlung oder einer sonstigen Reihe paralleler Kola, nach vorn und nach hinten deutlich abgesetzt ist” (p. 91). Fraenkel does not define what he means by “abgesetzt”, but the cola he adduces as examples include (short) full sentences, clauses, and syntactically complete phrases.


37

and the historical writers Sallust and Livy: in all these authors, – – [ § was a perfectly acceptable (and sometimes favored) rhythm for clausulae. But one should probably not make too much of this fact, since other rhythms were even more common, and there is wide variation among different Latin prose-writers in what (if any) clausulae were favored.10 The next few sections will examine Meyers and Luchss laws and their allowable exceptions in more detail, focusing on what information on prosodic domain construction can be gleaned from them. I should note that I make no attempt to encompass every aspect of these laws, the literature on which is extensive and intricate; I deal only with a selection of issues surrounding them. I begin with Luchss Law. Violations of Luchss Law Luchss Law, to repeat, says that the second-to-last foot in the line cannot be filled by an iambic word-end (thus a B/ c D is not allowed, with wordbreak after B). In his own discussion, Luchs (1873, 13 ff.) noted several classes of exceptions where such a sequence appeared to be licensed. I will now treat each of these in turn, reproducing his examples (supplemented as necessary). For philological details concerning these lines, see his discussion and, where it has been superseded, the footnotes below. 1) The fifth foot may be filled by an iamb that forms the end of a fourth-paeon word ([ [ [ –); in alphabetic notation, line-final a B c D is allowed under the configuration dd a B/ c D. I reproduce Luchss examples (p. 14), with the addition of Bac. 220 (Lindsay 1922, 271): Am. 188 Victores uictis hostibus legiones reueniunt domum, 11 Am. 983 Atque ut ministres mihi, quom sacruficem mihi. 10 There is the additional question, which cannot be entered into here, of the extent of Hellenistic influence on the preferred rhythms of clausulae in Latin prose; Aili believes that the influence of Xenophon and Thucydides explains the particular preferences exhibited by Sallust and Livy. But that of course does not rule out the possibility that – – [ § was already a common rhythm in Latin speech, and that Livy, Sallust, and perhaps others found Xenophons and Thucydidess practice simply a reason to exploit it. It is unlikely that the question can ever be definitively settled. (I should note that Ailis methodology has been criticized in Aumont 1996, 47 – 57, but I have not been able to evaluate his arguments. Those interested in pursuing these matters further should not overlook Aumonts Ch. XI, which contains a comparative study of the clausulae of Roman prose and of the iambo-trochaic meters.) 11 Ms. cum mihi sacruficem, which does not scan.

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Bac. 220 Cur. 86 Men. 550 Mos. 5712 Poen. 27 Rud. 1247

Nam istoc fortasse aurost opus. Philippeo quidem. Quisnam istic fluuiust, quem non recipiat mare? Iamne intro abiit? Abiit, operuit foris. Stimulis * * , si huc reueniat senex. Si minus curassint, quom eri reueniant domum. ne conscii sint ipsi malefici suis.

Lindsay (ib.) seems to have regarded the first as unsure, since he does not list it with his “strong examples”, but the reading is secure. Gratwick (Men. 550 ad loc.) says that these exceptions remain unexplained. Whatever the explanation,13 they must be considered in light of Luchss next class of exceptions: 2) An iamb is allowed in the fifth foot if it forms the end of an anapest-shaped word ([ [ –) preceded by a short (yielding a line-end [ / [ [ – / [ § jj with actual foot-division [ [ j [ – j [ § jj, or in alphabetic notation, d/ d a B/ c D). Luchs grouped his examples into three classes, the first two of which I shall argue are really identical to the exceptions in (1) above. 2a) The sequence dd a B consists of a pyrrhic with elided ultima plus a following anapestic word (pp. 15 – 16):14 Aul. 20 Cas. 387 Cist. 14815 Ep. 45 Ep. 601

Item a me contra factum est: nam item obiit diem. Vxor, aequa. :: Noli uxori credere. :: Habe animum bonum. meminisse ego hanc rem uos uolo. Ego abeo domum. Qur eam emit? :: Animi caussa. :: Quot illic homo animos habet? Perii misera! :: Ne fle, mulier. Intro abi, habe animum bonum.

12 Though the beginning of the line is corrupt, the end is sure. 13 Calvert Watkins (p.c.) is reminded of the rhythmic rule underlying the distribu˘C tion of 3rd-io¯ and 4th-conjugation verb stems: -i- after a root of the shape (C)V (e. g. ap- cap- fod-i-) but -ı¯- after a heavier or disyllabic root (aud- haur- sepel-ı¯-). I have, however, not been able to draw any conclusions from this comparison. 14 I omit the metrically difficult Am. 545 and the corrupt Truc. 526. 15 Added by Lindsay (1922, 271), who notes the possibility of scanning ego with hiatus.


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Men. 39916 Egoquidem neque umquam uxorem habui neque habeo neque huc Mer. 394 Vidi. Verum non ex usu nostrost neque adeo placet. Mer. 859 neque mihi ulla opsistet amnis nec mons neque adeo mare Mil. 80417 lepidiores duas ad hanc rem quam ego. Habe animum bonum. Mil. 110418 Qui tu scis eas adesse? :: Quia oculis meis Mil. 135719 multo quam alii libertus esse. :: Habe animum bonum. Mos. 52320 Quid faciam? :: Caue respexis, fuge, operi caput. Mos. 109021 Experiar, ut opino. :: Certum est. Mihi hominem cedo. Per. 733 Redis tu tandem? :: Redeo. :: Ne ego hodie tibi Poen. 904 Is in diuitias homo adoptauit hunc quom diem obiit suom.

16 Gratwick notes the curious enjambement of 399 – 400 (… huc j umquam …), for he says that huc-umquam is really one word. I doubt that that is correct. The two lines read in his edition: Ego quidem neque umquam uxorem habui neque habeo neque huc umquam postquam natus sum intra portam penetraui pedem. “Why, I never had a wife, and have none now, and never from the day I was born have I put a foot within your city gate here.“ (Nixon, line-division added)

17 18

19 20 21

While Gratwick is surely correct to assert that there is no strong break between the lines, huc and umquam are simply two adverbs modifying the verb, and if anything, umquam would appear to be more closely connected with the following postquam (at any time after …, ever since …) than to the preceding huc (though Lindsay punctuates with a comma after umquam). With hiatus after quam, unless one follows Luchs in inserting dabo after ego. Soubiran (1995, 35 and 244) prefers to scan quia¯ oculı¯s with hiatus and breuis in longo (the setting of a light syllable in a metrically heavy position, especially—as here—in the second-to-last D, the so-called locus Jacobsohnianus; see the next chapter). But hiatus, though frequent in the loci Jacobsohniani (16), almost always occurs after words ending in -m; Plautus strongly disfavored placing a word-final short vowel in hiatus in these positions. I know of only two examples, both from the same play (Ep. 214 and 653), and would therefore hesitate to accept Soubirans scansion, pending further research. Bothes emendation for ms. habeo bonum animum, followed by Lindsay. Leo has Habe bonum animum (ametrical!, see Soubiran 1995 ad loc.). In parentheses in Luchs. Guietus, followed by modern editors, brackets ms. atque between fuge and operi. Speaker division and wording debated; Leo reads, Experiar, ut opinor. Certum est. :: mihi hominem cedo.

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Poen. 915 Et ita hoc fiet. :: Proba materies data est, si probum adhibes fabrum. Ps. 524 Prius quam istam pugnam pugnabo, ego etiam prius Ps. 585 Ballionem exballistabo lepide: date operam modo. Rud. 77 ad uillam illius, exsul ubi habitat senex. Trin. 843 Huic ego die nomen Trinummo facio: nam ego operam meam Trin. 878 Fac me, si scis, certiorem hosce homines ubi habitent, pater. Trin. 897 Ita ut occepi, si animum aduortas, dicam. :: Dabo operam tibi. This set of exceptions is fairly clearly defined. The initial pyrrhic in the vast majority (eighteen out of twenty-two) is an unstressed element or verb: a verb six times (either habe in habe animum bonum or a form of dare in dare operam, plus fuge discussed below), the negative neque three times, a pronoun five times (ego, mihi), a conjunction twice (quia, ubi), and an adverb twice (item, ibi). These phrases may be assumed to have formed clitic groups. The patterning of the short verb forms with identically shaped clitics is probable evidence for similar weak prosodic status of these verb forms (how weak remains to be ascertained); this topic will be dealt with further in Ch. 5. Clearly fixed idioms such as dabo operam, habe animum (bonum) formed tight phonological phrases, with the result that these exceptions to Luchss Law can be grouped with those in (1) for all intents and purposes.22 There is a considerable body of cross-linguistic evidence that idiomatic fixed phrases “become domains for word prosody rather than phrase prosody” (Devine and Stephens 1994, 349; see their examples, 348 – 9). The four lines that do not fit this pattern are: Ep. 45 Mos. 523

Qur eam emit? :: Animi caussa. :: Quot illic homo animos habet? Quid faciam? :: Caue respexis, fuge, operi caput.

22 This is done also by Questa 1967, 191. I will be distinguishing “words” from clitic groups: the former were a single accentual domain, the latter were not. See further below.


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Poen. 904 Is in diuitias homo adoptauit hunc quom diem obiit suom. Poen. 915 Et ita hoc fiet. :: Proba materies data est, si probum adhibes fabrum. On closer inspection, however, a good case can be made that each of the boldfaced sequences contains a prosodically deficient element. Homo, though not a function word like the forms just discussed, is nonetheless rather bland (person, guy), and occurs twenty-eight times in the very phrase illic homo that guy;23 note its reduction to an impersonal clitic in French on, and the fact that in Plautus it is frequently reduced to homo˘ by iambic shortening, which, as we shall see in Ch. 7, typically affected unstressed or weakly stressed sequences.24 The second sequence, fuge, operi at Mos. 823, may well be a serial verb construction, as Brent Vine suggests to me (p.c.), in spite of the (modern) punctuation separating them; serial verb constructions cross-linguistically tend to cohere into single prosodic domains, with especially the first verb becoming reduced. The third and fourth passages pattern together in containing a sentence-final NP rendered discontinuous by the verb, a rather frequent type of discontinuity or hyperbaton. Since the other twenty examples of type (2a) that we have just seen clearly or probably contained a prosodically deficient element, it should be the case that these remaining two examples do so as well. The most likely candidate is the verb. In hyperbata of the type Noun–X–Adj. or Adj.–X–Noun (where the adjective and noun form an NP), X is not a focused or stressed element, as in constructions of the magna cum laude type that will be discussed in Ch. 5. Additionally, the word preceding the verb in each case is also not focused or contrasted, yielding a sequence of two words that could have together formed a prosodic unit of low overall prominence. Diem obiit is an idiom for he died, the same one seen above at Aul. 20; in the case of probum adhibes fabrum, the noun fabrum is the only piece of new information and is therefore delayed until the end (“Youll have good material if you get a good craftsman”). The appearance of the verb in second-to-last position in such sentences might be due to the workings of a sort of “re-

23 Drexler 1969a, 159, though he lists only some of the examples. 24 To be sure, there are assured examples of illic homo where no shortening took place, but presumably the full form could always be used at will.

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verse Wackernagels Law” whereby a prosodically weak clause-final verb and the preceding last member of an NP are flipped.25 2b) The second class of exceptions is similar to (2a), except the first short is occupied by a consonant-final word that does not elide with the following word, or is separated prosodically by hiatus from it:26 25 Not much to my knowledge has traditionally been written on “gedeckte Endstellung” of the verb, to use the term in Szantyr 1965, 404; along with other issues of Latin word-order it is traditionally treated under the domain of stylistics rather than syntax. Rendering a sentence-final phrase discontinuous by inserting the verb is discussed briefly by Marouzeau (1953, 54), who says a number of instances of verbs occurring second to last in their clause are due to metrical considerations (as this can allow an iambic noun or adjective to fill the last foot). This statement contrasts with the same authors claim (1938, 82 – 3) that this word-order in some texts “est si frquente quelle semble normale autant et plus que la finale” and confers no discernible pragmatic strength to either the verb or to neighboring elements. Note also the study of Adams (1971) of this order in prose, where considerations of meter are not present (though other rhythmic principles might be). The only work known to me to grapple seriously with the syntax of this word-order and the conditions on it is Devine and Stephens 2006, 125 ff. et passim. I use the term “reverse Wackernagels Law” very loosely, of course, since I am not claiming that verbs are clitics (the normal type of word affected by the real law). After coming up with this hypothesis, I was pleased to see that Devine and Stephens (ib., 130 – 5) also attribute these word orders to prosodic inversion, though they develop the hypothesis in a different way from how I would. In their view, the whole verb-object phrase has an “impoverished informational structure”, causing stress reduction of the object and consequent inability of it to project its own prosodic domain. The prosodic domain thus formed, consisting of unstressed object plus stressed verb, has a weak-strong stress contour rather than the normal trochaic (strong-weak) contour of Latin prosodic phrases; this stress-clash is avoided by flipping the order of the two words. In my view, the most semantically and prosodically impoverished member of the phrase was the verb, not the noun, as I will argue later (see Ch. 9), so the resultant VO order would still not have formed a trochaic phrase; but the evidence for “correction” of clash between an assumed ideal rhythm and a deviant surface rhythm in Latin is not good, as we will see in particular in Ch. 7 concerning certain widespread accounts of iambic shortening. Devine and Stephens conclude that a prosodic inversion approach works well for some examples of this order but is ultimately only one of several factors involved; that is probably correct, though I have not yet been able to look into the matter further. 26 Luchs also includes Cur. 66 Qui quod lenoni nulli est id ab eo petas


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Am. 91427 Aul. 531 Cist. 596 Men. 64028

uerum periclitatus sum animum tuom. spes prorogatur militi in alium diem. Deos teque spero.— :: Eosdem ego—ut abeas domum. Me rogas? :: Pol hau rogem te si sciam. :: O hominem malum, Mer. 20229 emisse illam. :: Visun est tibi credere id? :: Etiam rogas? Mil. 39 Facete aduortis tuom animum ad animum meum. Mil. 1142 Vt lepide deruncinauit militem. :: At etiam parum. Poen. 500 omnis extollo ex hoc die in alium diem. Ps. 810 Non ego item cenam condio ut alii coqui. Trin. 311 Nimio satiust ut opust ted ita esse quam ut animo lubet. Truc. 49 Si raras noctes ducit, ab animo perit; Truc. 502 Peperit mulier, ut ego opinor. :: Vin adeam ad hominem? :: Volo. Similar to the preceding set of examples, the sequence [ / [ [ – / in almost all these cases begins with a preposition or conjunction governing or introducing the following word, to which it was most likely prosodically subordinate or cliticized. Only Am. 914 and Mer. 202 require a different analysis. The second of these might scan with id metrically lengthened (Jacobsohns Law, see Ch. 4), as Lucio Ceccarelli suggests (p.c.); this could also be the case with Am. 914. This is attractive since sum is leftleaning (it may have been cliticized to the preceding participle), and either animum tuom has been right-extraposed (moved rightward around the normally sentence-final verb), or the periphrastic verb has been raised in front of the object. In other words a prosodic break between sum and the following material is probable, and reflected in the hiatus after the verb. The same is true in Mer. 202. My only hesitation in treating these as loci Jacobsohniani is that the lines do not absolutely require an analysis invoking metrical lengthening in order to scan, and therefore I will not be including them with the assured examples of this phenomenon in the next chapter.

since, as he says, ab eo counts as one word; this view is followed by Questa (1967, 191). However, we will see evidence below and in Chs. 5 and 7 that prepositional phrases did not productively form single phonological words, only clitic groups. 27 Hiatus after sum. See discussion below. 28 Hiatus after O. 29 See below in the main text for an alternative scansion.

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I will defer until the next chapter a discussion of the possible principles that allow for these exceptions to Luchss Law. 2c) Luchss third and final group of examples in this class (p. 17) are now known to contain loci Jacobsohniani and will be discussed in the next chapter.30 Many of these examples were emended by 19th-century editors to avoid hiatus, but the manuscript transmission is secure and the readings with hiatus seem preferable to reading an iambic fifth foot. 3) About two dozen lines ending in malam crucem (D a B c D) form the next class of exceptions to the rule. Luchs claims (pp. 20 – 21) that since the order malam crucem is never reversed (*crucem malam) and the phrase is never discontinuous,31 malam crucem functioned as a single word, and not as two iambic words; this exception to the law is therefore only apparent. The characterization of malam crucem as a single word has become generally accepted,32 and I believe the evidence from Luchss

30 There is an additional set of two exceptions at Poen. 290 and Ps. 800: Poen. 290 Nam illa mulier lapidem silicem subigere, ut se amet, potest. Ps. 800 Sed quor sedebas in foro, si eras coquos. Luchs explains these away by positing a hiatus between the two boldfaced words. Loewe, Goetz and Schoell, as well as Lindsay, make no indication of the hiatus, but A. S. Gratwick (p.c.) considers Luchss scansions to be correct, as does Questa (1967, 190) for the Pseudolus verse. 31 There are two possible counterexamples, both of which are doubtful. The first is: Cas. 641 Optine auris, amabo. :: I in malam a me crucem! P does not transmit a me. The line is in cretic tetrameter, a cantica meter whose basic scheme is four cretics (– [ – – [ – jj – [ – – [ –); however, the second hemistich is frequently filled by a shorter colon of the shape – [ – [ –, and this scansion would be obtained by leaving out a me. If one retains a me, it would scan as an ordinary cretic tetrameter. Either reading has disadvantages: retaining a me produces the highly unusual splitting of malam crucem but an ordinary second cretic hemistich, while the alternate reading produces ordinary malam crucem but the less usual shorter hemistich. (Questa 1995 and 2001 ad loc. does not discuss the problem but opts for the longer line.) The second possible example of noncontiguous malam and crucem is at Men. 849: nei a meis oculis apscedat in malam magnam crucem. Thus P and the editions; Gratwick emends to magnam malam crucem, following the plausible suggestion of Sonnenschein (1892, 446 – 7). 32 Fay (1969, 133, ad Rud. 518) argues that one would expect malam crucem to have iambic shortening, and “since this shortening has not occurred, we can presume this phrase … was pronounced with slow emphasis.” This is unlikely; as will be demonstrated in Chs. 7 and 8, there is no particular reason to expect iambic


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Law is sufficient support because it is the most strictly observed metrical rule in iambo-trochaics (Questa 1973, 536). Univerbated noun phrases in Latin where the individual members continued to be inflected33 include re¯s-pu¯blica, iu¯s-iu¯randum, ro¯s-marı¯nus rosemary, u¯nus-quisque; others, where one of the members is in an oblique case, include le¯gis-la¯tor, agrı¯-cultu¯ra, Quı¯ntı¯-por Quintuss slave-boy (puer), manu¯-missus. For additional examples see Leumann 1977, 270 – 1 and 384 – 5. Note that the univerbation is not necessarily represented in the orthography, witness the vacillation between writing res publica and respublica, nescio quis and nescioquis, etc. Taking malam-crucem as such a phrase, with its idiomatic meaning, is unproblematic, and its metrical equivalence to a four-syllable word like facillume is good evidence that (at least some) idiomatic compounded Adj.–Noun phrases became accented as single words. There are cross-linguistic parallels for this: in Macedonian, if an Adj.–Noun phrase becomes lexicalized as a compound, it becomes reaccented as a single word: for example, pr´va vcˇer a first evening vs. idiom prv vecˇer wedding night, mla rka a small river versus Mal reka, a placename (Spencer 1991, 362). In English, compounds form a unitary stress-matrix, hence the well-known difference between a blck brd and a blckbrd. 34 Forms like Quı¯ntı¯por cited above and the divine name Iu¯piter provide independent evidence that reaccentuation after lexicalization occurred in Latin: an original phrase *Quı´-ntı¯ pffler, *(D)iu pter with two lexical accents must have undergone reaccentuation to account for the weakening of puer and pater to -por, -piter. This finding is extremely important for one of the main claims made by such scholars as Fraenkel and Drexler, who argued repeatedly that Adj.–Noun phrases formed single accentual domains. That malm-crucem formed a single accentual domain is due to its univerbation as a compound; this of course is not going to be true of all Adj.–Noun phrases. We need independent metrical (or other) evidence, of the type afforded shortening here, and there is no reason from the context to suppose that this line was pronounced with slow emphasis (quite the opposite, given that it is a highly annoyed outburst). 33 Whether this is true of malam crucem is not clear; it occurs most frequently in the accusative, but also in the nominative mala crux in the meaning a real pain, cross to bear. 34 In all these examples, semantic specialization of the compound (e. g. Eng. blackbird = specifically Turdus merula rather than any bird having black plumage) is implicated in the reaccentuation and phonetic reduction. For the possible psycholinguistic underpinnings of such historical developments, see Fortson 2003b.

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by Luchss Law, to determine the validity of the claim for other such phrases on a case-by-case basis. What malm-crucem tells us is that such reaccentuation is in theory possible for any semantically specialized compounded phrase. Luchs, followed by Questa (1967, 192), explains the following exceptions to the law in the same way as he did for malam crucem: Mos. 670 Truc. 586

Tuos emit aedis filius. :: Bonan fide? Impudens mecastor, Cyame, es. :: Egone? :: Tu. :: Bona fide.

But here the situation is not as clear as with malam crucem. While bona fide was clearly an idiom, its potential status as a single word is complicated by bonan fide in Mos. 670, where cliticization of the interrogative particle -n(e) between the two words (rather than, say, at the end of the phrase)35 might indicate that the two words were prosodically separate. But it is just as possible that bonan fide? itself is a lexicalization (with -n(e) positioned before bona fide was univerbated), as it is an idiomatic phrase meaning “Honestly?”36 I will defer until the end of the next chapter a consideration of why a sequence consisting of two iambic words was not as acceptable for filling a measure as was a moraically identical quadrisyllabic word. Before tackling that question, we must discuss the related problem of why certain sequences of two iambic words (such as pater meus) seem not to have formed quadrisyllabic phonological “words”, in spite of an expectation (on many scholars part) that they should have done so. To sum up what we have seen so far, an iambic word beginning the last measure (a B/) was strongly avoided unless the word-end was a mirage (malam-crucem), or unless it was preceded by a fourth-paeon35 Comparable to, e. g., Hittite nekuz mehur in the evening, which acts as a single ˘ word for the purposes of clitic placement, as in clauses beginning nekuz mehur = ˘ ma (frequent), nekuz mehurr = a (KUB 7.5 ii 28), with the clitics -ma but and -a ˘ and placed after the whole phrase rather than after the first word in the clause as would usually be the case. (ne-ku-uz-za mehur at KBo 2.4 i 23 is simply a ˘ spelling variant of nekuza, nekuz and does not contain a conjunction, as H. C. Melchert [p.c.] confirms for me.) 36 The reduction of the clitic interrogative -ne to -n in bonan fide unfortunately tells us nothing about whether bonan fide was a single word or not: -ne became -n under purely phonological conditions (after a long final vowel or a vowel plus -s). See Schrader 1885.


47

shaped word (bb c D) or (more commonly, in fact) a clitic group of the same shape (more rarely a prosodically nonprominent sequence of full lexical words joined by elision). The avoidance of pater meus, etc. at line-end In n. 7 above, I cited the nearly holoiambic line Men. 750; this line is peculiar, as Gratwick points out ad loc., in ending with a breach of Luchss Law, namely with the sequence patrem meum. He goes on to say that we cannot easily explain it away by positing patrem meum as one phonological word: The absence of parallels for patrem meum at line-end, a potentially useful pattern (*bo˘ num me˘ um, *ca˘nem tu˘am, etc.), shows that such phrases though involving enclitic meus, tuus (cf. uo˘ lu˘pts-mea my darling, with Iambic shortening) were nevertheless not simply felt to constitute one word like ma˘lm-cru˘cem.

The situation as it is framed here by Gratwick is uncomfortable: a fortiori one would expect that the prosodic cohesion between a noun and an enclitic possessive determiner would be as tight as a stereotyped Adj.–Noun phrase. Parallels for line-final patrem meum are indeed vanishingly rare. There is a grand total of two additional examples out of Plautuss roughly 17,000 senarii and septenarii:37 Am. 4638 Sed mos numquam illi fuit patri meo Rud. 77539 Quaere erum atque adduce. :: At hic ne— :: Maxumo malo suo, 37 Cf. Bettini 1990, 362, who however does not list Am. 46. At Am. 104, line-final pater meus scans with iambic shortening; see Ch. 8, p. 220 with n. 8. 38 This line is corrupt (Luchs 1873, 34; Fraenkel 1928, 34 n. 2; and Drexler 1969a, 141 [implied]; Luchs even goes so far as to say, “Versus grauissime corruptus non medendo sed secando urendoque sanari potest,” “A verse so severely corrupt can be corrected not by remedying but by excising and burning it”! Redslobs emendation, quoted in Lindsays apparatus, would rearrange things to Sed mos nequam illi fuit patri numquam meo, but the ending fuit patri numquam meo seems strained: my sense is that when a noun phrase at sentence-end is rendered discontinuous by one lexical item, that item is generally the verb. I hope to investigate this more extensively elsewhere; for now, I can report that a quick look at the senarii in this play shows this to be always true at the ends of clauses and sentences line-finally (ll. 51, 119, 866, 868, 875, 1140, fr. x [Lindsay]; note also 1, 97, 126, and 144, which are at line-end but not clause-end; one can prob-

48


Line-internally, examples of possessive adjective plus noun filling a B c D are also very rare.40 In the case of the second-to-last measure, this is hardly surprising, as two iambic words would require entire omission of the caesura (normally after the fifth or seventh position), and indeed I have found only three instances of such a measure filled by a phrase of the type meus pater. 41 We would expect more in the first measure, where short A positions are more frequent than elsewhere, but a wordend at the end of this measure would normally have to be followed by a monosyllable. Here I have collected only five examples.42 But in the final measure there was no caesura to contend with, and since Plautus did not in general avoid creating a double-iamb sequence consisting of possessive and head (or of any other sequence of words), its rarity in filling the final measure is marked. (This is true even though possessives scan more often as pyrrhics than as iambs.) I have collected close to 200 examples of such phrases where both words are iambs, or could scan as iambs theoretically, and the only ones that actually fill a final measure as a diiambic sequence are the ones reproduced above. More commonly, if a phrase like meus pater occurs in the final measure,

39 40 41 42

ably also add sentence-final sit donis donatus plurumis at 137, with half of the periphrastic verb splitting the noun phrase). I therefore see nothing wrong with the end of Am. 46 as it stands, though this does not help with the rest of the line. Cf. also n. 25 above. Luchs (1873, 59 – 60) emends to … Cum malo magno suo, on grounds that do not appear very strong; editors have retained the ms. reading. This is noted also in Safarewicz 1936, 111. mea fide Cap. 432, tuom patrem Ep. 349, and ero meo Poen. 370. patri meo Cap. 1012, patrem meum Men. 747, suis eris Men. 973, meum bonum Mos. 49 – 50, and mea manu Truc. 927. One should perhaps also add the following cases where the last syllable of the second word is elided: Cap. 377 (patri meo ord-), Men. 133 (meo malo a), 300 (eram meam hanc), Mil. 1268 (eram meam e-), Per. 359 (Meo modo ist-), 512 (suae domi hbu-), and Rud. 345 (erum meum e-). At Per. 7, a preceding word is elided (Qui ero suo). Men. 973 is considered to be a Eupolidean by Lindsay, but it can scan perfectly well as a septenarius, which is how Gratwick labels it (with a question-mark) and how Questa takes it too (1995 ad loc.). Whether there is any Eupolidean meter in Plautus at all is most doubtful. Lindsay marks, hesitantly, only Bac. 673, Cas. 635 – 6, 917 – 8, and Men. 973 as Eupolidean; neither the edition of Loewe, Goetz and Schoell, nor Questa (1967 and 1995) admits its existence in Plautus. Even in Greek it is limited to less than a hundred fragmentary lines, and a handful of lines from Aristophanes, in comic parabases. See Poultney 1979, 141. For the rarity of a sequence of two iambic words line-initially, see Koster 1929, 291. (He also notes that in Seneca they are rather common.)


49

the possessive scans with synizesis, that is, as a single long syllable (e. g. Bac. 508, Cap. 987, Cas. 230, Poen. 843). Safarewicz (1936, 107 f.) considered the avoidance of two iambic words to be rooted in the fact that the first word in such sequences frequently underwent iambic shortening (see Ch. 7) to become a proceleusmatic. But there was no requirement that double-iamb sequences undergo shortening, which was restricted anyhow to certain prosodic contexts, as I will discuss in Ch. 7. Langen (1888, 410) thought that two iambic words filling the last metron simply sounded too “matt” and “schwach” to the Roman ear, a claim that amounts to no more than a subjective guess. Another, somewhat confused account was offered by Drexler, who saw in the rarity of verse-final patrm mefflm a reflection of the fact that “patrm mefflm ist als Pausaform nicht geeignet” (1932, 1:63). This unlikely and ad hoc stipulation has no justification. A few years earlier, Fraenkel (1928, 34) had said that the mere presence of a word-boundary was enough to withhold from patrem meum the status of a four-syllable word:43 Wir sprechen hier, wo es uns hauptschlich um den Akzent zu tun ist, mit einem gewissen Rechte von quasi-viersilbigen Wçrtern, um eben auszudrcken, daß von einem syntaktisch eng zusammengeschlossenen nostro Lari unter Umstnden die gleichen Akzentwirkungen ausgehen wie von einem respondeat. Das darf nun aber nicht dahin vergrçbert werden, als stnde ein derartiger Wortkomplex einem einheitlichen Wortkçrper in jeder Hinsicht gleich. Es lßt sich zum Glck beweisen, daß die Wortgrenze auch innerhalb der engen Verbindung doch immer noch empfunden wurde. Wre das nicht der Fall, so mßten dem Plautus Versschlsse wie patrem meum sehr bequem gewesen sein. In Wirklichkeit vermeidet er sie aber ebenso sorgfltig wie etwa pater petit. Auch dabo tibi und dergleichen ist bekanntlich am Versausgange nicht gestattet.

But this does not explain why malam crucem was allowed, and the stipulation that the word boundary between patrem and meum was strong enough (even though the connection between the two words was “eng”) to keep it from counting as a quadrisyllable needs independent support.44 All the attention that has been focused on the cliticization of possessives has led to the aporia concerning line-final pater meus, and has mostly distracted researchers from the following rather straightforward fact: when a possessive did not undergo phonological reduction (synizesis), 43 The same conclusion had also been voiced by Wallstedt (1909, 166 – 7). 44 For similar argumentation, see also Hoischen 1914, 43.

50


that is, when it appeared in its full iambic glory, it was not clitic.45 So in pater meus ([ – [ §), the full disyllabic scansion of meus shows that it did not cliticize; the phrase therefore is not a clitic group and could not have counted as a four-syllable word. We conclude that Gratwicks statement, “such phrases though involving enclitic meus, tuus (cf. uo˘ lu˘pts-mea my darling, with Iambic shortening) were nevertheless not simply felt to constitute one word,” has a correct conclusion but an incorrect premise: the possessive was never enclitic to begin with.46 This analysis does not depend on exactly what the phonetic reality behind the metrical phenomenon known as “synizesis” was. The source of the uncertainty is that when such words fill a long position, it is ambiguous whether their vowels coalesced into a diphthong, or whether the first vowel was elided, or whether the word underwent iambic shortening (or, in the case of meus, tuos, etc., final s-loss) to become a pyrrhic. The editions also do not treat all the declensional cases identically: nominative meus, tuos, etc. are written meu, tuo, i. e. as pyrrhics with loss of final -s, whereas the other cases are thought of as exhibiting iambic shortening or vowel coalescence. It is methodologically better to treat all the cases the same, which narrows the field down to a choice between iambic shortening and synizesis for all (underlyingly) iambic case-forms.47 Since we know from Romance possessives like French and Italian ma, ta that the first vowel of the unstressed possessives was ultimately dropped (at least in the varieties of Latin spoken in these regions), I take the view that synizesis reflects vowel coalescence, i. e. diphthongization,48 and I shall use the term in this way throughout. 45 Wallstedt (1906) essentially saw this but carried the conclusion much too far, arguing that meus etc. were not clitic at all in Plautus. Since Wallstedts time, I am only aware of one scholar, Bettini (1990, 362), coming to the same conclusion that I (at the time independently) have come to here. 46 As I will discuss in Chs. 7 and 8, the cliticization of mea in uoluptas mea is not a counterexample. 47 Thus pace Soubiran 1995, 3 (and cf. 12), who seems to prefer a scansion with final s-loss or iambic shortening to one with synizesis in the case of nom. sing. meus, tuus, etc., though in general agreeing with the view that the reduced scansions of the possessives are to be treated separately from iambic shortening. Gratwick (1999, 228) also prefers synizesis in all such cases. 48 Contra Fortson 1996a, 43, synizesis probably does not reflect loss of the first vowel of meus etc. already in Plautuss day. If the vowel had been dropped, we would expect a form like mea to scan sometimes as a single short syllable, for which there is no unambiguous evidence. The earliest spellings known to me that may reflect dropping of the first vowel are found much later: pater


51

I claim not that synizesis indicates clisis,49 but the converse—that clisis indicates synizesis. The fact that synizesis in possessives is vastly commoner than disyllabic scansion, and can occur in both emphatic or contrastive possessives as well as in neutral, predictable, and noncontrastive ones, indicates that these possessives were commonly pronounced with vowel coalescence (under my view of synizesis) both when they were stressed and when they were unstressed. The diachronic facts from Romance suggest that a subset of the possessives exhibiting synizesis were clitics, but it is not possible to determine whether a given possessive exhibiting synizesis in Plautus was clitic or not.50 Conclusion Our explanation for why phrases of the type pater meus do not obviate violations of Luchss Law is applicable mutatis mutandis for the lack of final measures containing other kinds of double-iambic syntagms. Two such syntagms may be briefly discussed. The first is phrases of the type pater quidem. 51 We know from scansions like me˘ quidem, tu˘quidem, and sı˘quidem that quidem could univerbate with the preceding word: if the monosyllables had maintained their independence, they would have ended in long vowels by the rule that no monosyllable can end in a short vowel in Latin.52 But univerbation of quidem with its host is only assured in those examples where the preceding syllable was shortened;

49 50 51

52

tus, mater ma, sum negotium from P.Mich. VIII 471 (early second cent. A.D.); cf. Vnnen 1981, 124 and Kieckers 1931, 127 ff. (who comes close to saying that these pronunciations were already Plautine, but stops short of it). Archaic Latin sus* suus (e. g. sis oculis Ennius Ann. 137 Skutsch [149 Vahlen]) is not relevant, resulting from a much earlier reduction of *su 7- to *s-, as in sibi, se¯, while a disyllabic variant *seu 7o- is the source of suus. Questa (1967, 84) believes that tu- with synizesis represents glide-formation to tu 7- (word-initial clusters did not make position in Plautus). Again contra Fortson 1996a. The claim in Fortson 1996a that only prehead possessives could undergo cliticization might still be true, but is not provable. I.e., (ne) pater quidem; quidem alone is rare at line-end since line-ends tend to correspond to clause- or sentence-ends while quidem is a second-position clitic. For the avoidance of measures of the type pater quidem see Wallstedt 1909, 167. He says (n. 2) that there is only one example of [ – quidem, at Ps. 877 (which he tries to cast aspersions on because of disagreement between A and P, but this disagreement does not extend to the end of the line). The most comprehensive account of the particle quidem is Solodow 1978, although he only touches upon the phonological facts (pp. 36 – 7). See further discussion in Ch. 8.

52


alongside shortened univerbated me˘ quidem tu˘quidem stand unshortened me¯ quidem tu¯ quidem with no cliticization. Attachment of -quidem is attested only after a small number of function words, mostly pronouns (e. g. me tu te qui hic) and the conjunctions si and quando. 53 A distinction must therefore be drawn between unstressed postpositive particles like quidem enim and autem, which could enter the prosodic domain of the preceding word without univerbating with it, and bound morphemes like -que -ue and -quidem that always univerbated.54 A second type of diiambic measure that one might expect could obviate a violation of Luchs is the type pater petit, mentioned above in the quote from Fraenkel 1928, 34. The expectation arises from those theories claiming that verbs cliticized (or could cliticize) to preceding elements: we will see evidence in Ch. 4 from Meyers Law that monosyllabic verbs may have behaved as clitics, and there is reason to believe, as we saw above with class (2a) of the violations of Luchs, that disyllabic verbs could be prosodically dependent on the following lexical item.55

53 For some reason, Solodow (1978, 36) says that shortened quando˘ quidem is not found until Catullus, but it is the rule already in Plautus. The short -o- in ego˘ quidem, cited as another example by Solodow (1978, 36), is meaningless because ego normally scans with short ultima anyway. (Egoquidem is a renewal of equidem; note the greater forcefulness of the former, as remarked on by Lindsay 1907, 97 – 8 in connection with Men. 1070 – 1, where equidem and egoquidem cooccur.) 54 Part of the problem here is terminological, since the term clitic encompasses several types of prosodically deficient words, some undergoing full univerbation with preceding or following material, others not. 55 The prosodic status of the Latin verb is a difficult issue, and will be treated in more detail in Ch. 9. I have not collected all the examples of measures of the type pater petit, but only a very few have come to my attention. The second measure of an iambic octonarius is twice filled with such a sequence: Am. 1058 animo malest, aqum uelm. Corrupta sum atque apsumpta sum. Bac. 932 Nunc prus quam hfflc senx uent, lubet l ment ri dum xe t. In the first of these, Plautus may have been aiming for a clean four-part phrasal division of the line (animo malest aquam uelim corrupta sum apsumpta sum). The second line contains other exceptional features as well: hiatus after quam and iambic shortening of lubet, but neither of these is terribly uncommon. Questa (1967, 190), however, considers the verse potentially corrupt. Mil. 204 ends ferit femur in Leos (but not Lindsays) edition and likewise has unusual features (stylistic in this case); I discuss it in Ch. 5, n. 60. Line-final Amor iubet at Poen. 447 is considered “vix ferendum” by Lindsay, while ager fuit at the end of Trin. 533, listed also by Questa (1967, 190), is probably not a violation because


53

Absence of measures of this type at line-end is more significant than absence of the pater quidem type, for precisely here we have a syntagm (verb-final phrase) that is syntactically ideally suited to verse-final position (since verse-end and clause-end typically correspond). I believe this absence is excellent evidence that however prosodically deficient disyllabic verbs could be, they did not univerbate with preceding words. The cases we saw above in Luchs (2b) show that whatever domain was formed by a disyllabic verb prosodically subordinate to a neighboring word, it was sufficiently tight to count as a single word in the positions dd a B, but not in the final metron. We have not yet come to an understanding of why the last measure lay under the restrictions we have examined. In order to investigate this more thoroughly, and integrate what we have seen here in a larger view of the intersection of Plautine metrics and prosody, we shall first turn to a consideration of the prosodic facts underlying Meyers Law and Jacobsohns Law, two phenomena occurring at the ends of measures. These are the subjects of the next chapter.

ager is preceded by the demonstrative and quasi-article ille, with which it was surely prosodically united into a clitic group.

Chapter Four Meyers and Jacobsohns Laws Violations of Meyers Law in the first measure of the senarius Meyers Law, again, rules out word-ends of the type . .. C D/. It is traditionally said that violations of this law are allowed if the word-end in question is followed by an enclitic (or, in some accounts, by a unit termed a “monosyllable” or “postpositive”) or by a four-syllable word. The data are actually a bit more complicated than this, as we will see from an examination of the violations of Meyers Law in the Plautine senarii.1 As these already comprise more than 200 verses, I will not reproduce examples from the other iambo-trochaic meters, which would swell this chapter unnecessarily; the senarii alone provide more than a representative sample as it is. Before giving the actual data, an overview will be instructive to guide our interpretations. The table below summarizes the types of elements that follow violations of Meyer (not including potential violations that involve a word-group filling C D). I use “monosyllable” as a cover term for monosyllables and pyrrhic disyllables, and “quadrisyllable” here and in the following discussion to mean any measure-filling word, whether four or five syllables in length:2 position of violation

total violations

followed by monosyll.

followed by quadrisyll.

other

1st measure 2nd measure

47 1523

37 (78.7 %) 23 (15.1 %)

0 (0 %) 88 (57.9 %)

10 (21.3 %) 41 (28.0 %)

The distribution of forms after violations in the first measure is best interpreted in light of the caesura: since the caesura normally follows the sec1 2 3

These data are taken from Ceccarelli 1988, 55 et passim, but there only the line numbers are given. I considered it useful to reproduce the entire verses. For clarifying the overview that follows, I am indebted to Mark Hale for a number of suggestions. Omitting cases where …CD is filled by a clitic group (see below), which may or may not represent violations of the law.

Chapter Four: Meyers and Jacobsohns Laws

55

ond A of the line, the A will of necessity be filled by a monosyllable or a pyrrhic disyllable (or sequence of two short monosyllables) if there is a wordbreak preceding, regardless of whether the first measure ends . .. c D/ or . .. C D/, i. e. regardless of whether Meyers Law is breached or not. Since most of the words that fit that bill are clitics and other particles, this explains the high rate of clitics in this position (especially relative to the rate after second-measure violations). We would predict, in fact, that the clitics following violations in the first measure should lean prosodically to the left, since the caesura represented a strong prosodic break, and that any clitics that might appear after second-measure violations of Meyers Law could lean either way. The first prediction, as we will see, is quite true, but clitics after second-measure violations almost all happen to lean to the right. As will be seen from the data below, nearly all of the particles are monosyllables and not pyrrhics; this is also not accidental, since in the position directly before the caesura, resolutions are very rare. In a 500-line sample from Plautus, Soubiran (1988, 189) counted 593 resolutions, of which only seven occurred before the caesura—proportionally much fewer than in any other resolvable position in the line. I will now provide a closer look at the data and a more detailed analysis. Violations at the end of the first measure in the senarius are allowed thirtyseven times with following monosyllables.4 Almost all the monosyllables appear prosodically closely linked with preceding material (my vague term “closely linked” will be clarified later). With punctuation or clausal boundary following the monosyllable: Aul. 55 Bac. 224 Cap. 110 Cist. 2975 Cist. 5656 Cist. 615

4

5 6

Apscede etiam nunc—etiam nunc—etim—ohe, Veniat quando uolt, atque ita ne mihi sit morae. Aduorte animum sis: tffl istos captiuos duos, Praestigiator es, siquidem hic non es atque ades. Immo meretrix fuit, sed ut sit, de ea re eloquar. prior psterior sit et posterior sit prior?

I have omitted the doubtful Am. 149, As. 100, Aul. 28 (pace Ceccarelli; see Stockert ad loc.), 372, Cap. 175, Cist. 162, Cur. 374, Ep. 47, Men. 359 (canticum), 719, Mer. 312, 730, Mos. 605, Per. 140, Poen. 980, Rud. 111, and St. 643; see Ceccarellis discussion (1988, 55 f.). Following Lindsay 1922, 141, scanning -gi7a¯-. For alternatives see Ceccarelli 1988, 56 n. 72. Ceccarelli (1988, 56 n. 73) says that the violation of Meyer could be avoided by scanning immo as a pyrrhic. For examples of this scansion, see Lindsay 1922, 257.

56


Men. 3597 Trin. 397 Trin. 458

item hinc ultro fit, ut meret, potissumus miser ex animo fit, factius nihilo facit. Nisi quid me aliud uis, Philto, respondi tibi.

Adverb post in the fixed phrase hau multo post: Bac. 853 Poen. 202 Ps. 1039

Scies haffl multo post. :: Oppido interii miser. quam ego hau multo post mittam e ballistario. uerum hau multo post faxo scibis accubans.

The semantically bleached noun res preceded by determiner or adjective: Cas. 506 Poen. 951 Ps. 544 Ps. 783

quinque hanc omnem rem meae erae iam faciam palam. ut quod de mea re huc ueni rite uenerim, aut si de istac re umquam inter nos conuenimus, Eheu, quam illae rei ego etiam nunc sum paruolus!

Pronominal object of preposition: Cap. 37

Itaque inter se commutant uestem et nomina;

Also this very unusual positioning of tam following the adjective it modifies (maestos tam so sad instead of the usual tam maestos): Bac. 669

Quid uos maestos tam tristisque esse conspicor?

I can find no other examples of this word-order from the standard dictionaries (including Lodge). The manuscripts agree on the reading, but editors have sometimes emended the passage: Loewe, Goetz and Schoell print uos tam maestos following Mller; Hermann and Ritschl omit tam altogether. Steve Peter (p.c.) calls to my attention the chiastic phonetic figure qu- -st-st- -qu- (quid uos maestos tam tristisque),8 which would be an argument against emendation—except that if maestos and tam were reversed, an even more interesting figure would emerge (quid uos tam maestos tristisque), with various phonetic sequences (-i-…-i- framing -o- -a- -ae- -o-) arranged chiastically and framing the pathetic geminate -mm- of tam maestos. Ulti7 8

From cantica; I follow Questa (1995, 222) in moving the following colon Reizianum (– – [ – –) to a separate line (359a), against the editions. Counting the -s t- of maestos tam, we actually have qu- -st- -s t- -st- -qu-.


57

mately, whether the passage is correct as transmitted is not of great moment for any of my arguments; either way tam would be prosodically most closely grouped with maestos.9 The following verse contains a form of dare that is probably left-leaning, as it is part of the idiomatic phrase operam dare and also stands at a clause boundary: Per. 372

uerum ei rei operam do ne alii dicant quibus licet.

In the next verse, the monosyllable follows a conjunction, and is likely to have been prosodically closer to the conjunction than to the material on the right, but this is not certain: Cap. 86

[canes] sumus, quando res redierunt, Molossici

The remaining examples of monosyllabic verbs are given below; in most cases, it is not clear in which direction they might lean, if they are clitics:10 Mer. 728 Ps. 1096 Rud. 901 Trin. 3 Trin. 575

Illast—etiam uis nomen dicam? :: Nihil agis, Vide modo ne illic sit contechnatus quippiam. ut tempestas est nunc atque ut noctu fuit. Adest. Em illae sunt aedes, i intro nunciam.— natus quam illuc est “spondeo” natum mihi.

The number of monosyllabic verb-forms in this position (more can be added from the first set of examples before punctuation) is much greater than after violations of Meyer in the second measure, where there is only one (uis at Poen. 190, see below). Gratwick (1981, 349), seeing that monosyllabic verbs pattern in this case with clitics, drew the important conclusion that these verb-forms must themselves have been clitic. This conclusion assumes that whatever element filled the second A position had to be enclitic to preceding material, which is not fully certain (see below); but 9 Doubts were raised in Questa 1963, 363 about whether the line is in fact an iambic senarius, but in his edition of this play (Questa and Canali 1965) he lists it as such in the Metrorum Conspectus, while referring in the apparatus (p. 155) to his earlier article. 10 I omit Ps. 61 (nisi quid mi in ted est auxili…), which would only count if quid mi in formed a single phonological word, which seems difficult, though not impossible given that it is a run of short function words.

58


other considerations about the prosodic status of verbs that I discuss in Chs. 5 and 9 lead me provisionally to accept the claim. Six of the remaining cases contain pronouns (in one case elided with a following copula):11 Am. 889 Per. 85 Poen. 681 Poen. 991 Poen. 107112 Trin. 14613

aut satis faciat mi ille atque adiuret insuper Curate istic uos atque adproperate ocius, Videre equidem uos uellem quom huic aurum darem. An scis? :: Nullus me est hodie Poenus Poenior. quo priuatum med aegre patior mortuo. Circumspicedum te ne quis adsit arbiter

These pronouns are most likely weak (unstressed) pronouns and therefore clitic;14 it is unclear in which direction they would have leaned, but leftward is certainly possible. Finally, another six cases contain apparently or certainly right-leaning elements:15 Am. 481 Bac. 15016 Cap. 111 Per. 68

alter decumo post mense nascetur puer Video nimio iam multo plus quam uolueram; heri qus emi de praeda de quaestoribus, Si legerupam qui damnet, det in publicum

11 Textually difficult is Mil. 547: Meruisse equidem me maxumum fateor malum

12 13

14 15

16

So A; tequidem et P. Soubiran (1995, 158) plausibly suggests Meruisse mequidem, and see there for further discussion. The me priuatum of the mss. yields a line that is too short; transposed by Lindsay. This is drawn from a different list in Ceccarelli 1988, but I include it here because of the clear univerbation of circumspice+dum, without which the line would have violated the “law of the split anapest” (which bans word-breaks of the type [ [ / d ). For an analysis of the positioning of weak pronouns, see now Devine and Stephens 2006, 277 ff. I omit Truc. 662 (argentum ad hanc, quam mage amo quam matrem meam), since it is disputable whether ad hanc formed a single phonological word; cf. Ch. 3, n. 26 and the discussion in Chs. 5 and 7. Considered spurious by Ritschl and Leo, but retained by Lindsay, following Weber.


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Poen. 1173 abduce intro. Nos hasce hic praestolabimur. Truc. 66 Nam nusquam alibi si sunt, circum argentarias Two these (de at Cap. 111 and nos after sentence boundary at Poen. 1173) are clearly right-leaning. The prosody of iam at Bac. 150 is difficult to guess; there is a good chance that it leaned rightward, but since nimio is also part of the large time phrase nimio iam multo plus by now a whole lot longer, iam could have acted as a bridge between the two. The prosody of the phrase decumo post mense in Am. 481 is unclear: post is an adverb with an ablative of time (cp. multis post annis many years later), but one wonders if synchronically this sort of phrase was prosodically equivalent to a magna cum laude construction. If so, based on evidence that we will see in Ch. 5, post probably cohered more closely with the following noun. This could also be true of the two conjunctions at Per. 68 and Truc. 66, which have had clausal material fronted around them; again, see Ch. 5 for some discussion of this phenomenon. But overall, the number of monosyllables after first-measure Meyers-Law violations that clearly or probably lean left (twenty) is far greater than the number clearly or probably leaning to the right (four? five?). This being the case, there is a strong possibility that the remaining monosyllables leaned leftward as well. The fact that the distributional tendencies known as “Meyers Law” for the first measure of the senarius (and the first full measure of the septenarius) are deducible from the basic pre-caesural construction of the line can lead one to think that the whole “law” is illusory, and that the placement of mostly left-leaning clitics in the first A in these lines does not reflect a conscious attempt on Plautuss part to “erase” a word-ending . .. C D/. To test this challenge, all we need to do is examine first measures ending . .. c D/, for if Meyers Law is an illusion, we would expect left-leaning monosyllables to follow … c D/ just as frequently as . .. C D/. But this turns out not to be the case; though the following A is usually filled by a monosyllable, there is no observable tendency for that monosyllable to be left-leaning. In the first eleven plays of Plautus, there are 112 first measures ending . .. c D/. Punctuation (i. e. a strong prosodic break) follows such measures twenty-four times; a conjunction or relative pronoun (right-leaning entities) follows (without punctuation) seventeen times; a word filling A B or A B C follows seventeen times, usually not intimately connected with preceding material; and a preposition follows three times. In the remaining fifty-one cases, the second measure begins with an oblique personal pronoun, an adverb, or a short verb form that may well have been left-leaning, or with more obviously left-leaning

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words like quidem and rem ending the phrase malam rem. Thus slightly more than half the time (54.5 %) in the senarii of the first eleven plays a prosodic break follows a word ending . .. c D/; this does not deviate significantly from chance. By contrast, only 8 % of first measures (in all of Plautuss senarii) ending . .. C D/ are followed by a clearly right-leaning word (and therefore by a prosodic break). The type of word that can fill the second A following a word-break is thus determined by the nature of the preceding C position. Meyers Law is therefore not an illusion; while the occurrence of a monosyllable directly following a Meyers-Law violation flows from general principles of line-construction, the fact that the vast majority of those monosyllables lean leftward cannot be attributed to those principles.17 The question naturally arises, why was a long C avoided if the measure-end corresponded to a full word-end, that is, if it was not directly followed by a left-leaning monosyllable? Since all long syllables are moraically identical, Meyers Law must reflect a prosodic fact about particular long syllables in particular word-positions. The background for what I believe to be the correct answer comes from elementary considerations of rhythm: it is usually the case in Plautus that iambic lines do preserve at least a semblance of their underlying iambic quality, in spite of all the substitutions that so frequently occur.18 The preference for short C positions that we noted earlier is one instantiation of this, as it serves to reinforce not just a sense of cadence (in Gratwicks terms), but a sense of “iambicity”: elsewhere (1991, 384) he has called B c D the “basic Roman conception of Iambic rhythm.” That the C position was most “naturally” filled by a short syllable is not only evidenced by the favoring of measures of the shape A B c D, but is also clear from Plautuss Greek model, where Cs could not be resolved at all. With this in mind, I would like to explore the possibilities that heavy stressed syllables in Latin were weightier than heavy unstressed syllables; 17 One may legitimately ask why, if a left-leaning clitic obviated a violation of Meyers Law, we do not see more instances of . ..C D/ A/. But this question crucially assumes that we “should” expect more instances just because this was not a metrical violation. I would suggest that even though . ..C D/ A/ was allowable, it was still marked, and Plautus used it relatively sparingly. (Compare the breues in longo in loci Jacobsohniani discussed below; though clearly acceptable, they were nonetheless not terribly commonly used by the poet.) 18 According to the statistics in Ceccarelli 1998 and 2000, although short Cs in the first two metra are vastly less common in Plautine senarii than in his Greek models, they are still noticeably commoner than short As; hence the “preferred” metron A B c D noted in the previous chapter.


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that filling a C position with a heavy stressed syllable was generally avoided; that Meyers Law reflects this avoidance; and that a left-leaning monosyllabic clitic resulted in some phonological reduction of the word to which it leaned. Let us take up the last point first. When a left-leaning clitic followed a word of the shape . .. C D/, such as in the sequence ultro¯ fit, the monosyllable formed, by hypothesis, a prosodic group with the preceding lexeme. The prosodic group in question could have been either a single phonological word with one stress (ultrfit), or a clitic group where no stress reassignment took place, i. e., that was not entirely equivalent to a phonological word (fflltro-fit).19 In either case, I would submit that the long syllable filling the C position (ul-) would have been shorter and less prominent than if the word were alone or standing at the end of its phrase. Cross-linguistically, stressed syllables are durationally longer and acoustically more prominent than unstressed syllables (resulting in what is technically called “overlength”). This has been especially richly documented in the case of stressed long vowels.20 It is likely that Latin shared this cross-linguistically common trait, and that a stressed heavy syllable (or, in the resolution of a long syllable, a combination of stressed short plus another short, as in lpido¯)was not only more prominent than the unstressed equivalent (by definition), but also durationally longer—too long and prominent, I would claim, for ready use in theses that were most naturally filled by short syllables, as C positions.21 By contrast, if ultro¯ formed a single prosodic unit with the following fit, then matters were different. If a single phonological word were the outcome, the whole group would have been accented by the Latin stress rule as ultro´-fit, 22 leaving the originally stressed initial syl19 Either is possible on cross-linguistic grounds; see further below. 20 In Latvian, long unaccented vowels are shorter than accented ones by a ratio of 3.5 to 4.5 (Ekblom 1933, 19). Similar findings are available for Serbo-Croatian (Lehiste and Ivic´ 1986, 61 – 2), Lithuanian (Ekblom 1925, 39, 51, and 52), and Italian (Farnetani and Kori 1986), to name just a few. 21 Radford (1905) already noted, in a different context, that one must surely posit a difference between the length of long syllables that bore “the primary tone”, which he called “heavy longs”, and those that did not (p. 163). In antiquity there were in fact two rival camps on this issue, the metrici and the rhythmici or musici: the former held that all syllables were strictly monomoraic or bimoraic, the latter, that there were more gradations and that there existed syllabae longis longiores and breuibus breuiores (as, Marius Victorinus 1.8 Keil). 22 After I developed the overlength explanation presented here, I noticed that Klotz saw the solution as well (1888, 133 f.): he observed first, “Um [einen Spondeus] in der inlautenden Senkung der Dipodie ertrglich zu machen, sollte die

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lable unstressed. But even if ultro-fit formed a clitic group without univerbation and reaccentuation, as I think the evidence more strongly suggests, there is strong cross-linguistic evidence that the stressed syllable was still shorter relative to the length it would have had if it had stood in isolation; for shortening of stressed syllables also happens inside domains larger than the word. Devine and Stephens (1994, 273 – 4) cite a number of studies showing refooting effects on phrases that result in the reduction of lexically stressed heavy syllables; the effects are comparable to similar shortening processes affecting long words.23 A proper investigation of refooting is necessary before this claim can be upheld, but I think the contrast between the behavior of clitics after . .. c D/ and that of clitics after . .. C D/, combined with the considerations of rhythm that I touched on, Lnge in der Senkung nicht schwerer sein als die der Hebung,” and combined this with the statement that the syllable mor- in mrtis is “schwerer” than the same syllable in morta-´lita¯s. (He gave no evidence for this view, however.) Later in the same year, Langen (1888) mentioned this also, but got confused by the placement of the ictus. More recently, Leonhardt (1992, 404) has stated essentially the same thing as Klotz about the nature of C positions: “… also daß auf den reinen Krzen des griechischen Verses [sc. the C positions] ein schwerer Wortakzent vermieden wird.” Soubiran (1988, 338 ff.) also claimed that Meyers law was ultimately rooted in the attempt to avoid realizing C positions with accented heavy syllables; this has been disputed by Ceccarelli (1997, 687), but I am not convinced that the data he presents contradict the hypothesis. Andrea Calabrese points out (p.c.) that this analysis of fflltro¯ may still not be sufficient to explain the avoidance of lpido¯ : the farther a stressed syllable is from the end of a word, the less the resultant overlength. This is true enough. But overlength is not ruled out per se; the durational effects of stress vary from language to language, and it is possible that even though, for instance, modern Italian and Spanish do not show the same overlength properties that I am positing for Latin, overlength as a correlate of stress was erased in the histories of these languages. English, as is well-known, has very considerable lengthening of stressed vowels before voiced consonants, but this has not prevented some dialects from losing the length contrasts in such environments. For example, in regional varieties of American English (e. g. in Salt Lake City), the tense vowels of fail, hail, etc. have fallen together with the lax vowels of fell, hell, with loss of the original qualitative and quantitative distinctions in the process. 23 In English, for example, the morpheme speed is longest in the simplex speed, and successively shorter in speedy and speediness as more syllables are added to it; similarly, it is longer in the sentence Speed kills than in the sentence Speed increases (Devine and Stephens ib. 273). Similar effects of word-length on stressed syllable duration are known for example from Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Latvian; see the studies referred to above (Farnetani and Kori 1986, 27; Lehiste and Ivic´ 1986, 60; Ekblom 1933, 16).


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means that some process like refooting operated on these long Cs that explains the word distribution patterns observed. Regardless of exactly what kind of unit these two words formed or exactly what the phonetic processes involved were, the behavior of these word-groups can be connected with another set of data, one that has to my knowledge not been considered in this connection before and that provides independent evidence from Plautus that the underlyingly stressed syllable of a bi- or polysyllabic full lexeme could undergo reduction when the word was followed by a monosyllable. What I have in mind is the iambic shortening seen in phrases of the type mole˘ stae sunt, dolo˘ res mi. These will be examined further in Ch. 7. Important for this discussion is a proper evaluation of the following eight verses listed in Ceccarelli 1988: Am. 137 Bac. 172 Per. 466 St. 204 Trin. 95

quo pacto sit donis donatus plurumis. Saluto te, uicine Apollo, qui aedibus numquam aeque sunt meditati. :: Lepide hercle adiuuas. uxorin sit reddenda dos diuortio. Si quid scis me fecisse inscite aut improbe,

As. 106 tun redimes me, si me hostes interceperint? Men. 47124 Non hercle <ego> is sum qui sum, ni hanc iniuriam Mer. 317 Egon t ? :: Nihil est iam quod tu mihi suscenseas: If one assumes that monosyllables univerbated with the preceding word, these verses violate of Meyer. However, they do not pattern with the more secure violations of Meyer with respect to what follows the first D: only in two of the eight (As. 106, Men. 471) do we see a clearly leftleaning clitic after the violation, and in one other case (Mer. 317) there is a clitic whose prosodic relationship to the surrounding words is unclear (it might have leaned left or right, or acted as a “bridge”). In the majority (the first five lines) a longer full lexeme follows; by contrast, only a minority of assured Meyers-Law violations are followed by such a word (the examples will be adduced below). What should be emphasized about these lines, however, is that they do not provide evidence one way or another about whether phrases of the type ultro-fit could form a single phonological word or a clitic group. The fact that by my arguments 24 <ego> Gratwick, following Ritschl (“fortasse recte” Lindsay, though he chooses in the end not to emend and rather to read hiatus after ni).

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the boldfaced phrases did not form single words says nothing about whether they could have under other circumstances. I have not yet demonstrated that even if the above phonetic claim about Latin stressed heavy syllables is true, the difference in length between tonic and atonic heavy syllables was actually relevant for the metrical system.25 The raw distribution of stressed and unstressed heavy syllables shows some marked skews, but it is not clear that these conclusively settle the issue. As an example, let us look at the nonelided heavy syllables (including those heavy by position)26 in the first seventy-six lines (senarii) of the Menaechmi. 27 The number of lines is not large, but does contain 460 heavy syllables. Of these, 218 are stressed,28 while 242 are unstressed. The complete distribution may be seen in the following table, with the greatest discrepancies (by a factor of 2) boldfaced (superscript numerals refer to the first, second, and third dipodies; the percentages are calculated from the total number of heavy syllables per position):

total # stressed % stressed # unstressed % unstr.

A1

B1

C1

D1

A2

B2

C2

D2

A3

B3

22 13 59.1 9 40.9

49 25 51.0 24 49.0

40 1 2.5 39 97.5

58 56 96.6 2 3.4

54 1 1.9 53 98.1

36 28 77.8 8 22.2

40 5 12.5 35 87.5

51 27 52.9 24 47.1

59 24 40.7 35 49.3

61 38 62.3 23 37.7

The figures for the first C and D and second A are epiphenomenal, falling out in particular from the placement of the caesura after the second A: unless the A is filled by a monosyllable or pyrrhic, it will contain 25 Not that this is unlikely per se. In the Greek hexameter, the biceps positions ([ [) are about 1.2 times longer than the princeps positions (single longs), with the result that when a single long is substituted for two shorts in a biceps, it strains the meter (West 1982b, 36). Thus the prosodic fact that in spoken Greek a single heavy syllable was shorter than a sequence of two lights is reflected in the metrical behavior. ˘ C before C-. 26 I.e., including -V 27 Excluding lines 13, 31, 33, and 39, where readings are problematic for our purposes. 28 Of course it is controversial precisely which syllables were stressed; I am being conservative and am counting only heavy penults and (if the penult is short) antepenults, as well as heavy syllables before enclitic -que, -ne, and -ue. The overall results will not differ significantly if one chooses to count e. g. the -luc rather than the il- of illuc as stressed (Leumann 1977, 239). I also exclude monosyllables and heavy syllables shortened by iambic shortening.


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the (heavy) ultima or (light) final two syllables of a longer word whose stressed syllable can only be placed in the preceding D, meaning in turn that the preceding C will normally be filled by an unstressed syllable. On the other hand, the positions following the caesura are not similarly constrained, and here the differences may be more meaningful: in the sample, the second C is filled by an unstressed heavy syllable over six times as often as by a stressed heavy syllable, while the preceding B is filled by a stressed heavy syllable nearly four times as often as by an unstressed heavy. It is possible that this reflects a desire to avoid placing stressed heavy syllables in the second C, but further statistical tests would be needed for this to be firmly established. The overlength explanation developed above for ultro(-)fit may run into difficulties because of the fact that a molossus-shaped word (– – –) is allowed to fill B C D, even if not followed by a clitic.29 But molossi are not common at all in the first B C D; in a 500-line sample of senarii, Soubiran (1988, 434) found seventy-five molossi in first hemistichs, of which none occupied B C D. In the second B C D they are not common, either. There is additionally good evidence that these latter were somewhat unnatural to the Roman ear, and they seem to have been stylistically marked. According to Hall (1921, 100 f.), Plautus is nearly unique in the history of Roman poetry in allowing them at all: examples are absent or nearly absent from Terence, Phaedrus, Seneca, and others.30 The one example in Phaedrus is a translation of a line from tragedy, and the few occurrences in later Roman poetry are found in drama and in passages meant to evoke a tragic or “sententious” tone. Molossi in this position in Plautus may also have been avoided because they are nearly incompatible with the usual caesura after the second A, which would require that both the first and second As be filled by a monosyllable.31

29 The molossi are listed in Lindsay 1922, 15 – 16, and a rich treatment is found in Hall 1921, discussed below. 30 For a brief overview of the placement of molossi in Plautus and later poets, see the figures in Soubiran 1988, 434 – 5, 437 – 8, and 440 – 1. Lucio Ceccarelli (p.c.) notes that the exclusion of molossi from B C D in Seneca is not significant, since the construction of his iambic trimeter (different from the Plautine senarius) excluded molossus-shaped words from practically anywhere in the line save before the final iambic cadence. 31 This was pointed out to me by Lucio Ceccarelli (p.c.). According to the figures in Soubiran 1988, 434 and 440, molossi are, in the senarius, far and away most commonly set in the first C D A.

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An explanation similar to that argued for above regarding ultro-fit has been proposed for Porsons Law and related phenomena in the Greek iambic trimeter by Devine and Stephens (1994), on which it will be useful to make a short digression. In the Greek iambographers, the last metron of the trimeter was normally not filled by a word of the shape – – [ § , nor could there be a word-break between the first two long syllables (so * – / – [ § ; this is Porsons Law), while a word-break elsewhere was allowed. Like Meyers Law and Ritschls Law (the law of the split resolution, see Ch. 1), Porsons Law may be broken (i. e. a word-break – / – [ § is allowed) if the first syllable in the sequence is a proclitic. This has, reasonably enough, been interpreted to reflect prosodic univerbation of the proclitic with its following host, forming one phonological “word” without a true word-break. But this raises an interesting question. If the clitic attached to its host to form one phonological word, what would distinguish the sequence – – [ § from a “true” four-syllable word of the same shape, whose occurrence, crucially, is avoided in this position of the line? We must draw the descriptive conclusion that the clitic group formed by the combination of proclitic and cretic host was not prosodically identical to a unitary lexeme (phonological word) having the same segmental sequence. On cross-linguistic grounds, this is not surprising; clitic groups in a number of languages do not necessarily behave identically to phonological words. For example, the accentual domain that they form may not be the same as that of a unitary lexeme, that is, may not receive stress-assignment by the same rules. In Italian, words are not stressed any farther from the end than the antepenult, but there is no stress-reassignment in clitic groups, with the result that they can be stressed farther back than the antepenult (e. g. telfonamelo call me about it, with the same syllable stressed as noncliticized telfona). By contrast, in French, a clitic group is treated the same as a single phonological word for stress-assignment purposes, with the result that the clitic gets the main stress and the host loses its stress (hence allez-vous-n go away! vs. noncliticized allz).32 The differences in metrical behavior between – – [ § and heavy clitic plus – [ § in Greek of course cannot have anything to do with stress assignment (procliticization does not affect stress-assignment in that language), but another cross-linguistically common factor that might have played a role is that morphological information was available to phonological prosodic mapping rules (or, more simply, that the presence of 32 See Nespor 1999, 141 ff. for more examples and discussion.


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the word boundary counted for something). Compare the fact from English that the first syllable of slyness is longer than that of minus; see Harris 1951, 79 and 86 n. 19.33 We must now turn finally to the nine outstanding violations of Meyers Law in the first measure, where instead of an unstressed particle following the first D, a longer word follows:34 Bac. 24535 Cap. 118 Cur. 219 Ep. 47736 Mil. 55437 Mos. 48938 Per. 465 Poen. 53 Rud. 11

Quin tu primum salutem reddis quam dedi? satis est, numquam postilla possis prendere. Valetudo decrescit, adcrescit labor; produci intus iubes? :: Haec ergo est fidicina. fateor. :: Quidni fateare ego quod uiderim? Quis homo? An gnatus meus? :: St! Tace, ausculta modo. Sed satin estis meditati? :: Tragici et comici Jaqwgd|mior uocatur haec comoedia; qui facta hominum moresque, pietatem et fidem

33 Devine and Stephens claim that the underlying atonicity of the proclitic may have prevented phonological overlength from lengthening it to the same degree as would have happened to a syllable that was not so marked underlyingly: according to their analysis, a final long syllable was automatically lengthened to a duration that was incompatible with mapping onto the first thesis of the last metron. Although it is true that word-final syllables are lengthened in some contexts (see below), I believe Devine and Stephenss analysis is not convincing; see Fortson 1995, 592 f. 34 I omit the corrupt Men. 308, as well as Truc. 433 (tibi sit ad me reuisas, tu ualeas— :: Vale.), since it is not clear whether ad me formed a single phonological word (cf. Chs. 5 and 7). 35 Cited as an example in Questa 1967, 200, but not in Ceccarelli, since Lindsay (on whom Ceccarelli based his lists) follows Bothe in emending the ms. order to salutem primum. The ms. reading is not objectionable in light of the other lines cited above with the same structure. 36 Various editors have emended this line because of the lack of a caesura either after fifth place or after seventh place; see Lindsay ad loc. and Ceccarelli 1988, 57 n. 76. 37 Taking quidni as one word, following Lindsay; compare his discussion of the word, 1907, 108. The passage is also difficult because of the scansion ego¯, which only very rarely scans with long ultima; Bentley suggested reading fatearis e˘ go˘ , but 2nd sg. passive -ris (rather than -re) is exceptional in Plautus (Questa 1973, 511). Other suggestions are given in Soubiran 1995, 159 – 60. 38 Included here because, under the analysis forwarded in the previous chapter, disyllabic meus following its noun cannot be a clitic.

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These run counter to Gratwicks assertion (1981, 349) that the only violations of Meyers Law in this position are obviated by following monosyllables; he claimed Poen. 53 to be the sole unambiguous exception. Questa (1967, 200) remarks that the violations are unclear in their motivation, and “devono ritenersi eccezionali o, talvolta, presumibilmente corrotti.” But I am unaware of any textual problems39 with them aside from what I have mentioned in the footnotes. At Cap. 118, Lindsay claims ad loc. that numquam postilla formed a unit (presumably meaning a single phonological word); while they do belong together grammatically and doubtless to the same prosodic domain, it is very unlikely that they formed a single phonological word since they are both tonic lexemes, and Lindsays view is correctly dismissed by Ceccarelli (1988, 56 n. 69) as a “petizione di principio”. The simple fact is that Meyers Law was not as strict a metrical principle for Plautus as Luchss Law; as we will see shortly, it was even less strict in the second measure of the senarius. Violations of Meyers Law in the second measure of the senarius To recapitulate the traditional account (which will be shown to be inaccurate), violations of Meyer in the second measure of the senarius are said to be obviated by a following monosyllable or measure-filling word. Twenty-four violations of Meyer in the second measure are followed by monosyllables. In contrast to the ones after first-measure violations, these are mostly rightward-leaning. Fourteen are clearly proclitic, comprising mostly prepositions and conjunctions:40 As. 800 Cap. 2441 Cap. 93 Cas. 59 Cur. 275 Ep. 400 Ep. 446

nec ulli uerbo male dicat. Si dixerit, Postquam belligerant Aetoli cum Aleis, ita nunc belligerant Aetoli cum Aleis, propterea fflna consentit cum filio. Estne hic parasitus qui missust in Cariam? Atque audin? :: Quid uis? :: Caue siris cum filia Nam strenuiori deterior si praedicat

39 That is, corruption that has entered the transmission since the Urtext. 40 I omit Men. 535 (…Nempe hoc est quod ill dedei) and Truc. 672 (Iam pol illic inclamabit me si aspexerit), where we do not know if hoc est and inclamabit me formed single phonological words; in my view they probably did not. Soubiran (1995, 83 and 247) explicitly considers per uiscera at Mil. 29 and per gratiam at Mil. 1125 to be four-syllable words. 41 With hiatus after cum.


Mil. 29 Mil. 50242 Mil. 1125 Mos. 3 Poen. 637 Poen. 1384 Ps. 555

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conixus esses, per corium, per uiscera nisi mihi supplicium uirgarum de te datur Istuc caue faxis; quin potius per gratiam Egredere, erilis permities, ex aedibus. Facete dictum! Sed quid istfflc ad me attinet? et mi auri fur est. :: Bellum hominem, quem noueris! Non demutabo. :: Namque edepol, si non dabis,

Several of these cases even show punctuation before the clitic. In four verses the clitic is a negative, which was proclitic as well (compare the evidence for this given at the end of Ch. 5, p. 132): Aul. 523 Cur. 649 Men. 499 Mos. 595

Compellarem ego illum, ni metuam ne desinat timidam atque pauidam, nec uiuam nec mortuam. Etiam derides quasi nomen non gnoueris? Non dat, non debet. :: Non debet? :: Ne[c] frit quidem

Almost all the clitics in these data are followed by a trisyllable, with which they formed a measure-filling clitic group (dubious are Mil. 502, Poen. 637, and Ps. 555). Given that, as we will see shortly, the majority of final measures after Meyers-Law violations are filled with a measure-filling word, it is very tempting to say that these clitic groups were equivalent to those measure-filling words. Again, though, we are faced with the question of whether these clitic groups were in fact true phonological words or not; if the latter, at best we can only vaguely say that they were functionally equivalent to measure-filling words. As will be discussed in Ch. 5, it was indeed possible for prepositions to univerbate with their objects in Latin, but there is no evidence that this happened universally or was free to happen with just any prepositional phrase. For now, we must leave this question unanswered. We are left with only the following potential candidates for enclisis to the preceding word:43 Bac. 856 Mil. 1135

Dixin tibi ego illum inuenturum te qualis sit? Nam quos uidere exoptabam me maxume,

42 Various editors emend uirgarum to uirgeum, and Ritschl even considered the verse spurious; see Soubiran 1995, 152. 43 I omit Poen. 190 (… nisi quid uis, Milphio), since we do not know if nisi quid formed a single phonological word; the same goes for aps ted at Ps. 486 (… Aps ted ego auferam?); see on this phrase Ch. 7, n. 50.

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Trin. 139 Crede huic tutelam: suam melius rem gesserit. Trin. 426a qua sponsione pronuper tu exactus es? The traditional descriptions of Meyers Law make no note of the differences in clisis direction for the two positions in the line (violations in the first measure and violations in the second); this is due to scholars framing the exceptions just in terms of “monosyllables”. While the term “monosyllable” is descriptively adequate at a basic level, it leaves unrecognized this fundamental dichotomy. In the list of examples of lines containing monosyllables that obviate violations of Meyer, Questa (1967, 199), who actually refers to postpositives and not monosyllables, does not list any violations with following proclitics, which means he lists almost no examples of monosyllables following second-measure Meyers violations. Since Plautus made no apparent effort to place leftleaning (instead of right-leaning) particles after these violations, the word-end . .. C D/ here apparently did not offend his sensibilities as much as it would have a measure earlier, and it becomes difficult to maintain the traditional position that Plautus avoided . .. C D/ word-ends in all places in the line. The most common type of word to occur after violations of Meyers Law in the second measure is, as we have noted, wholly absent from the first-measure violations because of the presence of the caesura, namely, words that fill the whole measure (as above, I will use “quadrisyllable” as the cover term for these, even though they are sometimes five syllables long). Quadrisyllables occur eighty-eight times after a Meyers-Law violation in the second measure, which means they account for 57.5 % of the word-types in this position, a rate close to six times that of the average occurrence of quadrisyllables at the end of a line.44 Below are the cases from three of the early plays where quadrisyllables follow lexical words filling . .. C D of the previous measure:45

44 I base this on a sample of nearly 1050 senarii from several plays (Am. 861 – 955, As. 1 – 126, Aul. 280 – 405, Bac. 109 – 367, 761 – 924, Ep. 382 – 525, Men. 1 – 109, 226 – 350), where the final dipody is filled by a quadrisyllable 111 times, or 10.6 %. The figures are even more divergent if one compares the rate of quadrisyllables specifically after B c D to the rate after B C D (Meyer); see the figures (from the Rudens) in Soubiran 1988, 350, and cf. p. 72 below. 45 Cap. 135 belongs here as well if Lindsay is followed (…misera—macritudine), but miser a macritudine is also possible (Leo).


Am. 42 Am. 100 Am. 490 Aul. 95 Aul. 557 Aul. 576 Bac. 152 Bac. 277 Bac. 300 Bac. 301 Bac. 599

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uidi, Neptunum, Virtutem, Victoriam, is nunc Amphitruo praefectust legionibus et clandestina ut celetur consuetio. Cultrum, securim, pistillum, mortarium, is numquam seruet. Praeterea tibicinam, post hoc quod habeo ut commutet coloniam. Magistron quemquam discipulum minitarier? Postquam aurum apstulimus, in nauem conscendimus capimus consilium continuo; postridie auferimus aurum omne illis praesentibus, Tuo ego istaec igitur dicam illi periculo.

Cases like the following, where clitic groups fill the second . .. C D, would also constitute violations if the clitic groups univerbated; but as we saw above, this is at best unproved and at worst unlikely: Am. 60 Aul. 35 Bac. 583 Mos. 497 Per. 332 Poen. 2 Ps. 544 Ps. 1038 St. 663 Truc. 10

nam me perpetuo facere ut sit comoedia, is adulescentis illius est auonculus, Ecquis exit? :: Quid istuc? Qua istaec est pulsatio? Ego transmarinus hospes sum Diapontius. sequere hac, mea gnata, me, cum dis uolentibus. inde mihi principium capiam, ex ea tragoedia aut si de istac re umquam inter nos conuenimus, Ne plora, nescis ut res sit, Phoenicium, mihi et tibi apud uos (nam apud nos est conuiuium, Athenis †tracto† ita ut hoc est proscaenium

Soubiran (1988, 349 and 351) is surely right in following Hingsts (1904, 21 ff.) belief that Meyers-Law violations in the second measure represent a rhythmical anomaly that required the reestablishment of normal rhythm in the following measure, the best way being to fill it with a whole word that would ensure coincidence of word-stress and metrical ictus in the fifth strong time of the line.46 To be sure, this explanation begs the question of the importance of coincidence of ictus and accent in Plautine poetry; but it cannot be gainsaid that a measure-filling word

46 For some test-cases that provisionally support this view see Ceccarelli 1997, 687, but he does not agree with all aspects of this theory; see the next footnote.

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of the right shape was the most direct and uncomplicated way of maintaining the ever-important fixity of the line-final cadence.47 Nonetheless, an uncomfortably large number of Meyers-Law violations—forty-one—are not obviated in this way, and are followed by a measure containing two (sometimes three) words.48 I give the following sample: Am. 10349 Aul. 375 Bac. 246 Cas. 791 Men. 294

grauidam Alcumenam uxorem fecit suam. uitulinam, cetum, porcinam: cara omnia. Salue. Sed ubinamst Mnesilochus? :: Viuit, ualet. Quid hic speculare? :: Nil equidem speculor. :: Abi: Cylindrus ego sum: non nosti nomen meum?

47 When the first syllable of the quadrisyllable is long, the rhythm thus established (. .. B C D/ A B c D) is weighty; see Gratwicks (1993) commentary ad Men. 30, 102, and 330. Ceccarelli (1997, 686) calls the Hingst-Soubiran theory into question, noting that the frequency of quadrisyllables in the final metron may be due to the difficulty of setting them elsewhere in the line, especially in the senarius. In a personal communication, Ceccarelli also informs me that Soubirans account does not explain why the fourth foot is preferentially iambic (. .. c D) even when a quadrisyllable follows. This second objection strikes me as weaker than the first, since the presence of an iamb in the fourth foot (common in any case; see the charts in Ceccarelli 2000) seems to me to have little bearing on whether the poet would choose to fill the final measure with a quadrisyllable. I am not claiming that Plautus filled the final measure with a quadrisyllable only for the purposes of re-establishing rhythm, merely that such words afforded a very straightforward means for so doing. As for the first objection, note that when the second metron ends with an iambic word-end, there is no comparable preference for filling the following measure with a quadrisyllable: in a roughly 770-line sample of senarii (Mil. 1 – 155, 481 – 595, Ps. 1 – 132, Rud. 1 – 184, Truc. 1 – 94, 322 – 415) that contained 100 verses with iambic word-end closing the second metron, only twenty-five (one-quarter) were followed by a quadrisyllable. 48 I omit Mil. 1307 (see Soubiran 1995 ad loc. for an alternative scansion that does not create a violation) and Poen. 1335, which may be an interpolation. I am including four verses where . .. C D ends in est preceded by an elided syllable, on the assumption that est formed a clitic group with the preceding word in such cases (though this is not fully assured). 49 The ms. reading, usually emended to … fecit uxorem suam because of the Meyers-Law violation; but given the large number of others like this, one wonders if the emendation is justified.


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Men. 63050 Neque edepol ego prandi neque hodie huc intro tetuli pedem. Men. 873a Vel hic qui insanit quam ualuit paulo prius! Mer. 10 eadem Latine Mercator Macci Titi. Mer. 9551 Lucrum ingens facio praeterquam mihi meus pater Mil. 3152 Nolo istaec hic nunc. :: Ne hercle operae pretium quidemst Mil. 827 Oculis opinor. :: Non te istuc rogito, scelus. Mil. 1095 de concubina? Nam nullo pacto potest Per. 408 inpure, inhoneste, iniure, inlex, labes popli, Per. 70653 Eu hercle! Nomen multimodis scriptumst tuom. Poen. 1058 Surruptus sum illim. Hic me Antidamas hospes tuos Poen. 1319 Scin quam cinaedus sum? Ite istinc, serui, foras, Ps. 77654 interminatust a minimo ad maxumam, Rud. 119555 Ego hodie neque speraui neque credidi: Trin. 52756 Consuadet homini, credo. Etsi scelestus est, In order for these exceptions to count as licit under the traditional description, the material filling the last measure should count as prosodically identical to a quadrisyllabic word. Many of them form syntactic constituents that would have likely belonged to the same prosodic domain (e. g. the NPs cara omnia, nomen meum, hospes tuos at Aul. 375, Men. 294, and Poen. 1058, respectively), but by rights such a domain should have been a minor phrase rather than a phonological word; 50 Gratwick (ad loc.) suggests taking intro tetuli as a single word and the space between them simply orthographic; this was also the opinion of Fraenkel (1928, 54) and, even earlier, Hingst (1904, 55 ff.), as Lucio Ceccarelli (p.c.) points out to me. This is not impossible, though normally reduplication in the perfect was lost in composition (exceptionlessly in the case of tetuli, though a few other verbs sometimes preserve it, such as some compounds of curro; see the data in NeueWagener). 51 With synizesis of meus. 52 The word-groups in the final metron of this and the following two verses are not equivalent to four-syllable words (implied by Soubirans statements, 1995, 83, 200, and 201, that these lines have Meyers-Law violations “sans lexcuse dun quadrisyllabe final”). 53 Following the reading of A against multis modis P. 54 With hiatus after minimo. 55 Reading ego¯ with hiatus. 56 Lindsay (1922, 16 and 187) argues that etsi may be two words here; I see no compelling reason to accept that position.

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and the possessive phrase nomen meum I would explicitly claim did not form a single phonological word, based on our findings in Ch. 3. Some of the last measures consist of words that probably would have formed a clitic group (full lexeme followed by pronoun or particle, conjunctioninitial phrases). Paulo prius at Men. 873a has been connected (Hingst 1904, 47) with a statement by the grammarian Marius Victorinus, who said (6.23.12 Keil) that there should no more be a word-divider between paulo and post in paulo post than in circumduci, circumueniri, ingalliam, and initaliam,57 and Fraenkel (1928, 35) says there is no doubt that this is also true of paulo prius. This is followed by Gratwick ad Men. 681, which also ends . .. paulo prius. It is unlikely that scelestus est formed a clitic group because of the lack of contraction of the verb (see Ch. 6), but the prosodic status of uncontracted est is unclear. The violation at Mil. 1095 (. .. nullo pacto potest) may be illusory if Questa (1967, 198), followed by Soubiran (1995, 243), is correct in considering nullo pacto to be acting as a single word (on the phenomenon of idioms acting as single words, recall Ch. 3, p. 40), but I know of no independent evidence for this. The name Macci Titi at Mer. 10 most likely did not form anything tighter than a minor phrase, given the notorious ability of Latin names to be split.58 At Per. 408, the phrase labes popli is said by Hingst (1904, 43) to be a single word, although this is unjustifiable on cross-linguistic grounds, and as far as I know there is no evidence for it from elsewhere in Latin either. At most it, too, formed a minor phonological phrase. Interspersed are also clear cases where single-word or clitic-group status is out of the question: four measures are filled by words separated by a pause, clause boundary, or even change of speaker (Bac. 246, Cas. 791, Mil. 827, Poen. 1319), and in most of the other cases the two words in question belong to different constituents. What all these cases and the data presented earlier suggest most strongly is that the traditional formulation of Meyers Law is inaccurate, and that the following modification is in order. First measures ending . .. C D/ required that the material in the following A be phonologically left-leaning so as to form a close prosodic unit (C D A) before the caesura. By contrast, . .. C D/ at the end of the second measure required (though not as

57 The spellings ingalliam, initaliam will be discussed in the next chapter. 58 Normally by a nonlexical; see e. g. Devine and Stephens 2006, 273 – 5.


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strongly)59 that the following measure be self-contained. The best way to do this was to fill the last measure with a single word (88§) or, failing that, a clitic group beginning with a proclitic monosyllable (18§); the two together comprise over two-thirds of the total instances. This was not a hard-and-fast rule; but that it was the preferred practice is clear from the contrastive evidence of second measures that closed with iambic word-ends (. .. c D/). A sample of nearly 1450 lines of senarii and trochaic septenarii60 contained fifty-six lines in which the second-to-last measure ended in this way; of these, only sixteen, slightly over a quarter (28.6 %), were followed by a measure-filling word in the final measure, and an additional eleven61 were followed by a monosyllable preceding a full lexical word (probably forming a clitic group). The two together still amount to less than half the lines where the second-to-last measure ends . .. c D/.62 To sum up, Meyers Law really needs to be considered as two different sets of principles. One concerns the avoidance of overly prominent first C positions in senarii; this half of Meyers Law allowed us to hypothesize, even if the details are still a bit unclear, a shortening effect on syllable duration and prominence caused by a following monosyllabic clitic. By contrast, we saw that Meyers Law was followed far less strictly in the second measure. This somewhat hampers our efforts to derive information about Latin prosody from the law: as there is no evidence that the last measure had to be prosodically equivalent to a four-syllable word when following a violation, there is no way to tell from this whether clitic groups like ex aedibus, quem noueris were prosodic words.

59 Gratwick 1993, 57, in noting that Meyers-Law violations are more frequent in the second-to-last metron than earlier in the line, says that they lend a noticeably “dragged” rhythm to the line which was often used for effect (though we cannot always understand what the import of the effect was). By implication, there was nothing censurable in this. 60 Men. 1 – 109, 123 – 5, 127, 130, 132 – 225, Mil. 1 – 353, 426 – 873, 947 – 1010, 1094 – 1215, 1284 – 1437. 61 Men. 150, 185, Mil. 207, 426, 486, 676, 695, 839 – 40 (one verse), 859, 860, 1404; perhaps add also Men. 96, Mil. 317, 319. 62 Note that the rate of measure-filling words after . .. c D/ in the second-to-last measure is still nearly three times higher than the average rate of 10.6 % in the sample I analyzed (cf. n. 44). I assume that an iambic word-end before the last measure might sound misleadingly cadential, and to override this there was a tendency to follow it with a measure-filling word. But this deserves more investigation.

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Jacobsohns Law and the breues in longo Friedrich Leos pupil Hermann Jacobsohn wrote a thesis in 1904 in which he claimed that hiatus and syllaba anceps were allowed in the fourth arsis of the senarius and the corresponding position of the septenarius, as well as in the second arsis of the septenarius. Translated into the alphabetic terminology, the first claim is that the second-to-last D position in the senarius and septenarius could be filled by a light syllable (notated d+) and/or be followed by hiatus. This claim is now uncontroversial. The second claim of a syllaba anceps in the first D, however, has not been universally accepted, but I defer discussion of this part of Jacobsohns thesis until later.63 The appearance of a light syllable in an underlyingly heavy position is usually referred to by its Latin term, breuis in longo; and such D positions have been named loci Jacobsohniani in Jacobsohns honor. It is not clear whether any short syllable is susceptible to this treatment: in the vast majority of cases, the lengthened syllable is approached in such a way as to simulate line-end (i. e. with a preceding short, yielding . .. c d+), but there are more than a few cases of long or resolved Cs before a breuis in longo, and it is unclear if emendation of them is necessary. An example is Aul. 40

Exi, inquam, age exi: exeundum hercle tibi hinc est foras.

which may or may not contain lengthened hercle¯ (. .. C d+).64 From senarii, I know of a total of four examples of loci Jacobsohniani preceded by a long or resolved C (the loci Jacobsohniani are boldfaced in these and the following examples, and all the ictuses are marked with acute accents): 63 The number of examples of the first claim is admittedly not enormous, as Ceccarelli points out (1988, 10 and n. 7, which lists the relevant verse numbers), but is more than sufficient. In the lists below, I include a total of forty-eight examples from senarii and forty-six from septenarii, although Ceccarelli admits a few more. See the notes. 64 A. S. Gratwick (p.c.) is of the opinion that Jacobsohnian breues in longo are legitimate only following a short C, and therefore rejects the scansion hercle¯ here. (But see also his commentary to Men. 211 [discussed below, n. 68], where the rhythm is regarded as irregular but not impossible.) He considers Aul. 40 “intentionally farouche”, as it has no caesura, exhibits the repetitive sequence ex- exex-, and -cle ti- is a strained resolution. The last point may not be so serious if one considers that hercle tibi (or even hercle tibi hinc) is a chain of unstressed particles that may have formed a clitic group.


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Men. 877 qui m ui cgunt fflt ualidffls insnim? Mil. 48165 Satin biit lle n que eril negtifflm Stiche. :: Hem! :: Qu d fit? :: Efflgae! Sngarin St. 66066 lepid ssum . Trin. 42567 Tarpez tae m lle drchumarfflm Oly´mpic, To these may be added the following eight from septenarii:68 Ep. 21469 buiam rnatae ccurr bant sfflis quaequ amatribffls. Men. 84170 fflt ego ill c oculs exfflram lmpadibffls ard ntibffls

65 So the mss.; emended in various ways by various editors to avoid the breuis in longo, see Soubiran 1995, 148 – 9. 66 It is also possible to read Sagarine, a scansion guaranteed in two other nearby lines (644 and 680); see Petersmann 1973 ad loc. and Questa 1985, 275 (for which references I am indebted to Lucio Ceccarelli). If correct, this instance of Jacocbsohns Law would be removed. 67 Emended to mille drachumarum tarpezitae by Ritschl. 68 Possibly also Men. 211: afflt sinc pitam nta prcina afflt aliqud ad efflm modfflm It either scans as I have indicated, or with unlengthened aliquid, which results in a split resolution -quid ad filling the D position and with a violation of Luchss Law. See Gratwick ad loc., and on this particular kind of metrical ambiguity further below in the main text. My personal preference is to scan with locus Jacobsohnianus, as at least then the last measure would be neatly filled by ad eum modum, which, as a common idiom, probably formed a phonological phrase that in the best of worlds may have been metrically (if not prosodically) equivalent to a measure-filling word. 69 Reading quaeque with the manuscripts and Leo, contra Lindsay. Final short vowel in hiatus is very rare in a locus Jacobsohnianus; recall Ch. 3, n. 18. 70 Reading lampadibus with the manuscripts, against the conjecture lampadis that is followed by Lindsay (and cited in the OLD), as though from a *lampada that is not otherwise securely attested in Archaic Latin (and which is not the way Greek kalp\r should have been borrowed); cf. already Jacobsohn 1904, 6. Gratwick also leaves the line unchanged, but notes the other possibility in his commentary. (The supposed first-declension accusative plural lampadas at Ter. Ad. 907, so the editions, is surely false. The ancient Codex Bembinus reads lampedes, a slight corruption of what must be an original lampades, the expected consonant-stem accusative plural. In the other traditions, this was corrupted to lampadas either due to perseveration of the preceding as or under influence of the preceding and following words [turbas, tibicinas], both first-declension accusative plurals, or simply because the scribe spoke later Latin, where the word is lampada.)

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Mos. 90571 Nfflm nimio mptae t bi uid ntur? :: Nfflsquam edepl ego m sci Mos. 110072 Qud agas, d agas. :: Qu d tu prro u s serer negtifflm? Per. 552 Haffl potui tiam in pr mo u rbo p rspicer sapi ntim. Ps. 645 t illic nfflnc negtisust: r s agitfflr apud iffldic m. St. 716 Qu d hic fstid s quod fciundfflm uid s ess tibi? Qu n bib s? Truc. 593 S d quisnam llic homst qui ipsus s com st, trists, oculis mal s? Such lines are doubly problematic in that they also violate Meyers Law in the second-to-last measure; but in eight of the twelve, a final quadrisyllable obviates that violation, and in two more, a clitic group or minor phrase is found (apud iudicem, oculis malis). The loci Jacobsohniani have not to my knowledge been investigated in detail with an eye to whatever linguistic information can be drawn from them. To that end, let me first present the relevant verses. A number of editors have been uncomfortable with these passages and have tried to emend them in various ways, though this has been generally less true since the appearance of Jacobsohns thesis; the motivation for the emendations is in most cases specious, as I discuss in greater detail below. I reproduce in the footnotes a selection of suggested emendations, but have not attempted to be exhaustive; I cite them for references sake, and not because I consider the lines in question to be problematic (unless otherwise indicated). Note that I am including only those lines with breues in longo, not those with just hiatus; hiatus is a phenomenon of much wider scope, occurring commonly in Plautus between D and A positions.73 Before proceeding with the data, mention should be made of a dispute over the proper metrical division of [/ [ [ after the second-to-last C (that is, in the sequence . .. [/ [ [ d [ § at line-end, with a wordbreak between the first and second syllables; e. g. Mos. 256 (mulie)re memorarier). Traditionally these sequences have been scanned as d+/ aa B c D with breuis in longo (so (mulie)rd+ meamoarBricrD); however, Questa (1990, 431 ff.) has claimed that a better scansion would be d/d a B 71 A difficult line: A omits ego; P has scito. See also Ceccarelli 1988, 88 n. 19. 72 So the mss.; uis serere transposed to serere uis by Bothe, followed by Lindsay; see also Lindsays note to As. 250. 73 As well as between A and B positions; much less often elsewhere (Gratwick 1993, 253).


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c D, with a split resolution (so (mulie)red medmoarBricrD). But it is unclear why d+/ aa B c D is objectionable when there are patent examples of d+/ A B c D and d+/ a B c D, and the breuis in longo is far less problematic, in my opinion, than a split resolution across two full lexemes (muliere memorarier).74 I therefore consider such lines to contain loci Jacobsohniani. In a case like Truc. 49 ducit ab animo perit, on the other hand, where the split resolution is of the allowed type, breuis in longo is not preferable, since artificial lengthening of the preposition and setting it off from its object would have been awkward.75 There are forty-three examples of loci Jacobsohniani after short Cs in senarii:76 Am. 94 Am. 882 As. 8577 As. 110 As. 775 Aul. 378

Hanc fbulam, nquam, hic Ifflppitr hodie pse ag t Durre n queo in a dibffls. Ita m probr

Dotlem s ruom Safflrem uxr tu ubi ris? :: Vbiqumque lfflbitum ert anim me. Neque llaec ffllli p de pedm homin premt, Ita ill s inpfflris mnibffls adi manfflm.

74 Questas own admission of this kind of split resolution is due to his having personally become “pi tolerante” in such matters (ib. 433 n. 35). This highlights one of the problems discussed in Ch. 1, that when trying to pick between two competing scansions, both of which involve an abnormality, our own judgments are often matters of taste that can change over the course of a lifetime. (An earlier statement by the same scholar [1973, 538], “La metrica non unopinione,” stands in stark contrast!) Matters of taste aside, breuis in longo here is the clearly preferable scansion: resolutions split between two full lexemes were avoided in Plautus, whereas breues in longo were not. Questas analysis of these lines has also been questioned by Ceccarelli (1994, 292 – 4). 75 Cf. n. 68 above on Men. 211. 76 Less secure are Am. 9, 914 (see discussion in Ch. 3, p. 43), Aul. 297 (see Ceccarelli 1988, 61 n. 114; Lindsay neglects to mention that his ardus is an emendation!), Cap. 143 (see Questa 1990, 432), Cur. 46 (if read with hiatus after facere, as per Lindsay and Loewe, Goetz and Schoell), Trin. 538; too corrupt are Poen. 1108 and Truc. 6. See Ceccarelli 1988, 10 n. 7, 59, and 68 n. 178. At Am. 102, the line-end is scanned as … psemt in e˘ xrcitfflm in Lindsay 1922, 83, but in his edition he prints it as though there were nothing unusual; Christenson (2000 ad loc.) posits, most improbably, long ¯ın, and his alphabetic notation of the line does not work. If Lindsay is right, it scans … B c dd A B c D, with the split resolution -met in- defensible since it is across two nonlexicals, though admittedly they perhaps belong to two different prosodic domains. This is also how Questa 1990, 432 with n. 35 scans the line. I have added Ep. 471 (but see n. 79 below) and Ps. 100, thanks to a personal communication from A. S. Gratwick. 77 Emended to uxor by Havet.

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Cap. 11 Cap. 159 Cap. 362 Cap. 373 Cas. 134 Cas. 427 Cur. 1578 Cur. 2779 Cur. 438 Ep. 471 Ep. 498 Men. 32780 Men. 506 Men. 887 Mer. 693 Mer. 70681 Mil. 27 Mil. 848 Mos. 99982 Per. 39883 Per. 43384 Poen. 8585 Poen. 93 Poen. 628 Poen. 1052

Negt hercle llic fflltumffls. Acc dit. Mult s et mfflltig neribffls opus st tib

uob sque, ult te nuos erffls operm dar Sequere. m tibi hminem. :: Grtim habe tib , quom m hi illa d cet mi nimul, mi Oly´mpi, Quid pus est, qu sic mrtus? equid m tam n Huic prxumum llud stifflm ocul ssumfflm. nec me lle s rit Ifflppitr! :: Ego it m uol. quia nffldiusqurtus u nimffls in Crim Estne mpta mihi stis l gibffls? :: Habes lic t. potu t: plus im sum l ber quinqu nnifflm. Proin tffl ne quo beas lngiffls ab a dibffls. sanum st, adul scens, s ncipfflt, int lleg. utrfflm me d cam dfflcer medicum n fabrfflm. ni sfflmptusus nsupr etim si t? uid sse cr do mffllierm in a dibffls. Quid, brcchium? :: llud d cer uolu , femfflr. Numquam depol u di prmer. Verum hc ert: Numqu d proc ssit d forfflm hodi nou ? Vel tffl me u nde u l fac—quid t bi lub t. Mirfflm quin t bi ego cr derm, ut id m mih

alt ra quinqu nnis, lter quadr mul: Is x Anctorio, fflbi priffls habituert, eum oprtet mnem qua rer comit m sib . Haec mi hspitlis t sser cum ill fu t.

78 Fleckeisen normalized this to ostiumst against the mss., which is followed by Leo and Lindsay. But since together with the next line the passage reads 15 Huic proxumum illud ostium oculissumum. Salue, ualuistin? :: Ostium occlusissumum,

79 80 81 82 83 84 85

A. S. Gratwick (p. c.) suggests that the ms. reading ostium in l. 15 is a better preparation for the paronomasia in the next line. Lucio Ceccarelli (p.c.) would omit this line from the list, as well as Ep. 471, because of the change of speaker before the last metron. ab emended to ab by Brix, “nam longiu¯s suspectum” (Lindsay). Gratwick leaves the line as is. Emended to mulierem in by Ritschl, followed by Lindsay. Emended to ad forum hodie by Ritschl. Emended to uel <me> face by Ritschl. Emended to ut idem by Bothe. Emended to altera <erat> quadrimula by Ritschl, certainly unnecessarily.


Ps. 5986 Ps. 10087 Ps. 396 Ps. 56388 Ps. 100389 Rud. 7090 St. 209 Truc. 33 Truc. 333 Truc. 42591 Vid. 24 Vid. 8792

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haec pra stitfflta est, prxum Dionsi. nisi tu lli drchumis fl uers arg nte s, larg tus d ctis dpsils? Vbi sfflnt e? me idc rco haec tnta fcinor prom tter , nullm salffltem m tter scriptm sol t? Nam Arctfflrus s gnum sum mnifflm ac rrumfflm damna uen runt mxum miser mih , aut a ra aut u num afflt olefflm aut tr ticfflm; Quid iam r uocbas, nprob nihil que hom? Non affldes liquid m hi dar munfflsculfflm? Dare pssum, op nor, stis bonfflm operrifflm. quom m hi qui u uam cpim inop fac s.

If one were not to scan the indicated syllables as ancipitia, the result is either a line that is short a syllable, or a line that violates Ritschls and/ or Luchss laws. It will have been noticed from some of the critical notes that a number of these lines can be read in more than one way, each way in violation of a different metrical “law”. It is not clear how to rank these possibilities—e. g., whether a particular license such as hiatus or breuis in longo is less or more subject to censure than a violation of Meyer or Ritschl. As I have noted already (Ch. 1), normally this sort of thing is left to matters of taste or the weight of the communis opinio; unfortunately, no one to my knowledge has drawn up a principled way of ranking these considerations. Lacking such—the achievement of which, if even possible, is a project far beyond the scope of this book—we can 86 Emended to proxuma Dionysia by Ritschl. 87 Drachumis is Lindsays reading of ms. dacrumis, which A. S. Gratwick (p.c.) takes as it stands (tears). The future perfect regularly has a short vowel in Plautus (Questa 1967, 9); recall Ch. 2. 88 Emended to facinora by Ritschl. Lindsay suggests <ero> instead of , claiming that facinora¯ is suspect. 89 The length is not due to the following scr- cluster, which when word-initial did not close a preceding short syllable. 90 Emended to omnium by Seyffert, followed by Lindsay. 91 mihi dare emended to dare mihi by Camerarius, followed by Lindsay, who claims (ad loc.) that dare¯ is suspect even in this position in the line. There are other problems with the transmission of this line, but they are minor: the manuscripts vary between aliquid and aliquod, and instead of munusculum there is the corrupt munusciuilim. We might in fact expect a partitive genitive munusculi with aliquid, which could lie behind this corruption. 92 Emended to copiam by Studemund.

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for now only follow the communis opinio and leave the more problematic lines out of consideration. In the trochaic septenarii, there are thirty-eight loci Jacobsohniani with breues in longo after short Cs:93 Am. 34594 Am. 438 As. 184 As. 250 Cap. 973 Cist. 63 Cur. 602 Ep. 653 Men. 21195 Men. 90096 Men. 92197 Mer. 611 Mer. 1008 Mil. 45198

t iam fciam ut u rum d cas d cer. :: Quid eo st opffls? Qu s ego sfflm salt m, si nn sum Ssi? Te int rrog. Vlt famul s, uolt tiam anc llis; t quoqu catul me tque arg nto cmparndo f nger fallcim. Quo homin ? :: Theodrom di in lid Polyplfflsi, Qu d faciam? :: n latebrs apscndas p ctor penit ssum. Pter istfflm meus g stituit. :: t me mat rter. bi quid m quod am s domi pra stost, f dicin, oper me; afflt sinc pitam nta prcina ut aliqud ad efflm modfflm, Qua me clm ratffls sum fcere ea mni fec t palm ptinis liquid pr us quam p rcipt insni? Mffllier lienta est ps te. :: Effltych, capitl fac s. rit. Emus. :: H c est ntus f liffls apud ns tus. dmicilium st, Ath nis dmus est tque erffls; ego istm domfflm

93 I omit Am. 321 and Truc. 757, which are corrupt, as well as Am. 401, which is too problematic, and Mer. 202, which is uncertain (see Ch. 3, p. 43). Poen. 364 is ambiguous. I also omit Mer. 619, which many have thought to be in an interpolated passage (see Enk 1932 ad loc. and the references in Ceccarelli 1988, 102 n. 164). In Fortson 1996a, 71 f. I made a case for Aul. 658 being correctly transmitted as . .. mal agit grtis, but overlooked the fact that agit would have to scan with iambic shortening (Ch. 7); the combination of both the extremely rare vowelfinal breuis in longo in hiatus (see Ch. 3, n. 18) and a somewhat difficult-to-motivate case of iambic shortening makes me less certain about scanning the line with breuis in longo. I therefore now follow the communis opinio in reading . .. mal(e) egit gratias. 94 Perhaps not a good example because of the change of speaker (recall n. 79 above). 95 Not entirely sure; see above, n. 68. 96 ea omnia emended to omnia ea by Bothe, followed by Lindsay; this necessitates hiatus after facere instead of breuis in longo, so it is an unhelpful emendation. 97 insania emended to uesania by Bothe, who objected to the scansion percipı¯t. 98 atque erus emended to at erus by Ritschl; on other difficulties in this line, see Soubiran 1995, 145.


Mil. 618 Mil. 72799 Mil. 1314 Mil. 1338 Mil. 1425 Mos. 256100 Mos. 402 Mos. 1118101 Per. 186 Poen. 365 Poen. 901 Poen. 903102 Ps. 346103 Ps. 355104 Ps. 660 Ps. 1185

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M tibi istfflc aettis hmini fcinor puer li s cuti m rci pr tium sttuit qui st probffls agornomffls: Qu d uis? :: Qu n tu ifflbes cferri mni quae ist ded ? xite tque ecf rte huc ntus mni quae ist ded . psecr uos. :: Sluite stunc. :: Grtim habe tib . Vh! Quid ill pote p ius qu cquam mffllier memorri r? Tmquam si ntus ntus n mo in a dibffls habit t. :: Lic t. Cfflm pedibffls, manibffls, cum d gitis, afflribffls, ocul s, labr s. Nn edepl scis. :: D hercle p gnus, ni mni memini t sci, M a uolfflptas, m a del cia, m a uit, mea amo nits N mium l pidum m moras fcinus. Nam rus meffls Agorstocl s qui um surrfflpuit hfflc deu xit meque ero efflm hic u ndid t. m lit Macednio, t iam qu ndecm habe mins. go scel stus nfflnc arg ntum prmer possfflm dom Qu d nunc u s? :: Inde fflt me arc ssas, rus tus ubi u ner t. Qu d mer t macha ra? :: Ell borum hisce hminibffls opus st. :: Eh—

99 The locus Jacobsohnianus here could be easily obviated by emending to qui probust, following Ritschl (Soubiran 1995, 186). Again I prefer to follow the mss. 100 Lindsay reads mulieri following B, with an ultima long by nature, taking this to be an example of i-stem abl. -ı¯ added to a consonant stem (on which see Lindsay 1894, 392). But the evidence for this ending in consonant stems in Plautus is poor; see Gerschner 2002, 124 – 7. (The line could scan without the breuis in longo if instead of reading quid ˘ılla¯ with iambic shortening, we read Vh! Quid lla pte peiffls quicqum mulire memorrir. The violation of Meyers Law would be obviated by the final measure-filling word, and the heaviness of the line—all positions but the first and last C are long—would reinforce the disgust with which it is spoken.) 101 Note that this line consists of a list; cf. Soubirans remarks on Mil. 204 cited in Ch. 5, n. 60. 102 qu(i) eum pyrrhic by iambic shortening (Ch. 7). 103 Emended to habeo by Brix. 104 Reading possum with the mss., against Lindsays pos sum (emendation due to regarding promere¯ as suspect).

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Rud. 1002105 St. 574 St. 615 Trin. 714106 Trin. 906 Trin. 971 Trin. 1046 Truc. 297

V de sis quiius rbitrtu ns facer uis. :: V dul

S d quid ag t paras tus nster Gelsimffls? Etim ual t? Qu d ais, G lasime? :: ratres tu ccips, habes tib . s ne dot , neque tu h nc abitfflrus, qud mefflm erit id er t tum; cpere sle. :: Quid st ei nmen? :: Qud edepl homin prob. N que edepl tu is s neque hdie is fflmquam ers, auro hu c quid m. Nnne hoc pfflblice nimum adurti? Nam d genffls hominum mnibffls qud scist? :: Er lis nster f liffls apud us Strabx

Before commenting on what linguistic conclusions can be drawn from the loci Jacobsohniani, I should say a word about what conclusions cannot be drawn from them. It is clear even from a cursory look at the data above that most of the syllables that appear as breues in longo in loci Jacobsohniani have no etymological justification for scanning as long; they include nominative singulars in -is and -us, dative plurals in -bus, infinitives in -re, neuter plurals in -a, accusative singulars in -um and -em, and an assortment of other final syllables that never had a long vowel even in the prehistory of Latin. Since the D position of loci Jacobsohniani is an anceps with breuis in longo, behaving exactly the same as the D anceps at the line-end, and since the line-final D position may (and often is) filled by an etymologically short syllable, I consider as unfounded all attempts to emend these verses simply on the grounds that the length is not etymological or otherwise not known from line-internal attestations.107 The total number of loci Jacobsohniani—nearly a hundred, counting those after

105 facere uis transposed to uis facere by Gruterus, followed by Lindsay. 106 Somewhat dubious because of the split resolution -te ne-. For the end of the line see also Ceccarelli 1988, 106 n. 197. 107 Note incidentally that Lindsay is very inconsistent; for example, as some of the infinitives in -re in the loci Jacobsohniani he dislikes, others he lets pass without comment. (To be fair to some of Lindsays remarks, his edition of Plautus appeared concurrently with Jacobsohns thesis.) Few loci Jacobsohniani are filled with the last syllable of a finite verb, but this simply falls out from the fact that finite verbs tend to be clause-final or sentencefinal, and clauses and sentences do not typically end right before the final metron.


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heavy Cs—is not insubstantial, and the transmission of most of them is unproblematic. An important corollary of the points made above is that the loci Jacobsohniani cannot be used as evidence for old longs that had otherwise been shortened by Plautuss time.108 For example, at Ep. 498 and Poen. 365 we have two feminine nominative singulars in -a scanning as long; while we know that this -a is in fact etymologically long, and occasionally scans as such in Archaic Latin poetry,109 these two attestations are not survivals of the etymological length. Having said what breues in longo in loci Jacobsohniani cannot be used as evidence for, let us now turn to what they can be used for. Even if breuis in longo is termed a metrical license, it clearly had some constraints on it. Only final syllables are found in breues in longo;110 if the rule were

108 This point was made as early as in Lindsay 1893 – 94, 202, in reference to unetymological long vowels in positions of the line that had not yet been termed loci Jacobsohniani; Lindsay at the time considered such longs corrupt. See also Fraenkel 1928, 263 n. 4. 109 Lindsay (1922, 116) thought there were no examples of feminine nom. sing. in -a¯ in Plautus, whereas Mller (1869, 3 – 10) claimed there were roughly half a dozen relatively certain cases. The matter has been investigated anew by Gerschner (2002, see especially pp. 27 – 9), who shows that of the seven examples that are difficult to emend out of existence and difficult to attribute to metrical lengthening, five are personal names. Gerschner prefers to attribute these to Greek influence, but (assuming the data to be genuine) the preponderance of personal names suggests to me that these are true archaisms: compare the fact that the very few examples of the o-stem genitive sing. -osio (later -oeo) in Archaic Latin are all found in proper names (Popliosio Valesiosio CIL I2 2832a [Lapis Satricanus], Mettoeo Fufetioeo Ennius Ann. 120 Skutsch [120 Vahlen]; pace Skutsch 1985, 272 and traditional scholarship, -oeo need not be a Homericism), and note that the sole instance of fem. nt-stem nom. sing. in -ntı¯s (Classical -ns) is also found in a proper name (Laurentı¯s terra Ennius Ann. 30 Skutsch [34 Vahlen]; for the analysis see Nussbaum 1973). Outside the Classical languages there are many parallels for this; cf. the preservation of PIE gen. sg. *-oso in Lycian solely in proper names (Melchert 2004, following earlier scholarship). (Gerschner, ib. 28, also notes that a couple of the instances of -a¯ appear in religious contexts and could thus be archaic survivals of the length in sacral language.) It should be mentioned that there are other positions in the line besides the second-to-last D that sometimes admit breues in longo, and that one or another of the examples of nom. sing. in -a¯ could therefore due to metrical license. On these breues in longo see Ceccarelli 1990. 110 Comincommodus, with lengthened com-, at the end of Bac. 401 is a doubtful conjecture (com in comodus B, commodus incommodus CD); if real, it probably

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purely an unconstrained metrical rule, we might expect internal syllables to be subject to lengthening as well. Loci Jacobsohniani or their equivalents are not known from Greek,111 hence they are presumably based on a linguistic feature of Latin, made possible, it is true, by a metrical peculiarity of the comic senarius—the ability of a line-internal D to be turned optionally into an anceps position.112 I say “optionally” because, compared with the rate of breues in longo in the line-final D, breues in longo in the second-to-last D are quite rare; it was clearly not an anceps position von Hause aus. In a sample (the 1132 lines of senarii and trochaic septenarii in the Miles gloriosus whose lineends are not damaged or in doubt), lines end with unambiguously short113 final vowels eighty-nine times, or 7.9 % of the time.114 If line-internal Ds were normal anceps positions like final Ds, we would expect the rate of breues in longo to be comparable; but even rounding up the number of loci Jacobsohniani to one hundred, the rate of breues in longo in the second-to-last D comes to 0.6 %. Unambiguous short final vowels therefore are thirteen times less common filling the second-to-last D than in a true anceps position, the end of the line. Lengthening of final short syllables is found in many languages prepausally or before major phrasal boundaries (see further Ch. 5). In Latin poetry, this is probably reflected in line-final breuis in longo, which tends to correspond to the end of a clause or sentence. We shall now investigate whether the breues in longo in loci Jacobsohniani are further instances of this phenomenon, or whether they represent an artificial extension of genuine phrase-final lengthening to final syllables that were in a metrical position analogous to line-end.

111

112

113 114

represents commincommodus, as it is apparently a conflation of commodus and incommodus. The line may be spurious anyhow; see Ritschl ad loc. Lucio Ceccarelli (p.c.) points out that the lengthening of short syllables in the arsis in Homer could be at least a typologically similar case from Greek, though there is no reason otherwise to believe the two phenomena have anything to do with one another. Ruijgh (1986, 437) argues that the loci Jacobsohniani are one piece of evidence that all final short syllables were pronounced with roughly the same duration as word-internal long syllables, but this is not very likely and his arguments are unconvincing. Cf. n. 128 below for more on this issue. I.e., omitting the finals in such forms as mihi, tibi, which can scan as iambs or pyrrhics. By comparison, in the first one hundred lines, twelve percent of the total words (eighty out of 646) ended in unambiguously short vowels.


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Seventeen, or roughly one-fifth, show the breuis in longo before a sentence-break or other punctuated pause,115 and nine breues in longo are filled by the final syllable of a verb that is followed by an apparently postposed constituent (or one around which the verb has been fronted).116 Others have less substantial breaks after the breues in longo: seven are followed by prepositional phrases117 and four by adjective phrases.118 This means that only a sizeable minority (thirty-seven out of ninetythree, or 39.8 %) of the breues in longo precede a prosodic break, counting generously. This is not unequivocal support for a claim that the breues in longo reflect prepausal lengthening. However, it is surely significant that in most of the remaining cases the word that ends in the breuis in longo and the following word do not belong to the same phrase. The largest single group of exceptions to this—nine breues in longo within an Adj.–Noun phrase—are themselves revealing:119 Cist. 63 Cur. 602 Men. 841 Mil. 481 Mil. 618 Mil. 727 Ps. 59 St. 660 Vid. 24

Qu d faciam? :: n latebrs apscndas p ctor penit ssum. Pter istfflm meus g stituit. :: t me mat rter. fflt ego ill c oculs exfflram lmpadibffls ard ntibffls Satin biit lle n que eril negtifflm M tibi istfflc aettis hmini fcinor puer li s cuti m rci pr tium sttuit qui st probffls agornomffls: haec pra stitfflta est, prxum Dionsi. Stiche. :: Hem! :: Qu d fit? :: Efflgae! Sngarin lepid sum . Dare pssum, op nor, stis bonfflm operrifflm.

As can be seen, the prosodic cohesion between the two words in almost all these lines (Cur. 602 is exceptional) would not have been very tight: the NPs here consist of two rather heavy words, each of which likely pro115 Am. 438, 882, Cap. 11, Cas. 134, 427, Ep. 653, Men. 506, Mer. 611, Mil. 451, 848 (-e¯ “peut-Þtre favoris e par la pause syntaxique,” Soubiran 1995, 203), Per. 398, 433, Poen. 365, Ps. 396, St. 574, Trin. 971, Truc. 593. 116 As. 110, 250, Cur. 438, Men. 887, 921, Mos. 1100, Per. 552, Poen. 628 (two constituents follow the verb), Truc. 425. 117 Am. 94, Men. 211, Mer. 706, 1008, Mos. 999, Poen. 1052, Truc. 297. 118 As. 85, 184, St. 209, Trin. 906. 119 Poen. 85 (altra qunquenns, lter quadrmul) does not go here, since altera is subject and quadrimula is a predicate adjective; the two words belong to different constituents.

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jected its own prosodic domain. In all the cases the second word fills the final measure after the breuis in longo. 120 The general pattern with the loci Jacobsohniani, then, is that the word whose final syllable fills the secondto-last D was at the right edge of the prosodic domain to which it belonged, and was therefore followed by a prosodic break. The strength of the break varied from word-level to sentence-level. In only the smallest number of exceptions do we see lengthening of the final syllable of a prosodically deficient word. Based on the cross-linguistic evidence alluded to above, it is unlikely that all of these cases exhibit linguistically real word-final lengthening; we do not expect just any word that projected its own word-level or even minor-phrase-level prosodic domain to undergo final lengthening. But the presence of a prosodic-domain boundary between it and the following word could have easily been exaggerated by the poet: all he had to do was mimic the treatment that such words underwent before a stronger boundary. This was licensed at line-end and in the second-to-last D. Another possible interpretation is available for the breues in longo of final -VC syllables: suppression of resyllabification of the final consonant as the onset of the following syllable. This possibility will be explored shortly. Unclear to me at present are the implications, for the status of the loci Jacobsohniani, of Fraenkels statement (quoted in Ch. 3, p. 36) that the iambic metron – – [ §, whose form is taken by many cola in Latin prose, is particularly frequent in closed cola separated syntactically from the rest of their sentence, and is not found as a clausula. The last measure of the senarius is usually filled by such a metron, as we have seen, and the classic locus Jacobsohnianus is before the last measure. If it is true, as we have hypothesized, that the loci Jacobsohniani as a phenomenon originated in cases of prepausal lengthening of final syllables, then—if Fraenkels observations are correct—it may not have been uncommon for sentences in Latin speech to end with a closed colon of the shape – – [ §, which by virtue of its prosodic independence from immediately preceding material caused the final syllable of the preceding word to be prepausal. While I doubt the brief pause that this entailed would have 120 The presence of such a word would obviate violations of Meyers Law, but not all of the above verses contain such violations. The measure-filling word could have served to set off the locus Jacobsohnianus from what followed, and (as with the quadrisyllables following Meyers-Law violations) to preserve the cadential character of the final metron after an irregularity.


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been sufficient for significant phrase-final lengthening to have taken place, it could have been exaggerated in the recitation of lines and used to set off the last measure from the one preceding and enhance the ability of the preceding measure to act analogously to a line-final one. I mentioned at the outset of the discussion that there is potentially a second locus Jacobsohnianus, the first D of the septenarius, and that this claim of Jacobsohns quickly engendered controversy. Lindsay (1922, 236) cast aspersions on all but a few of the supposed examples, while Fraenkel (1928, 263) denounced those scholars who did not accept both of Jacobsohns claims in their entirety. W. A. Laidlaw (1936, 33 – 9) who had little use for either of the loci Jacobsohniani, showed that if one omits the two non-metrical causes of hiatus and syllaba anceps, namely change of speaker or strong syntactic break, the number of examples becomes rather small: Cur. 308, 602, Men. 601, Mer. 412, 619,121 Mil. 1425, Per. 835, and Ps. 346.122 Additionally, Men. 841, 900, 921, Ps. 355, and Truc. 757 may exhibit the phenomenon unless one says that they occur before a pause (for the last of these, the text is disputed). Laidlaw claimed that ideally such laws should only be based on passages for which we have the testimony of more than one manuscript tradition (i. e., both A and P); in these cases, the evidence is supported by both A and P only for three lines (Poen. 1295, St. 344, 374), and analogously for the Terentian manuscript tradition there is but one incontrovertible instance, at Ph. 1047 (p. 34). Laidlaw comments, “There is no theory under the sun for which an array of support could not be collected from the scribal errors in the Parchetype” (p. 36); compare Lindsays warning (1922, 21). But Laidlaws position is excessively severe; if it were seriously followed as method, Plautine philology would virtually grind to a halt. The premise that P is a trustworthy witness only when we have confirmatory readings from A is false and overemphasizes the importance of the readings of A over P; recall from Ch. 1 the error that Lindsay made (pp. 11 – 12). In an ideal world, of course, we would be able to check all the readings in P against A—or, better yet, we would possess original manuscripts in Plautuss own hand. The surviving evidence that any historical scholarly discipline uses is almost always more meager than desired; but we would be remiss not to use all that is at our disposal and to dismiss most of what we do have 121 Possibly an interpolation; recall n. 93. 122 Doubtful As. 250 if one emends fingere¯ to fingere¯s (Lindsay 1907, 64). Laidlaw says this emendation would be supported by Hau. 533 fingeret fallaciam, but I do not see how.

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(viz., most of the readings of P) simply because there happens not to be a confirmatory second witness. The readings of P are part of the historical record just as surely as A is and must be explained. Laidlaws argument is flawed in other ways as well. By claiming that one should disregard all examples of this second type of locus Jacobsohnianus that have “nonmetrical” origins (strong syntactic break, change of speaker), and by claiming that once all of these passages have been weeded out only a handful of examples of the phenomenon are left, he has effectively proved that this type of locus Jacobsohnianus has a clear basis in living speech and that we are not dealing merely (or at all) with a poetic artifice. This also bolsters my suppositions that the other, more frequent type of locus Jacobsohnianus is based in real-speech prosody, although, as already pointed out, poetic license played a role in the extension of its usage. The loci Jacobsohniani and the phenomenon of breuis in longo also ˘ Cneed to be considered in light of the prosodic status of word-final V sequences, for some (admittedly problematic) studies have tried to show that a final consonant could make position in Latin poetry even when followed by a vowel. The first of these is Gustafsons (1983) examination of the use of line-final monosyllables in Terence. It has often been stated that Plautus and Terence avoided ending lines with monosyllables;123 as we will see in Ch. 5, part of this “avoidance” is only apparent as far as Plautus is concerned. Many of the most common monosyllables are prepositions or other unstressed words that depend prosodically on the following word, and Plautus (and to a lesser extent Terence) strongly avoided stranding a proclitic from its host across line-end.124 In fact, as noted by Soubiran (1988, 398 – 9), it is really stressed monosyllables that were avoided; but curiously, neither Plautus nor Terence avoided them if they began with a vowel and if the preceding word elided with them. This was the subject of Gustafsons study.125 In Terence, line-final monosyllables (stressed or unstressed), if preceded by a syntactic break, always elided with the preceding word except in one case (ninety-one out of ninety-two times; Gustafson 1983, 45).126 The eight examples of a final 123 The observation was made at least as far back as Meyer 1884 [1886], 44 and 48. See also more recently Soubiran 1988, 398 – 9. 124 Presumably, as with their English equivalents, lines displaying such a stranding would have been joined without a pause in the recitation. 125 It is also noted in Gratwick 1993, 156. 126 The one exception is a line ending Quid “at”? which Gustafson reasonably argues is a phrase: “What do you mean by at?” (p. 52). As Gustafson points


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monosyllable preceded by a noneliding syllable were not separated from that word by a syntactic break (p. 44). Gustafson concludes that if there was a syntactic break (or, more drastically, a change of speaker) between the monosyllable and the preceding word, elision was mandatory (p. 58; for examples, see below). The reason for this was that if there was a syntactic break (correlating, we may assume, with a prosodic break) and no ˘ C would elision, the consonant at the end of the preceding sequence -V not have undergone resyllabification with the following vowel127 and would have made position (remember that the second-to-last syllable in an iambic line must be short). A problem with Gustafsons study, as Lucio Ceccarelli (p.c.) points out to me, is that normally change of speaker or syntactic break does ˘ C word-end to make position. This is, of course, not cause a preceding -V the default situation in all Classical poetry, just like elision occurring across change of speaker. The curious state of affairs is thus problematic whichever way one wishes to look at it: resyllabification and elision across change of speaker are, from the point of view of natural language, quite unnatural, while hiatus and lack of resyllabification across change of speaker are linguistically natural but go against usual metrical practice. One could argue that whatever subtle distinction in pronunciation may ˘ C and non-prepausal -V ˘ C was not have obtained between prepausal -V of importance except in the iambic cadence, where the slightly longer prepausal sequence became a bit too cumbersome to fit comfortably in the final c. But lacking independent evidence for this, we cannot be confident that Gustafsons conclusions are warranted. I suggest below a different analysis of the data in Gustafsons study. Another study that attempts to marshall evidence for the heaviness of ˘ C in Latin is Kent 1948. In Vergil, Kent found fifty-four phrase-final -V ˘ C making position before a vowel; in almost all the instances of final -V cases, the sequence came before a pause of some kind. This study faces ˘ C does not the same problem as Gustafsons, in that normally final -V make position before a pause followed by a vowel. But the fact that near˘ C does make position occur before ly all the instances where prevocalic -V a pause cannot be easily attributed to chance, and the fact that most of out, it is immaterial exactly how elision at change of speaker was implemented in the delivery—whether the last syllable spoken by the first actor coincided with the first syllable spoken by the second, or whether the first actor simply did not pronounce the rime of the last syllable, or whether both syllables were pronounced sequentially and in their entirety. 127 That is, have become syllabified as the onset of the following syllable.

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˘ C did not make position before a pause does not mean that, in the time -V ordinary speech, pauses had no effect on the pronunciation of preceding syllables and that Vergil might not from time to time have made use of that fact (rather than always mechanically ignoring word-breaks in the ˘ C#Vscansion). We may legitimately hypothesize that the sequence -V ˘ .CV- and the consonant would normally have been resyllabified as -V would not have made position, but if there was a prosodic break after the consonant, resyllabification would have been suppressed. By way of illustration, a line ending . .. dicere. :: Hem! would have been syllabified in the first instance di.ce.re Hem, and after elision, di.ce.rem; but . .. dicit. :: Est would have been syllabified di.cit.est, yielding unallowed . .. B C D at line-end.128 From Plautus I have not been able to find any evidence (outside of the ˘ C could make position. There are loci Jacobsoniani) that prevocalic -V some interesting distributional tendencies to be noted about these sequenc˘ C is placed before a consonant vastly es, however. In a 320-line sample,129 -V more commonly than before a vowel, and of the prevocalic instances, only a small percentage scan unambiguously short; those that do almost all belong to a nonlexical. Unfortunately, these facts can be variously interpret˘ C making ed, and in no case do they provide unambiguous evidence of -V position before a vowel or prepausally. What they might be evidence of, ˘ C behowever, is presence or absence of resyllabification. If word-final -V fore a vowel did not count as heavy, but the same sequence before a consonant did, this presumably reflects resyllabification of the consonant as an

128 It must be admitted that on cross-linguistic grounds, Kents conclusion may be open to question. In a number of languages, such as Malayalam, Icelandic, Po˘ C sequence counts as napean, Estonian, Nez Perce, and Menomini, a (C)V heavy word-internally, but light word-finally (i. e. the final consonant is extrametrical); see the references in Devine and Stephens 1994, 80 and Lunden 2006, 1. However, Lundens thesis about Norwegian, if it is applicable to these other languages, complicates matters. According to her analysis, word-final ˘ C does not count as heavy because it is durationally much closer to word-V ˘ (due to word-final lengthening of final short vowels) than word-internal final -V ˘ C- is to word-internal -V ˘ -. Additionally, word-final lengthening also neutraliz-V ˘ and -V. Latin, on the other hand, at least in es the length distinctions between -V ˘ distinct from -V. This of course does not the period of interest here, kept -V ˘ C was heavy in Latin, but languages in which it is heavy are prove that -V known (e. g. Moroccan Arabic, Goroa, and Bhojpuri; see the references in Devine and Stephens 1994, 80). 129 Men. 1 – 109, 135 – 350.


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onset in the former case but not in the latter.130 The fact that unambiguous˘ C occurs almost always (at least in this sample) when ly short prevocalic -V the sequence ends a nonlexical would dovetail nicely with this supposition ˘C as well as with the law of the split resolution (see pp. 7 ff.): a sequence -V ˘ ˘ ˘ V- was syllabified -V.CV- inside a clitic group and was therefore allowable as a split resolution, but it was not resyllabified in natural speech between two full lexemes, each of which projected their own phonological word domain. The domain of single-consonant resyllabification was therefore the phonological word and the clitic group.131 But until more data are analyzed, this conclusion must remain tentative: nonlexicals as a class may end more ˘ C# than lexicals (as Lucio Ceccarelli reminds frequently in (unelidable) -V ˘ C-sequences that do not occur in lexicals me), and they evince unelidable V ˘ d, as in ad id quid).132 at all (particularly -V Conclusion We have seen evidence from the Luchss Law data that noun phrases consisting of a pronominal possessive adjective and a noun did not form a clitic group when the possessive scanned as a full iamb rather than with synizesis. In this way the old problem as to why malam crucem can count as a foursyllable phonological word, but pater meus cannot, was seen to be a pseudo-problem; confusion reigned as long as meus was regarded to be enclitic. The exceptional rarity of phrases of the type pater petit filling a measure was taken as evidence that disyllabic verbs did not cliticize to a preceding word; however, we saw evidence from violations of Meyers Law in the first measure of the senarius that monosyllabic verbs could cliticize. The

130 Marouzeau (1954, 1955a, and in greatest detail 1955b) suggested that what we mean by a syllable-final consonant “making position” before a consonant-initial word cannot be simply that it closed the syllable (because a closed syllable in pausa does not count as heavy); rather, the duration of the resulting sequence, typically involving two stop closures, was too long and complex to be placed in a short metrical position. But this in effect claims that the onset of the following word was resyllabified as part of the coda of the preceding word, which goes contrary to the cross-linguistically normal direction of resyllabification (except in cases of vowel deletion or epenthesis). 131 As we saw in Ch. 2 the initial stop of muta cum liquida clusters, by contrast, was resyllabified as an onset only within the domain of the nonprefixed word, hence pa.trem but ab.ripio across prefix boundary and ut. rem across clitic-boundary. ˘ C was heavy, see Allen 1973, 132 For some additional arguments that word-final -V 130 – 31.

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subject of verb prosody will be considered in more detail in the chapters to come. We must still return to the issue of why a four-syllable word of double iambic shape like facillume was allowed to fill a measure, whereas a double-iambic sequence pater meus was avoided. An explanation based on ictus-accent clash will not account for the allowability of a sequence A B/ c D, which very commonly fills measures. A prosodic explanation based on relative durations is not very promising, either. The solution is likely to be found in a combination of prosodic and metrical considerations; while there are considerable prosodic differences between a sequence pter mus and facllume, there are fewer between pter mus and ma-´trem mam. The unstressed heavy ultima of a word like pter would have been durationally shorter than a stressed heavy, and the stressed light penult would have been longer than an unstressed light. In a single word facllume, the B position was filled by the syllable of greatest duration and prominence. In the case of an accentuation pter mus, however, the B position was (by hypothesis) not filled by the most prominent syllable in the sequence. The fact that B positions are usually filled by stressed heavy syllables (yielding the well-known observation that ictus and accent tend to correspond) may have nothing to do with the stress per se, but with the extra duration that the stress entailed; this would explain why the strong time of the foot, i. e. a B or D, would have been most naturally filled by a long stressed syllable (the D normally by a long syllable, since full word-stress does not occur in this position). Again, this line of approach can explain the avoidance of a measure-filling sequence pater meus, but it does not explain the acceptability of ma¯trem meam. A better approach is to consider the simple possibility that the poet consistently strove to make the ends of lines really sound like line-ends, as more than one scholar has suggested.133 For line-end to sound cadential means that the line, aside from ending in an iamb, has to satisfy at least one of the following conditions: (a) the final iamb must stand out as such; (b) the final metron must be a unified whole;134 (c) the final A position must be heavy. These principles will help explain the allowability of final metra of 133 Cf. the view of Hingst and Soubiran on the use of measure-filling words after violations of Meyers Law above and note the parallel approach of Bettini 1990, 396 – 7. 134 Recall the likelihood that this principle is at work in how frequently measurefilling words follow upon loci Jacobsohniani, discussed above.


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the type facillume and matrem meam, the avoidance of the type pater meus, and the other allowable exceptions to Luchss Law that we saw earlier and to which we may now return. (To repeat those, a line ending . .. a B/ c D is allowed only if a B is the end of a longer word, … / dd a B/ c D or … d/ d a B/ c D.) A final metron filled by two iambic-shaped words (. .. / a B/ c D/) violates all three of these principles—principles (b) and (c) in self-evident ways, and principle (a) by virtue of the prosodic fact that words (at least those that are not clitics) in general stand out from each other, and especially so in poetry if they correspond also with a foot division. Thus two iambic words in a row filling the final metron will each feel like separate units, rendering the final iamb less clearly cadential. (Recall also that Plautus strongly disfavored long runs of pure iambic sequences to begin with, regardless of word-divisions; among other things, they are essentially static and do not allow the cadential iamb to stand out in any way.)135 If, however, the second-to-last iamb was part of a longer word that extended back into the preceding metron, as in the three allowable exceptions (1), (2a), and (2b) to Luchss Law in Ch. 3, then the final iambic word can stand out as such and principle (a) is satisfied. In contrast to pater meus, the phrase matrem meam filling a final metron fulfilled both principles (a) and (c), and a final metron of the type facillume, though not conforming to the statistically preferred cadential rhythmic pattern – – [ –, at least lacks the combination of word breaks before and after the fifth foot, allowing the fifth and sixth feet to be bound together seamlessly into an integrated whole, satisfying principle (b). These principles are, to repeat, admittedly speculative, but are inferred from the data. Now there are, to be sure, lines that end . .. a /B c D/, . .. A /B c D, . .. a B c/ D, etc., where a word-break occurs within a metron elsewhere than between the two feet. Regarding lines ending . .. / D, as we saw above the final position in the line (in Plautus as well as in other Roman poetry) is normally not filled by a stressed monosyllable; this makes sense in light of principle (a), since fully-stressed words project their own prosodic domains and are thus prosodically set off from surrounding non-clitic lexemes. Such a prosodic break between the final c and D would disrupt the final iambic 135 Compare the overwhelming preference by Latin hexameter poets to end the line with the Adonic clausula – [ [ – § rather than two spondees; the latter do not signal line-end as clearly. Note that Greek poets did not as strongly avoid either holoiambic lines of trimeter (cf. Ch. 3, n. 6) or spondaic fifth feet in the hexameter (which occur at a rate of 5 % in Epic and often much higher rates in later poets; West 1982b, 37 and 154).

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rhythm and in a sense compete with the “real” prosodic break that is supposed to come after the final D.136 If, however, that D is filled by a clitic, the juncture between it and the preceding word would have been tight enough to maintain . .. c D as a prosodically single entity. And these considerations also provide us with the true linguistic background to the phenomenon discussed by Gustafson that we encountered earlier, whereby a stressed line-final monosyllable was licensed if it elided with the preceding syllable. The elision means there was no prosodic break between the two in the delivery, and hence the integrity of the cadence was not disturbed.137 Our reexamination of Meyers Law showed that what has traditionally been lumped together under one rubric reflects in fact the operation of at least two disparate phenomena. The fact that . .. C D/ “must” be followed by a monosyllabic left-leaning monosyllabic clitic is partly deducible from the placement of the caesura, but also not, since measures ending . .. c D/ do not show the same tendency, in spite of the identical position of the word-break. However, in view of the general desire to make C positions short or unaccented or both (in order to preserve iambic rhythm to some degree), there are good reasons to suspect that a sequence C D-A, where A is a clitic forming a clitic group with what preceded, would have resulted in a less prominent C. We then showed that what is traditionally called Meyers Law for the second measure is some phenomenon that behaves quite differently; here there seems to be no particular concern for a close prosodic connection between C D and the following A, as nearly all the examples of clitics in A are rightward-leaning, and most of the measures following long C D contain a measure-filling word or phrase that is not tightly joined to the preceding D. Whatever principles are governing the setting of C D sequences in the second measure, they are not the same as those governing identical sequences in the first.138 Finally, our discussion of Jacobsohns Law allowed us to hypothesize, if tentatively, that coda-to-onset resyllabification of single consonants was 136 This works in the other direction as well: desire to maintain the prosodic break after the final D led to avoidance of placing proclitics line-finally. See Ch. 5. 137 Line-ends of the type …/ B c D are a bit more difficult, but probably satisfy principle (a) as well, at least weakly, by not interfering with the iambic close even if they do not highlight it. Principle (a) could also be modified to be more neutral; the point is probably not that the final iamb be highlighted so much as that nothing compete with it or interfere with its cadential function. 138 Note that if the analysis of Meyers Law given here is correct, it is further evidence for the analysis of the Plautine iambo-trochaic lines into metra rather than feet.


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limited to domains no larger than clitic groups, and did not occur at the end of phrases and clauses or in general before prosodic breaks. In the next chapter we will depart from the terrain of named metrical “laws” but continue to examine line-ends and what additional information they can provide about Latin prosodic domains.

Chapter Five Enjambement Introduction The poetry of Plautus exhibits, broadly speaking, an equivalence of the sentence or clause and the verse-line. This is a characteristic that Plautine verse shares with numberless other metrical forms both within and outside the Roman world. Commenting on the fact that both Homer and South Slavic oral poetry tend to occupy a single verse-line with a single idea or thought, Milman Parry wrote, There is nothing strange in this common tendency of the two poetries. Indeed, to the person who has actually seen the practice of a living oral poetry it seems the most natural of things: the easiest formula for the oral poet to handle is that which is both a whole sentence and a whole verse.1

While Plautus was no longer operating in an oral-formulaic tradition, some of the poetic forms he implemented are descended from ones used in such a tradition and carry over many of the same properties from it.2 Parrys interest was in the mechanics of oral composition and the manipulation of formulae; a linguistic-prosodic way of recasting his statement is to say that, under normal circumstances, the end of a verse-line 1 2

M. Parry 1933, 194 (= A. Parry 1987, 388 – 9). Plautuss position within the Indo-European oral-formulaic tradition that Latin surely inherited (but of which practically nothing is known to have survived) has been recently discussed by Dunkel (1996 and 2001). On the first of these studies, see further n. 16 below. Note Courtneys observation (1999, 14) on the style of the Laws of the Twelve Tables (brief, spare, and direct, in contrast to later laws that spell out every potentially relevant detail) as being well-suited to oral transmission. On orality in Rome in general see e. g. Vogt-Spira 1989 and the other studies in Benz 2001 besides Dunkels. Rix (1989, 29) is probably overly pessimistic when he writes, “Wer ber Zeugnisse einer vorliterarischen Dichtersprache reden will, ist beim Lateinischen in einer schlechteren Situation als beim Griechischen. Formeln, das Kennzeichen einer mndlichen Heldenpoesie, fehlen ganz, und von archaischen Sprachformen finden sich nur Spuren…” Plautus indeed did not write in the tradition of Heldenpoesie, but he made use of formulaic styles from several genres, including law and religion, that hark back to an oral tradition and can provide evidence about it. See further below, n. 30.

Chapter Five: Enjambement

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corresponded to a significant prosodic break in the utterance. The supposition that line-end was associated with a prosodic break is not merely an ad hoc statement based on the frequent agreement of line- with sentenceend; it is inherent in the nature both of the line-ends themselves and of the line-beginnings. In the Plautine senarius and septenarius, the last foot was the most highly constrained: as we have seen, all of the substitutions possible in the other feet were disallowed here. This is true of dozens of other metrical systems as well, such as the hexameter, the Rigvedic meters, and the meters of Finnish folksong, to name a few. This fixity served inter alia the demarcative purpose of signaling the end of the line. By contrast, the beginning sequences of a verse in many of the worlds metrical systems are the freest of the line, and are the site of licenses not allowed elsewhere. In the senarius, for instance, only at linebeginning may a foot be filled by a dactyl-shaped word,3 and in the Greek iambic trimeter, the use of a choriambic word (– [ [ –) to fill a metron was allowed only line-initially (this is an example of anaclasis, the switching of the order of heavy and light syllables, in the first foot).4 Farther afield, in the Finnish iambic meter used in the Kalevala, the fall (unstressed portion) of a foot cannot be filled by a long stressed syllable, nor the rise by a short unstressed syllable; however, the first fall and rise of a line allow exceptions to this rule.5 In the trochaic meters of Estonian folk-songs, a trochee may be replaced by a dactyl or first paeon (– [ [ [) only in the first foot (Terras 1965, 87). And in Shakespeare, out of almost 4000 cases of iambic inversion (substituting a stress pattern ’ ’ for normal ’ ’), 3000 occur line-initially;6 similar findings obtain in German for the Neue Gedichte of Rainer Maria Rilke (Bjorklund 1989, 157). The clustering of such irregularities at line-beginnings makes sense if linebeginnings were postpausal (i. e. preceded by a prosodic break): Devine and Stephens (1994, 145) adduce a body of metrical and experimental 3

4 5 6

A dactyl-shaped sequence as a substitute for iambs is perfectly fine elsewhere, as long as it is not composed of a single word. A dactyl-shaped word filling an iamb means that the resolved long coincides with word-end, which is not allowed, for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious; this is the “law of the split anapest” or the Law of Hermann-Lachmann (Questa 1967, 129 ff.). Thus a split anapest is one of the licenses allowed at line-beginning. For a detailed study of the licenses at the beginnings of lines in Plautus, see Drexler 1965; he does not take note of any cross-linguistic comparanda. Maas 1962, 67 – 8 and West 1982b, 82. See Leino 1986, 146, cf. also ibid. 44, 74, and 94. Kçnig 1888, 79. See also Jespersen 1962, 650.

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evidence showing that sensitivity to rhythm is at its lowest directly after a pause, and much greater once a rhythm has been established, i. e. when there is a left-hand environment (preceding phonetic material).7 Hayes (1989, 223 and 247) notes that when iambic inversion occurs line-internally in Shakespeare, it is almost entirely limited to the beginning of a phonological phrase; in the Rilke poetry examined by Bjorklund, five of the seven cases of line-internal inversion followed a major syntactic break (p. 159). The effects of pauses on stress and rhythmic organization are a fact of natural language, not just poetry; for instance, in the Australian language Nyangumat.a, words are normally stressed on the first syllable, but at the beginnings of intonational phrases they are accented on the first or second syllable in apparently free variation (OGrady 1964, 17). Another piece of evidence that line-end was a prepausal position comes from the final syllable itself. As just mentioned, none of the substitutions that were possible elsewhere in the iambo-trochaic line was allowed at line-end. However, recall from the preceding chapter that one substitution was admitted, and interestingly, one that was normally allowed only here: the very last syllable was indifferent to quantity and could be filled by either a heavy or a light syllable. Thus in the iambic senarius the last two syllables could form an iamb or a pyrrhic ([ [); elsewhere in the line, a pyrrhic is an unacceptable substitution for an iamb.8 This feature is shared not only by all other Greco-Roman meters, but by quantity-measuring metrical systems throughout the world. Devine and Stephens (1994, 79 – 81) have noted that this fact makes sense if the position at line-end was prepausal, because syllables ending larger structural units frequently have their quantity distinctions erased in some way. In Hausa, for instance, final short vowels are significantly lengthened, and lose their qualitative distinctions from long vowels; this is reflected in Hausa poetry, which allows final breuis in longo just as Greek does.9 One should add to Devine and Stephenss discussion the important fact 7

8 9

Compare also Leino 1986, 93. To explain the Plautine admission of dactyls into the first foot of a senarius, Devine and Stephens suggest that “in this … position the clash of ictus and accent was less disruptive to the iambic pattern due to the absence of a left-hand environment” (p. 145; a dactyl-shaped word would have had the metrical ictus on the penult, but the word-accent on the antepenult). Except for the special cases of breuis in longo. As Devine and Stephens point out, the linguistic phenomenon is real in Hausa, even if, as is possible, the metrical phenomenon of breuis in longo is borrowed from Arabic like the rest of the meter. The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for Latin.


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that when such lengthening occurs in various languages, it seems to be associated particularly with the ends of sentences or utterances. It has been shown that when the rapidity of speech is increased and durations of syllables correspondingly reduced, the final syllable of a sentence is reduced the least (Weismer and Ingrisano 1979). In Italian, sentence-final unstressed vowels are twice as long as non-final unstressed vowels; phrase-final unstressed vowels are not lengthened (Farnetani and Kori 1990, 62). In Hebrew, in rapid speech sentence-final words are lengthened, but not phrase-final words (Berkovits 1991).10 In a study of English, lengthening always correlated with the ends of phrases, the amount of lengthening being determined by the depth of the syntactic break (Klatt 1975, 135 – 6). Other languages, however, do exactly the opposite, namely reduce prepausal syllables rather than lengthen them: this may take the form of devoicing (e. g. Nyangumat. a, Tarascan, and Zuni; see the references cited by Devine and Stephens 1994, 80) or shortening (e. g. Dakota; ib.), and final consonants may be more weakly articulated prepausally, resulting in their loss diachronically. In spite of these cross-linguistic parallels, there is no good evidence that length distinctions were erased line-finally in the recitation of Latin poetry. Quintilian (Inst. 9.4.93) indicates clearly that they were not; well aware that both short and long ultimae counted as long in that position, he nonetheless avers that only long ultimae really created a satisfying line-end to his ears.11 It would be a bit willful to ascribe his reaction to an imagined difference not present in the recitation, though strictly speaking that could not be entirely discounted. If Quintilians statement is evidence that short syllables were not lengthened prepausally, there is also evidence that long syllables were not shortened. The historical loss of prepausal segments mentioned in the preceding paragraph is found also in Latin, which displays final-segment loss and shortening (e. g. loss of final dentals in the third singular and plural in inscriptions; iambic and cretic shortening), but these shortenings and losses are precisely not found prepausally, as a rule (see Ch. 7 for more detailed discussion of this fact with regard to iambic shortening). On balance, it is difficult in the case of Latin to claim that the final position of the line was any10 Interestingly, when sentences are spoken at a slower than normal rate of speed, the opposite is the case: phrase-final lengthening is more than twice that in utterance-final position. See also Stephens 1986, 241 for further cross-linguistic data and references. 11 I am indebted to Lucio Ceccarelli for drawing this passage to my attention.

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thing other than simply indifferent to quantity, as indeed it has usually been characterized. Now it is the case in Plautus, as in other poetry, that metrical units (such as the line) and syntactic units (such as the sentence) do not match up all the time. In particular, a sentence, clause, or other syntactic constituent can continue from the end of one line into the beginning of the next. This phenomenon is known as enjambement. It is a beloved stylistic technique of Greek and Latin poets, as the beginning of the line is a position of prominence and emphasis.12 But in Plautus only a small number of enjambed words and phrases are clearly delayed for emphasis; the rest give the appearance of simply “spilling over” onto the following line. Given what was said above about the prosodic unity of a verse-line, enjambement becomes a very interesting area of investigation for linguists. If we never see, for example, prepositions at line-end with their objects enjambed at the beginning of the next line, that could essentially only mean that the prosodic break corresponding to line-end was too great to allow a prosodic unit as tight as that of a PP to be split across line-end under normal circumstances.13 Examining the ability of certain 12 In oral-formulaic poetry, this position is also a favorite place for what Parry called “adding enjambement”, the continuation of what is already a complete thought onto the next line by adding modifiers that describe some element in the preceding sentence further, e. g. oqkol]mgm at Il. 1.2 (L/mim %eide, he\, Pgkgz\dey )wik/or/ oqkol]mgm). As this example shows, in the hands of a skilled poet, adding enjambement can be used for vertical juxtaposition of phonetically similar words (L/mim … oqkol l]mgm) that reinforces the poetic message. 13 Supporters of the ictus-accent theory would claim that function words, being normally destressed, were not suitable for placement under the line-final ictus; but these words are just as rare at line-end in the iambic septenarius, which does not end with an ictus. Another argument could be drawn from the typical identity of poetic line with complete thought or syntactic unit: stranding a preposition at line-end would cause an overly severe clash between the typical nature of line-end as demarcating the end of a significant “chunk” (be it a complete thought or syntactic unit) and the necessity of continuing the thought that stranding a preposition would entail. But other kinds of strandings (nouns from attributes, main verbs from the rest of clauses, conjunctions from their clauses) seem not to have caused similar difficulty, and it is unlikely that in the delivery of Sprechvers and recitative there was much of a pause between lines that would put people on edge if a line ended in an unfinished prepositional phrase. To be sure, delaying a clause-final main verb is less “severe” than delaying a prepositions object or the head noun of an NP, since the verbs arguments and the nouns modifiers allow the listener to make a pretty good guess at what the verb will be when it is finally spoken, whereas a function word on its own does


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syntactic units to straddle line-ends should then reveal information about the relative prosodic cohesion of those units. The prosodic evidence thus gleaned would be independent testimony about prosodic domain–construction in Latin, and although the case of preposition plus object is somewhat banal, others are not: pauses in the flow of speech, and also nonapplication of external sandhi rules, can reflect syntactic movement, gapping effects, and branching, to name a few less immediately obvious—and often less easily recoverable—phenomena.14 As an example, I may point out some of the findings from Pentti Leinos work regarding noun phrases: phrases consisting of an attributive plus noun (in either order) are over a hundred times less likely to enjamb in his limited corpus of Finnish poetry than more complex three-member attributive phrases (Leino 1986, 43 – 4), indicating looser prosodic cohesion of the latter, more complicated kind of phrase. Hayes (1989, 242) has shown that the relative frequency of enjambed words in Shakespeares Antony and Cleopatra is in direct proportion to the number of syntactic boundaries (“brackets”) dividing them from the preceding word.15 not allow the listener much ability to predict what will follow. Compare Kollmann 1982, for whom the most noteworthy sorts of enjambement are those where the word at line-end cannot be properly understood without the following enjambed word (though to be sure Kollmann is dealing with hexameters rather than iambo-trochaics, where the stylistic considerations are not the same). But the reason lines correspond so well to Sinnesabschnitte is that they have an end (cadence plus pause) and are self-contained; in other words, the prosodic break between lines reigns supreme as the determining factor of what the poet chose to do with his line-ends. 14 Studies on hesitation pauses are sometimes cited in this connection, but they belong technically in the domain of speech errors. They are informative about the organization and production of syntactic structures, though: Clark and Clark (1977, 267 – 8) cite studies showing that pauses tend not only to occur after clause- and phrase-ends, as might be predicted, but also between phrase-initial function words (e. g., definite article, preposition) and full-content lexemes. This shows that the overall phrasal structure is hit upon before the actual content lexemes are retrieved. 15 There are no line-final articles or adjectives preceding their noun in Antony and Cleopatra, and fewer line-final prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and conjunctions than complementizers or conjunctions followed by a clause. Other significant metrical breaks besides line-end, such as the caesura and diaeresis, are also sources of useful prosodic information of the kind discussed here; see for example the important study by Pintzuk and Kroch (1989) of metrical evidence for the syntactic processes of heavy-NP shift and PP extraposition in Beowulf, and the different prosodic ramifications of both movement processes. In the present work, however, I will not be investigating line-internal breaks.

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As far as I am aware, enjambement in Plautus has never been systematically examined for this kind of information;16 this chapter seeks to fill that gap, by determining possible constraints on enjambement and what evidence they can provide for Latin prosodic and syntactic phenomena. For the purposes of this study I am defining “enjambement” somewhat loosely: besides sentences that run over onto the next line by one word, I am including sentences that run over by as much as several words wherever that seemed appropriate. As my definition is somewhat on the subjective side,17 my collection may seem too all-encompassing for the taste of some, and perhaps not extensive enough for others. However, it is complete enough to be thoroughly representative, and it is very unlikely that any examples that I have not included would dramatically alter my findings.18 I should add for the record that, as Dunkel (1996, 211 – 2) points out, Plautuss enjambement style is quite different from

16 Prescott (1907) treated only the separation of nouns from their modifiers by lineend. Fraenkels chapter on enjambement (1928, 169 – 78) concerns the ictus placement of enjambed words and is not relevant for our purposes. I have not been able to consult Otto Wiebes dissertation from 1909 (De versus sententiaeque concinnitate apud veteres poetas Romanos), mentioned by Fraenkel (1928, 169 n. 1). Devine and Stephens (1999 [2000], 193 – 200) have a very useful linguistic study of enjambement in Homer, but it is limited to an examination of NPs in hyperbaton. In Classical studies, the other treatments known to me are concerned above all with the stylistic effects of enjambement, e. g. Bchner 1936 (who claims that enjambement adds to sarcastic or parodying tone in Horaces Satires) and Kollmann 1982 (a semantic-stylistic study of enjambement in the Latin hexameter). Dunkels (1996) study of enjambement in Plautus aims to establish the “relative orality” of Plautuss style on the basis of the relative frequency of different syntactic types of enjambement, following M. Parry 1929 (= A. Parry 1987, 251 – 65). 17 I am not alone in this; if one scans Carolyn Higbies review of scholarship on enjambement in Homer (1990, 4 – 27), one sees a great variety of individual definitions of the phenomenon. Compare also the various definitions collected in Kollmann 1982, 117 n. 1. The ancients had no word for enjambement, and do not mention it (ibid. 118). 18 I have for the most part not considered the mirror-image, as it were, of enjambement, namely main clauses whose first word occupies the end of a line; where these seemed interesting, however, I have included them. In quoting the examples that follow, I have cited wherever possible only the immediately relevant material, usually only one clause (sometimes more if setting the context seemed helpful to the discussion); I use dots (…) before a citation to indicate that it begins line-internally. Line-end is indicated by /.


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Menanders, so we need not worry about external influence when investigating this phenomenon in Plautus.19 Since the metrical interpretation of many verses in lyric cantica passages remains controversial (including—crucially for this study—line-divisions!), I have included data only from iambo-trochaic meters. I should also add that I am not interested in any kind of exhaustive cataloging and classifying of “types” of enjambement:20 there are very few substantive linguistic findings to be gained from such an endeavor, and one runs the danger of missing important generalizations. I will also not discuss in any detail cases of enjambement involving obvious major phrasal breaks; this includes line-breaks preceding a complete prepositional phrase, or a clause. For an autonomous phrasal unit to be placed after a metrical break of any kind is unremarkable; but these cases are of some minimal usefulness, since they show that the prosodic break associated with line-end did not need to be as robust as the one between whole sentences. The strength of prosodic breaks between syntactic units is proportional to the depth of the syntactic division, hence pauses are longer between whole sentences than, for example, between conjoined clauses.21 The material in this chapter was collected from Lindsays edition of Plautus; I have not made a systematic effort of checking other editions for comparison, as the results would not differ materially.22 Inversion of subordinating conjunction A common syntactic phenomenon of Latin of all ages and styles was the appearance of a subordinating conjunction after the first word or words of its clause.23 Some examples of the phenomenon from Plautus are (with the clause in italics and the fronted material in boldface): 19 Cf. also the criticism by Fraenkel (1928, 170 n. 1) of Wiebes dissertation (n. 16 above): “[Er] hat den Einfluß der griechischen Vorlagen berschtzt, dagegen die in der lateinischen Sprache von Haus aus liegenden Tendenzen nicht gengend gewrdigt.” We are interested, of course, in the von Haus aus liegenden Tendenzen of Latin. 20 The unpublished thesis of Elizabeth Lyding that Higbie discusses (1990, 10 – 11) is an extreme example of such a work. 21 Compare also Leino 1986, 43. 22 Editions differ typically in line-internal matters (word order, for example) but not very much in line-divisions in iambo-trochaic passages. 23 The same phenomenon is seen in relative clauses where the relative pronoun is preceded by one or more elements of the clause; this is quite common, but ex-

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As. 228

Remeato audacter, mercedem si eris nactus: nunc abi. “Come back boldly, if you find the fee: now go.”

Mil. 254

… uera ut esse credat quae mentibimur. “… so that he may believe that the lies well tell him are true.”

Mos. 529

… tibi hodie ut det, senex, magnum malum. “… so that he may give you a big beating today, old man.”

This word-order was either the result of “prosodic flip” (see Halpern 1995),24 whereby the conjunction was moved in the prosody to a position immediately after the first stressed word or constituent; or it was due to fronting of material around the conjunction for emphasis or focus. Prosodic flip works well for those cases where fronting for emphasis does not seem indicated by the context, but works less well when the conjunction appears after more than one constituent, as not infrequently happens (as in Mos. 529 above); in fact, the two accounts are not mutually exclusive.25 In spite of the high overall frequency of this sort of word-order in Plautus, it is relatively uncommon for the material before the subordinating conjunction to be enjambed, i. e. the configuration [X1/ Conj. X2]ConjP, where X1 and X2 are both members of a clause ConjP headed by the conjunction Conj., is not very common. Nonetheless I have collected over a dozen examples, reproduced below with the material before the conjunc-

amples involving enjambement are unknown to me. For a discussion of these in Plautus, see Deecke 1907, 15 f. and 44 f. 24 Adherents of the theory of distributed morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993) prefer to view this as “morphosyntactic flip”, believing that any kind of movement must take place in the morphosyntax and before the phonology or prosody (my thanks to Andrea Calabrese for drawing this to my attention). Devine and Stephens helpfully compare and contrast prosodic movement analyses with morphosyntactic movement analyses throughout their book on Latin word-order (2006). 25 Compare for instance the account of Indo-Iranian clitic pronouns in Ch. 3 of Hale 1987: these pronouns are normally second in their clause by Wackernagels Law, but sometimes retain a more archaic positioning, namely clisis to the head of the constituent of origin. In the Rigveda, these latter cases are restricted to the older Family Books, where however Wackernagels-Law position is already the norm; this is thus an example of the coexistence of two grammars, each displaying different rules of clitic placement.


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tion boldfaced. In this and the other lists of enjambments in this chapter, the line-number given is that of the first line:26 Am. 978 As. 111 Aul. 479 Aul. 541 Cap. 64 Cap. 569 Cur. 692 Per. 330 Ps. 266 Ps. 434 Ps. 533 Ps. 72927 St. 75828 Truc. 297

face iam Amphitruonem aduenientem ab aedibus / ut abigas; … mihi / ne quid nocere possit, … pauperiorum filias / ut indotatas ducant uxores domum, Pro re nitorem et gloriam pro copiam / qui habent, ualentiorem nactus aduersarium / si erit, … tu inuentus, uera uanitudine / qui conuincas. … At ego uos ambo in robusto carcere / ut pereatis. … perpetuo cibus / ut mihi supersit, suppetat, superstitet: … interea loci / si lucri quid detur, … Quid nouom, adulescens homo / si amat, si amicam liberat? … numquid caussaest, ilico / quin te in pistrinum condam? Posse opinor me dare hominem tibi malum et doctum, modo / qui a patre aduenit Carysto … postidea loci / si hoc eduxeris, … Erilis noster filius apud uos Strabax / ut pereat,

26 Similar are the following, where the fronted material itself straddles line-end: Mil. 875 … Hanc fabricam fallaciasque / minus si tenetis, Per. 606 … Age, age nunc tu, in proelium / uide ut ingrediare auspicato. Trin. 442 … inter te atque nos / adfinitatem ut conciliarem et gratiam. Note that in each of these, though, the phrases preceding the line-break are discrete chunks: conjoined NPs (hanc fabricam fallaciasque), a PP (in proelium), and conjoined PPs (inter te atque nos). At Per. 606, the syntagm uide ut ingrediare acts like a single verb in the imperative. 27 Leo and others have emended modo to domo and take it with the first clause: “… I can furnish you your sly, clever chap from home…” (Nixon). But the whole point of lines 730 f. is that the man has just (modo) arrived: Nixons translation continues, “one that [just, BWF] came from my father in Carystus and hasnt yet gone anywhere outside the house or ever come to Athens before yesterday.” I therefore follow Lindsay in reading modo with the manuscripts. I do not believe any problems are raised by the fronted modo; modo meaning just now modifying a verb is separated twice by line-end from a following verb (Men. 1051, Mos. 352). 28 Some would interpret si hoc eduxeris here as parenthetical (e. g., Ernout in his edition), so this example is less secure.

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As in general with this sort of construction, the material found before the conjunction usually is, but need not be, a single constituent (mihi, in robusto carcere). The apparent rarity of this kind of enjambement may be illusory if the material preceding the conjunction has been fronted for emphasis or contrast: the natural position for emphatic material is the beginning, not the end, of a line. This together with the general practice of having a verseline be equal to a clause could have conspired to make such material enjambed only very rarely. From the point of view of prosody, one would expect the material preceding the conjunction to be able to end a line and be separated by a prosodic break from the following conjunction. First of all, several of the bold-faced constituents above are “heavy” (especially Am. 978, Aul. 541, Cap. 64, and Truc. 297); these heavy constituents certainly projected prosodic domains of their own, as they do in other languages. Second, as pointed out to me by Mark Hale (p.c.), if the word-order is due to fronting, fronted elements generally form their own intonational phrases (see Nespor and Vogel 1986, 188), so we would expect fronted constituents in Plautus to have had a prosodic break following them. Fronting blocks sandhi phenomena and other phrase-internal phonological processes in many languages. In the Bantu language Kiyaka, phonological phrases, identifiable by a set of tone-spreading and tone-deletion rules, are composed of a head and any elements that fall under its maximal projection; but an element that moves out of this domain (e. g., a subject or object moving out of the VP) forms its own phonological phrase (Kidima 1990, 202 f.). In Fuzhou, a northern Min dialect of Chinese, tone sandhi is allowed between an adjunct and following head (e. g. Adj.–Noun, Adv.–Adj.), and between a head and following argument (e. g. Verb– Obj.), but it is blocked if these orders are reversed (Chen 1990, 42).29 We will see additional examples below from Latin, namely from magna cum laude constructions, which are structurally analogous to clauses with material preceding the subordinator. I should note before proceeding to the next sets of data that some of these cases of enjambement may find a motivation in their stylistic con29 For Chen, the functional distinction between adjunct and argument, and not any movement rules, drives the external sandhi facts; however, the fact that it is differences in word-order that are correlated with the presence or absence of sandhi suggests local movement of the sort discussed in Hale 1990, 84 for Vedic NPs consisting of a noun and dependent genitive.


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text. The example at Per. 330 is perhaps the most interesting; in this passage, the parasite Saturio is speaking to his daughter, who is dressed up as a kidnapped maiden:

330

335

330

335

Quae res bene uortat mihi et tibi et uentri meo perennitatique adeo huic, perpetuo cibus ut mihi supersit, suppetat, superstitet: sequere hac, mea gnata, me, cum dis uolentibus. Quoi rei opera detur scis, tenes, intellegis; communicaui tecum consilia omnia. ea caussa ad hoc exemplum te exornaui ego. uenibis tu hodie, uirgo. “May heaven bless this undertaking for me and for you and for my belly, aye, and bring it food for ever and ever, world without end, amen, to surpass its needs, supply and surfeit it! This way, daughter mine, and God be with us! You know the nature of our task, you grasp it, understand it. I have apprised you of all our plans. This is the reason for arraying you as I have. You are to be sold to-day, young lady.” (tr. Nixon; my line-divisions)

This little speech is characteristic of Plautuss frequent satirical treatment of solemn ritual language.30 Each line has its own phonetic or grammatical

30 To my knowledge, a complete dossier and discussion of Plautuss and Terences mock-sacral passages is lacking. Collecting them would be a fruitful endeavor, for although they are meant to be humorous, in order for the humor to work they had to contain much that was lifted straight from real Roman sacral formulae. I believe these passages have been underexploited for their potential to shed light on details of linguistic/formulaic practice in Roman sacral language. Hanson 1959 (who lists, p. 49 n. 2, some previous literature) is an excellent study, but nonetheless does not fulfill these particular aims: it is not as concerned with formulae per se as with what can be gleaned about Roman religion and religious philosophy from Plautuss religious references. For example, in discussing the use of the verb seruare with the gods and its associations with Salus and saluus (pp. 74 – 7), he makes no mention that the collocation is not just Plautine, witness salua seruassis in the suouitaurilia prayer (Cato Agr. 141.3) and its well-known analogs outside Latin. Thus when noting that seruare in such contexts in Plautus always means save rather than preserve, with one exception

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figures. The first line is a comic rendering of the standard ritual invocation to the gods to benefit the person praying, his family, and his community (cp. mihi domo familiaeque meae Cato), turned into the comical mihi et tibi et uentri meo, with Toxiluss belly forming the last member of the triad. The second line displays alliteration between the two nearsynonyms perennitatique … perpetuo; and similarly the third line contains asyndeton of near-synonymous and alliterating verbs (supersit, suppetat, superstitet), all sharing the same first syllable,31 again in a comic version of such ritual phrases as defendas prohibessis auerruncassis (Cato). This sort of mock-solemnity continues past the actual “prayer” in line 333 (the repetitive scis, tenes, intellegis). Note finally the wonderful anticlimactic capping of this little solemn-sounding sequence with the all-too ordinary word and concept cibus (itself in neat vertical balance with uentri meo ending the preceding line).32 If there was any unusual phrasal articulation inherent in this kind of enjambement (admittedly, there is no sure evidence that there was), it would not have been out of place in such a stylistically marked and humorous passage. Put another way, Plautus (di te seruassint passim and variants), Hanson neglects to mention that it is the exceptional usage in Plautus that is most in keeping with the Catonian use. Hanson also leaves out passages dealing with omens, magic, and the like, another repository of traditional language that should be analyzed. It is not an accident that heavy alliteration is one of the central phonetic devices both in Roman ritual language and in Plautine comedy, but not at all in Plautuss Greek sources; this was a quintessentially Roman stylistic technique that shines through the otherwise Greek medium, a point that deserves more attention than it usually receives. (For the rarity of alliteration in Greek literature, see Denniston 1960, 2 and 126 – 9.) I notice that Williams (1968, 684 f. and 693) also makes this observation, with reference in particular to Enniuss predilection for phonetic imagery (including assonance and alliteration) at the expense of the striking visual imagery of his Greek models, which Williams connects with the alliterative style of the Old Latin carmina. I plan to explore these topics more elsewhere. 31 Note the interesting touch that the third of these, superstitet, which is composed of a disyllabic preverb plus disyllabic verb, is sort of a “summation” of the first two compound verbs, supersit (disyllabic preverb plus monosyllabic verb) and suppetat (monosyllabic preverb plus disyllabic verb). For a similar phrase-final positioning of this verb, compare Ennius Scaen. 295 Vahlen ut sospitent superstitentque (cited in Ussing 1875 – 86, 5.436). 32 Woytek ad loc. mentions some of these features of this passage, but many of them have apparently gone unnoticed hitherto. None of the recent essays on the Persa in Faller 2001 discusses such matters. Ussing (1875 – 86, 5.435) merely noted that the heaping up of synonyms was almost tragic (“tragico fere modo”), but I feel that that misses the mark.


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may have allowed the unusual enjambement in order to imitate (and poke fun at) sacral language more fully. Magna cum laude constructions: prosody and diachrony Relevant to the issues raised in the preceding section are the facts concerning enjambement of magna cum laude constructions, that is, prepositional phrases where an element (usually not the head) precedes the preposition. I have found no examples of a magna cum laude construction straddling line-end in iambo-trochaics, of the sort seen in this lyric cretic passage: Am. 244

… ab dextera maxumo / cum clamore inuolant impetu alacri,

I will have more to say about this passage later. Magna cum laude constructions are well attested in Plautus (I have collected roughly one hundred of them), and it is curious that there should be none straddling a line-end in iambo-trochaics,33 suggesting at first glance that the prosodic cohesion of the phrase was rather tight. Consistent with this hypothesis is the additional fact that, unlike other types of discontinuous constituents, magna cum laude constructions only rarely admit the positioning of another element between the fronted attribute (magna) and the following preposition, and in most of the cases where a word does intrude, it is an enclitic or a verb. I have collected the following examples:34 quamque in urbem measque in aedis suis med ex locis tua te ex uirtute et mea quam se ad uitam

Poen. 106 Mer. 786 Trin. 82335 Mil. 738 Bac. 1077

33 To be sure, only phrases where the first word ended in an iamb would be suitable, such as possessive pronominal adjectives (in phrases of the type mea / cum matre or the like). These are, however, among the commonest modifiers found in magna cum laude constructions (see further below), so it is not clear that the pool theoretically available for enjambement is significantly reduced if we limit our sights to iambic modifiers. 34 Trin. 186, cited as a further example in Fortson 1996a, 96, is too problematic a line for inclusion. 35 Anapests, as also Trin. 823.

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rem esse in nostram uno asto in loco hoc recipimur in loco secundo salue in pretio

Per. 609 Men. 56 St. 685 Poen. 33136

Along the lines of these data from Plautus, Terence has nullane in re And. 425, quonam in loco Ph. 473; and from Ennius we can add eandem me in suspicionem sceleris Scaen. 327 Vahlen, meum umquam in gremium Scaen. 299 Vahlen.37 As far as Archaic Latin is concerned, we must look to the higher register of Enniuss hexameters for an example of a magna cum laude construction with more than one interposed element: sulpureas posuit spiramine Naris ad undas Ann. 222 Skutsch (260 Vahlen).38 In Fortson 1996a, 97, I claimed that the lack of enjambements of the type magna / cum laude was not significant, and argued for the existence of a prosodic break between the preposition and the preceding word. I based this on the univerbations quamobrem, quemadmodum (also written quam ob rem, quem ad modum), whose spelling I claimed indicated lack of elision (*quobrem, *quadmodum, versus e. g. animaduerto < anim(um) aduerto, ue¯neo¯ < ue¯n(um) eo¯).39 The fact that these forms are thought to scan with elision in Plautus I attributed to poetic factors (pp. 98 – 9). Though, for reasons that will soon be clear, I believe my original conclusion to have been correct (there was a prosodic break between magna and cum laude), the material is more complex than first met my eye, and requires some reinvestigation. One might be tempted to attribute the lack of enjambed magna cum laude constructions to tight prosodic cohesion between the first two words because of the univerbation seen in such forms as mecum, tecum, nobiscum, eacum, and quibuscum, with which the magna cum laude constructions bear a certain resemblance. There has indeed been a tendency, at least since the time of Wackernagel, to conflate the two and to view

36 Lindsay preferred to read insecundo (1900b, 37 n. 1). 37 Terence has a half-example with a verb, mihi ueniebat in mentem Ph. 652, but the dative of reference mihi does not count as an ordinary modifier. 38 Cf. the fact that hyperbaton in general is commoner in higher-register texts (Devine and Stephens 2006, 602 – 3). 39 See Sturtevant and Kent 1915 for a discussion of the known examples of lexicalized hiatus and elision.


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both as containing postpositions.40 These constructions are also often further compared with Sabellic postpositional syntagms of the type Umbrian carsome uestisier 41 to the avenue of Vesticius Tab.Ig. VIa 13 – 4, petruniaper natine for the Petronian gens IIa 21 and 35, and nertruco persi at (his) left foot VIb 37 and 39, which superficially combine the wordorder of magna cum laude and the clisis in mecum. However, as I show in a separate article (Fortson to appear), neither magna cum laude nor mecum has anything to do with the Sabellic construction. The latter contains what is syntactically a true postposition that must be attached either to its nominal object or to a modifier of that object in the same case. This is not true of the magna cum laude construction in Latin, where, as we saw above, an element such as a clitic or verb or even sequence of words can intervene between magna and cum (even if not commonly), and where allied syntagms like Genitive–Preposition–Noun are perfectly acceptable as well,42 in contrast to Sabellic. Furthermore, it is highly doubtful that mecum and magna cum laude have much to do with each other, either. As again discussed in considerably more detail in Fortson to appear, against the backdrop of comparative facts within Italic and Indo-European, mecum is not—contrary to appearances—demonstrably all that old within Latin, and could have arisen by several routes. Postpositional and cliticized cum is limited to use with pronouns, as are the other sporadic lexicalized postpositional syntagms in Latin (e. g. quoad, quando [< *quam-do¯, with the lost preposition *do¯ to], eapropter). These could have arisen by wh-movement in the case of quoad and similar forms, and prosodic inversion in the case of the demonstrative and personal pronouns (among other possibilities). It is not clear that the adpositions in any of these forms were ever true postpositions in the prehistory of Latin.43 For the magna cum laude construction, there are at least two ways to motivate the order: “prosodic flip” of the preposition around the first available host, and fronting of the modifier around the preposition. Prosodic flip is not likely for several reasons. First, it is counterevidenced by 40 E. g. Drexler 1965, 85: “Bei magn cum cfflra liegt Postposition vor ebenso wie in nobscum, obwohl das Sprachgefhl die Praeposition spter sicher mit dem Substantiv verbunden hat.” 41 The postposition is underlined in this and the following examples. 42 I am not convinced by the arguments of Penney (1999, 265) that this construction was borrowed from Greek; see again Fortson to appear. 43 In Fortson to appear, I also argue at length against the notion that Latin was more postpositional in its early history or prehistory than later on.

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those cases above like hoc recipimur in loco, where another word intervenes between the leftmost element and the preposition:44 prosodic flip (a purely phonological process) should have produced *hoc in recipimur loco or the like.45 Second, positing prosodic flip to explain magna cum laude implies that there had to have been two separate prepositions: an unstressed one positioned by prosodic flip, and a stressed one positioned in other ways, as M. Hale points out (p.c.). Third, and in some ways most importantly, magna cum laude constructions are but a subtype of discontinuous X–Y phrases, which can have, first of all, a nonclitic element intervening between the two words, and second, any number of elements intervening. Prosodic flip is posited to explain the positioning of clitics, and obviously will not work for NPs rendered discontinuous by full lexical items. The two phenomena can, however, easily be united: such discontinuities can arise by fronting of the first word of the phrase around the intervening element. Thus magna etc. are placed by fronting around cum, which retains its syntactic status as a preposition.46 We have seen evidence that fronted elements in Latin projected their own prosodic domains, producing a prosodic break that allows separating a fronted constituent across a line-break (see the previous section). This means that between magna and cum laude there should be a prosodic break of some sort, and that the lack of enjambements of the type magna / cum laude in Plautuss iambo-trochaics is accidental rather than due to prosodic factors. The cretic passage adduced earlier (Am. 244) would seem to bear this out. However, this account runs into a potential problem with the scansion of the phrases quemadmodum and quamobrem, to which we now turn. The initial sequences quem ad- and quam ob- could theoretically scan either with elision as a heavy syllable (qu(em) ad, qu(am) ob) or with hi44 At least some of these cases do seem to reflect prosodic flip of the element immediately after the first element, and this is important for establishing the relative ordering of movement rules. Measque in aedis is the most unambiguous: the placement of the clitic -que is best attributed to prosodic flip, but this could have only occurred after the fronting of meas. This of course makes sense, since prosodic flip should apply only after syntactic movement has taken place. 45 Such orders can occur in later poetry, but are not found to my knowledge in Plautus. 46 After developing this account of magna cum laude syntax, I was pleased to see that many of the same points have now been made also in Devine and Stephens 2006, 568 ff., based primarily on data from Latin prose authors. Clackson (2004) also claimed that the construction arose by fronting of the modifier around the preposition.


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atus and iambic shortening of the second syllable as a pyrrhic (quem a˘d, quam o˘ b). For such shortening, compare e. g. ut ˘ın seruitute Cap. 49, nequ(e) a˘d detexundam Ps. 400, tib(i) ˘ın mercede seruos Vid. 25 (see Ch. 7 on these and other examples). Lindsay (1922, 186 – 7) argued for hiatus and shortening, but on dubious grounds: he wanted to show that these phrases were not yet “stereotyped” expressions and should therefore not be written as one word. In fact there is no evidence that these phrases were not fully stereotyped already in Plautuss day, and the modern scholarly consensus is that quemadmodum, quamobrem scanned with elision.47 That the elision in fact reflected ordinary pronunciation, and was not simply a poetic artifact, is, according to Soubiran (1966, 62), supported by the inscriptional spelling que ad modum, attested several times (see the material in Diehl 1899, 210). I am not as sure as Soubiran is about the scansion of these phrases or whether inscriptional que ad modum clinches the argument,48 but as it happens, both scansions—hiatus with iambic shortening as well as elision—pose a problem because either one would indicate close prosodic connection between the relative and the following preposition;49 yet we have just established that the word-order X1 Prep X2 was generated by fronting of the first element, producing a prosodic break separating it from the preposition. This impasse, though, is illusory. We must recognize two chronological stages, one where quem ad modum, quam ob rem were generated online by movement rules, and a later one where they had become lexicalized as chunks; from that point forward they entered the syntax already fully formed, fixed in that word-order. As mentioned before, I see no reason to believe that they were not already idioms by Plautuss time. As idioms, we expect them to have exhibited word-level or cliticgroup-level prosody (Devine and Stephens 1994, 349), which leaves them open to undergoing either iambic shortening or elision, regardless 47 Soubiran 1966, 62. In Hammond et al.s 1970 edition of the Miles gloriosus, it is stated that quem ad modum should be scanned with hiatus and shortening at the opening of a line or sentence, but with elision elsewhere (see their notes ad 201 and 257). It is not clear from these notes, or from their discussion on p. 41 and ad lines 724 and 1328, what their reason for this assumption is; it appears to be arbitrary. 48 Orthographic suppression of final -m was frequent during certain periods. I have not had the opportunity to subject the attestations of que ad modum to philological analysis. 49 In Ch. 7 we will see that iamic shortening was only proper to sequences that were prosodically united.

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of their earlier prosodic characteristics. In short, these forms are irrelevant to determining the prosody of any magna cum laude construction that was generated afresh.50 The above discussion allows us to conclude that there was probably no prosodic reason that Plautus could not have set magna cum laude constructions straddling line-ends. As said at the outset, it is surprising that none is so found in iambo-trochaics.51 But if separating a magna cum laude construction across line-end was avoided for whatever reason, Plautus could still bend or break the rule for special effect. We began this section by citing the following passage: Am. 244

… ab dextera maxumo / cum clamore inuolant impetu alacri,

This comes from near the end of the famous canticum sung by Sosia, an extremely carefully crafted and magnificently bombastic passage that is replete with stylistic and grammatical figures of all kinds. An able and full discussion can be found in Oniga 1985, who notes, among many other things (p. 159), that the verse-initial position of the alliterative

50 Since clitics can have “bridge effects” and be linked prosodically to both preceding and following material (see Ch. 1, n. 21, and Ch. 7), I cannot exclude the possibility that in magna cum laude constructions, magna and cum did cohere even in spite of the fronting of magna, at least enough to discourage this poet from separating them across a line boundary. But it is not necessary to assume this. 51 Lucio Ceccarelli (p.c.) asks how many cases of enjambed magna cum laude constructions we in fact would expect, given that one hundred examples in the whole corpus is not a very large number in the grand scheme of things (it averages to about five per play). It would certainly ease my efforts if the answer were an obvious “None” or “Next to none,” but there is in fact no straightforward answer to this question, since all “expectations” are a complicated business (recall Ch. 1, pp. 14 ff.). No statistics are available to allow calculation of the raw probability that any given syntagm might get enjambed; and even if we possessed such statistics, they would probably not be sufficient to make a prediction as long as we lacked a fuller understanding of the purposes and effects of enjambement. Those purposes and effects would probably make the likelihood of enjambement of a given syntagm in a given context deviate markedly from a statistical norm, and in a manner unlikely to be quantifiable. The question is thus an important one, but in my opinion currently unanswerable.


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cum clamore, followed by the alliterative inuolant impetu with its forceful repeated in-, 52 underlines the entrance of the cavalry. Conjunctions Inscriptional evidence exists showing the prosodic dependence of conjunctions to the following word. Note first the voicing assimilation in quot per (< quod per) CIL IX 3321, CLE 170, set qui CIL X 2496.5 (Leumann 1977, 196). Voicing of et to ed (also spelled id) is known from a handful of mostly Christian inscriptions of Imperial times. In the late inscription CIL III 15184.13, found by a Mithraic temple in what was anciently Pannonia Superior, there is the sequence proseessu, which has been interpreted as pro se et su(is), with assimilation of et to the following su(is). In general these spellings are very rare because of the usually strict adherence to standard orthographic rules, but they surely reflect a more widespread phenomenon that obtained in Plautuss day as well. In Plautus, et scans short before a following consonant in some phrases (see Ch. 7), potentially indicating weakening or loss of the -t that would be explicable by destressing. However, this must remain speculative, since inscriptional spellings of et without the -t do not appear until the Imperial period. The fact that conjunctions are only very rarely stranded at line-end suggests indeed that in Plautuss day their prosodic cohesion with following material was tight. I have collected a total of nine examples of linefinal conjunctions. These include five subordinating conjunctions, mostly ut(i), and four coordinating conjunctions:53 Cas. 952 – 3 … nescio, nisi ut / inprobos famulos imiter Mil. 768 … caesariatus, atque uti / huic amanti ac Philocomasio hanc ecficiamus copiam, Poen. 1336 … Quia / iniuriarum multo induci satius est. Rud. 499 dum uiuos, uti / omnis tui similis hospites habeas tibi. 52 A preverb beloved of Vergil for the same reason, cf. the description of the storm at Aen. 1.81 – 91 impulit in latus … incubuit … insequitur … intonuere, each time line-initially. 53 Doubtful is As. 585 … Philaenium estne haec quae intus exit atque / una Argyrippus? This is what Lindsay reads, following Bothe; the mss. have … exit / atque Argyrippus una, which does not scan.

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Trin. 120

… posses, non uti / in eandem tute accederes infamiam

Mil. 1132

Nunc ad me ut ueniat usust Acroteleutium aut / ancillula eius aut Pleusicles. Poen. quamquam hanc salutem ferimus inuiti tibi et / quam622 – 2a quam bene uolumus leniter lenonibus. Ps. 835 terrestris pecudes cicimandro condio aut / hapalopside aut cataractria. Rud. 1169 Post sicilicula argenteola et duae conexae maniculae et / sucula— Doubts can be raised about two of these. Leo and Lindsay follow A in ending Mil. 1132 with aut, but the conjunction is absent from P; Soubiran (1995, 248), following Ritschl, says that its presence “ne simpose pas” (though to my mind it is a bit more natural to have it). Assuming that aut is original to Plautus in this passage, note that it is in the middle of the right-extraposed subjects Acroteleutium aut ancillula eius aut Pleusicles, which are separated from their verb ueniat by the intervening higherlevel usust from which the ut-clause depends.54 The line-final aut of Ps. 835 has also been questioned; it erroneously appears at the beginning of the next line in the manuscripts, where it cannot scan. Some editors move it to the end of the preceding line, while others have deleted it; it seems a matter of taste whether to keep it or not, as it does not affect the sense. What is not in doubt is that both this passage and the one from the Rudens are stylistically strongly marked,55 although it is not clear if the enjambements are in any way connected with this (that is, we do not know whether enjambements of this kind might have been 54 The structure looks a bit more complicated than it is; ut ueniat usust is for all intents and purposes a verbal complex (has to come). Compare n. 26 above on Per. 606. 55 Ps. 835 – 36 is in the middle of a passage spoken by the Cook that contains comic nonce names of various spices (here cicimandrum, hapalopsis, cataractria, after several others earlier in the passage). Rud. 1169 – 70 is marked by four diminutives in a row (sicilicula, maniculae, sucula, and even the adjective describing the already diminutized sicilicula, namely argenteola). Diminutives in Plautus usually convey shades of affective and expressive meaning, and are five times more common than in Terence (Seniv 1971, 484 et passim; although I am not sure that these statistics mean much given the difference in the sizes of the Plautine and Terentian corpora, the difference in usage discussed by Seniv does seem to be genuine). To be sure, here the items so described (contents of a chest) are actually small in size.


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felt to reinforce e. g. a pseudo-archaic or solemn feel). Also, in three of the four (Mil. 1132, Poen. 622 – 2a, and Rud. 1169) the line-break is in the middle of a list that continues well into the next line (in the Rudens passage the list would have continued but the speaker is interrupted); Plautus may have put the conjunctions at line-end to bind the lines together into one breath. Lists can evince unusual metrical behavior; for another example, see n. 60 below. An interesting feature of the five lines ending with subordinating conjunctions is that in three cases they form short phrases with a preceding function word (nisi ut, atque uti, non uti), and the whole group is preceded by a pause; the other two conjunctions are disyllabic and also separated by a pause. The four coordinating conjunctions are preceded by a word that ends in an elidable syllable. In the subordinating conjunction cases, we are thus dealing with disyllabic (once trisyllabic) units rather than a single stranded monosyllabic proclitic. Right-extraposed subjects Deferred or right-extraposed subjects enjamb freely: Am. 9756 Am. 778 Am. 825 Aul. 517 Bac. 403 Bac. 413 Cap. 604 Cur. 345

… In illisce habitat aedibus / Amphitruo, natus Argis ex Argo patre, … Age aspice huc sis nunciam / tu qui quae facta infitiare; Nescio quid istuc negoti dicam, nisi si quispiam est / Amphitruo alius, … petunt / treceni, … Sed eccos uideo incedere / patrem sodalis et magistrum. nunc propter te tuamque prauos factus est fiduciam / Pistoclerus. … os denasabit tibi / mordicus. … Immo apud tarpezitam situm est / illum quem dixi Lyconem,

56 Some might object that including this example—as well as Am. 778 and a few others where the enjambed material consists of several words—stretches my already loose definition of enjambement excessively. Even if my terminology is found lacking, what is of interest is simply the identification of what kinds of constituents can be separated from preceding material by the line-break. As the subsequent discussion will make clear, “heavy” NPs such as some of the ones here are just as important to analyze as light ones.

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Mer. 100 Mer. 623 Mil. 140 Mil. 182 Mil. 1152 Mos. 468 Mos. 484 Per. 543 Ps. 688 Rud. 58 Rud. 334 Rud. 403 Rud. 476 Trin. 324 Trin. 745

Discubitum noctu ut imus, ecce ad me aduenit / mulier, … eo si pacto posset indagarier / mulier? Nam unum conclaue, concubinae quod dedit / miles, … se ut uideant domi / familiares, … si prosenserit / miles, … Tangite / uos quoque terram. … Vt foris cenauerat / tuos gnatus, … Sed optume eccum ipse aduenit / hospes ille … Aurichalco contra non carum fuit / meum mendacium, quidquid erat noctu in nauem comportat domo / leno; … Estne hic / Trachalio … Ego quod mihi imperauit / sacerdos, Nempe optumo <me> iure in uinclis enicet / magistratus … quia res quaedamst quam uolo / ego me aps te exorare. … huic ducendi interea abscesserit / lubido;

It is beyond the scope of this book to determine the syntactic movement processes that created these word-orders; at best we can try to match these data to processes known from living languages. In a few cases, the subject NPs have likely been moved rightward by heavy-NP shift, the rightward movement of stressed NPs out of their VP to the right edge of a clause or sentence; NPs that undergo such movement, according to Pintzuk and Kroch (1989, 123), typically form their own intonational phrases. But most of the examples I have collected do not involve heavy NPs; rather, they exhibit the delay of rhematic (new, focused) information until sentence-end, a position of prominence.57 The same subject-verb inversion is found in English as a result of topicalization and in expletive constructions: In that house lives Amphitruo = In illisce habitat aedibus Amphitruo, Am. 97 – 8; here comes a woman up to me = ecce ad me aduenit mulier, Mer. 100 – 1.58 We do not know if this inverted wordorder results from rightward extraposition of the subject, or leftward movement of the verb, and we also do not know what the intonational ef57 Similar is Mos. 636: … Soluite / uosmet igitur “… So secure it yourselves” 58 On the general function of leftward movement to prepose thematic (known or familiar) information and of rightward movement to postpose rhematic information in English, see Horn 1986.


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fects were of such movement, if any. (In English, inversion of subject and verb does not necessarily have special effects on prosodic domain construction.) In Latin, the situation is rendered more complicated by the ability of such NPs to become discontinuous, with part of them preceding and part of them following the verb, as in the last example above (“meanwhile his desire for marrying will have left him”), where the subject NP is ducendi lubido, distracted by interea abscesserit. Regardless of the proper structural analysis of these phrases, the ability of the delayed subject to be separated from its verb across line-break indicates the presence of a prosodic boundary before the subject. Right-extraposed subjects are of course merely a subset of the general class of right-extraposed NPs, enjambement of which I have not investigated in detail. Pintzuk and Kroch (1989) observed that in Beowulf, right-extraposed NPs enjamb more readily than postposed PPs; it remains a task for the future to determine whether such differences are visible in the text of Plautus as well. Such distributional skews, if evident, could provide valuable diagnostic aids for determining when clausefinal position of a PP or NP is due to rightward extraposition, or to some other process like fronting of the (originally clause-final) verb. NPs straddling line-break For an NP to straddle a line-break is also common, indicating no particularly strong prosodic cohesion within such phrases. I only cite representative examples:59 Am. 980 As. 433 As. 564 Aul. 478 Aul. 489 Aul. 649 Bac. 777

Volo deludi hinc, dum cum hac usuraria / uxore nunc mi morigero. … Sticho uicario ipsi / tuo. ubi saepe caussam dixeris pendens aduorsus octo / artutos, audacis uiros, Nam meo quidem animo si idem faciant ceteri / opulentiores, … Quo illae nubent diuites / dotatae, … Ostende huc manum / dexteram. … ut, ni meum / gnatum tam amem

59 A fuller listing, though also incomplete, may be found in Fortson 1996a, 105 – 10, and a number of additional examples that had escaped my notice at that time are listed and discussed in Prescott 1907.

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Bac. 879 Mil. 9

… Ah, salus / mea, seruauisti me. … Stat propter uirum / fortem atque fortunatum et forma regia; conficiatur 60 dextera digitis rationem computat, ferit femur / dexterum. Mil. 204 Mil. 387 … propter eandem / suspicionem maxumam sum uisa sustinere. Mil. 473 … Sed numquam quisquam faciet quin soror / istaec sit gemina huius: Mil. 659 … At quidem illuc aetatis qui sit non inuenies alterum / lepidiorem ad omnis res Mil. 1125 … quin potius per gratiam / bonam abeat aps te. Poen. 165 … Sunt tibi intus aurei / trecenti nummi Philippi? Poen. 1260 … Cupite atque exspectate / pater, Ps. 58 … Ei rei dies / haec praestituta est, Ps. 649 … ut qui argentum adferret atque expressam imaginem / suam huc ad nos, Rud. 316 … Ecquem / recaluom ad Silanum senem, Rud. 372 Noui, Neptunus ita solet, quamuis fastidiosus / aedilis est: Truc. 391 … Propter militem / Babyloniensem, There is no restriction on the type of modifier involved, whether it is a deictic, quantifier, or a full-content adjective; and word-order also does not play a role in the NPs ability to straddle line-end.

60 feriens is Lindsays reading (feries P), preferred over As ferit because of the violation of Luchss Law that line-final ferit femur would entail. However, other scholars (e. g. Leo, Ernout) are clearly right in preferring ferit in spite of the violation. Periplectomenus is speaking these lines while watching Palaestrio gesticulating: “Hes tapping his chest with his fingers. Intends to summon forth his intelligence, I suppose. Aha! Turns away! Rests his left hand on his left thigh, and reckons on the fingers of his right hand. Gives his right thigh a smack! A lusty whack—his plan of action is having a hard birth …” (tr. Nixon) If the line read dextera digitis rationem computat, feriens femur dexterum, it would mean that while reckoning on the fingers of his right hand he dealt his right thigh a smack, a smack that could only be delivered with his left hand; but the left hand is resting all this time on his left thigh, and it would be odd to slap ones right thigh with the left hand in any case. Second, the asyndetic computat ferit would be quite in keeping with the style of the passage, which is highly asyndetic throughout. Third, as Soubiran points out, the violation of Luchs might not be so grievous in an extended list of actions like the one here (“lnumeration est peut-Þtre une excuse lanomalie”, 1995, 106; apparently not known to Eichner apud Gerschner 2002, 118, who arrived independently at a similar conclusion).


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To the above examples of NPs straddling line-ends may be appended some instances of discontinuous NPs straddling line-end. They number several dozen in total; representative examples from the first few plays include the following where the intervening material precedes the break, Am. 825 As. 339 As. 360 As. 920 Aul. 288 Aul. 294 Aul. 498 Aul. 610 Bac. 279 Cap. 98 Cap. 159 Cist. 177 Cist. 651 Cur. 420

… si quispiam est / Amphitruo alius, … Sed tamen tu nempe eos asinos praedicas / uetulos, claudos … nam si ille argentum prius / hospes huc adfert, … Pol me quidem / miseram odio enicauit. … Sed erus nuptias / meus hodie faciet. … Hic non poterat de suo / senex opsonari filiai nuptiis? … equidem dotem ad te attuli / maiorem multo quam … … si quis illam inuenerit / aulam onustam auri; … atque ego lembum conspicor / longum, strigorem maleficum exornarier. nunc hic occepit quaestum hunc fili gratia / inhonestum Multis et multigeneribus opus est tibi / militibus: … duxit uxorem hic sibi / eandem … ut haec ex me sciat / eadem, … Multam me tibi / salutem iussit Therapontigonus dicere,

as well as the following where the intrusory material begins a line: As. 16 Aul. 479 Bac. 172 Bac. 406 Cas. 992 Ep. 202 Ep. 597

Sicut tuom uis unicum gnatum tuae / superesse uitae … pauperiorum filias / ut indotatas ducant uxores domum, Saluto te, uicine, Apollo, qui aedibus / propinquos nostris accolis, … Ad illam quae tuom / perdidit, pessum dedit tibi filium unice unicum. … Nam tu maxumo / me opsecrauisti opere … Sed, ere, maxuma / uos uideo opportunitate ambo aduenire. … Qua re filiam / credidisti nostram?

In several further instances, the intervening material itself straddles the line-boundary, but these cases are hardly useful, given that the strings involved are several words in length (e. g. Per. 105 Pernam quidem / ius est

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adponi frigidam postridie) and thus occupy multiple phonological phrases; that they could be distributed across a line-boundary is not surprising. Most of the examples of enjambed hyperbata are discussed in Prescott 1907, especially as regards the issue of preserving semantically unified lines. A fair number of possible examples are probably better interpreted not as hyperbata, but as pendant appositives (often afterthoughts) that are separated from the noun they are in apposition to by an intervening element or elements; these do not concern us. Prosodic investigations of discontinuous NPs in other languages are few and far between; aside from early work on the prosody of hyperbaton by Drexler (1932; 1965; 1969a, 187 f.), the only one known to me is that in Devine and Stephens 1994, 480 ff. for Greek,61 from which we learn that discontinuous structures of the shape Y1XY2 (where Y1 is the modifier of Y2 and X is the head of the superordinate phrase containing the phrase YP) have “a tendency to promote the application of certain types of sandhi and prosodic processes more strongly than the continuous head flanking structures” (p. 487). The bond seems to be particularly tight between Y1 and X, according to their discussion. It is possible that this was true of discontinuous NPs in Latin as well, for there are more enjambements of the type Y1X / Y2 than Y1 / XY2. However, the first type is not in the overwhelming majority, and typically more than one element renders the phrase discontinuous (as in Aul. 294 and 398 above), which makes a prosodic explanation of the discrepancy between the two types unlikely: as already noted, the ability to break a major prosodic domain consisting of numerous full-content lexemes across a line-boundary is trivial. But perhaps significant is the fact that, relatively speaking, there are not many cases of short (three-word) hyperbata, of the type erus nuptias meus in Aul. 288, that are split across line-end. I know only of the following thirteen examples: As. 920 Aul. 288 Mer. 262

… Pol me quidem / miseram odio enicauit. … Sed erus nuptias / meus hodie faciet. … non ita amo ut sanei solent / homines

61 Devine and Stephens have since written a whole book on hyperbaton in Greek (1999 [2000]), but it is not concerned with prosody (although a few remarks are dropped passim). While I do not agree with all the conclusions they reach, the study is exemplary in its depth and in the variety of questions they ask, very few of which have, to my knowledge, been hitherto seriously explored for either Greek or Latin.


Poen. 191 Poen. 265 Ps. 482 Ps. 849 Truc. 661

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… Oculos uolo / meos delectare …An te ibi uis inter istas uorsarier / prosedas,62 … Ecquam scis filium tibicinam / meum amare? uerum pro pretio facio ut opera appareat / mea quo conductus uenio. … Nunc hoc deferam / argentum ad hanc,

As. 16 Men. 384 Mos. 975

Sicut tuom uis unicum gnatum tuae / superesse uitae … Oboluit marsuppium / huic istuc quod habes. Alexandrum magnum atque Agathoclem aiunt maxumas / duo res gessisse: Rud. 1235 … in aetate hominum plurumae / fiunt trasennae, St. 167 solere elephantum grauidam perpetuos decem / esse annos;

I have not collected all instances of hyperbaton in Plautus, but in my incomplete corpus, both types of hyperbaton are about equally represented: in the first 600 lines of the Miles, for example, there are forty-two instances of the short kind and forty-five instances of the longer kind. By contrast, splitting the short kind across line-end is markedly less common than splitting the long kind across line-end. In most of the cases above, the intervening word is a full-content lexeme, though typically (8) a verb, which may have been prosodically subordinate to its neighbors; there is also one pronoun (huic) and one genuine clitic (quidem), aside from two nouns and a numeral. Except for quidem, none of these would have formed a clitic group with the preceding element, but prosodic subordination to it (or the following) is certainly possible, which might have led Plautus to disprefer separating such phrases, though not to avoid it outright. Prepositions Prepositions never occur at line-end in iambo-trochaics. In the anapestic canticum Bac. 1084a–5 uiso ecquid eum ad uirtutem aut ad / frugem opera sua compulerit,

62 Followed by one and a half lines of appositional NPs.

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we have an apparent example, but it is misleading to speak of line-ends in lyric passages the same way as in iambo-trochaics (note fecisse straddling lines 1085a–6 as fe/cisse). Clearly line-breaks in this sort of lyric meter can have had no natural prosodic significance. The absence of prepositions stranded across line-breaks from their objects is hardly surprising: prepositions and their following objects formed a clitic group. Whether they also could form a single phonological word, with accent retraction according to the Latin stress rule, is not so clear. Certainly this is often assumed, with reference made to various frozen prepositional phrases that were univerbated and lexicalized, usually with word-internal phonological changes: ¯ılico¯ on the spot, right away < *in s(t)loco¯, se¯dulo¯ sincerely, without guile < se¯ dolo¯ (malo¯), affatim sufficiently < *ad fatim, and many others. Inscriptional spellings are pointed to for additional evidence of univerbation of prepositions and their objects as a living feature of Latin. Sommer-Pfister (217) mention spellings such as intabulas CIL I2 593.14, without word-break after the preposition, and note also the use of “I longa” or extra-tall I in inscriptional spellings of the preposition in before nouns beginning with a fricative, indicating lengthening of the i by the normally word-internal rule that lengthens vowels before a nasal plus fricative: In saliare carmen Mon. Anc. 10, Insuos CIL II 1503 (written as one word), In super CIL X 1781 (105 B.C.) (Christiansen 1889, 43). Interpunction can also provide evidence for the tight cohesion of prepositional phrases: Adams (1996) notes from the Vindolanda writing tablets and the W di Faw khir ostraca (saec. i – ii A.D.) various examples of lack of interpunction between preposition and object, indicating at least proclisis and potentially univerbation. We also have the remarks of ancient grammarians to guide us in this case: Marius Victorinus (6.23.12 Keil) mentions ingalliam and initaliam as single words, and Quintilian (Inst. 1.5.27) notes that circum litora as a phrase contained a single stress, which might indicate status as a single word. A final piece of evidence that may be mentioned comes from Romance, where forms like Italian alla to the (fem.) < *ad lam < ad illam (with unstressed and reduced ill-) attest to an earlier univerbation of preposition and demonstrative. Though admittedly *ad lam is from later Vulgar Latin, ad ˘ıllam is already Plautine (see Ch. 7).63 63 It would be instructive to see if inscriptions having regular punctuation show any consistent difference between punctuation of short prepositional phrases like those just disussed and longer ones (e. g. where the preposition is followed by a branching phrase such as genitive–noun). Proclisis and enclisis to branching


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All these facts would seem to be excellent evidence that prepositions and their objects could form single phonological words. However, looked at more closely, none of them guarantees that such phrases productively formed any prosodic unit tighter than a clitic group. Words like ¯ılico¯ are irrelevant, as these are lexicalized univerbations. Spellings without space or interpunction between preposition and object (intabulas, Vindolanda tablets) can just as easily represent clitic groups as genuine single words. Assuming that the I longa of Insuos, etc. represents a genuine long vowel,64 the lengthening of vowels before nasal plus fricative could have applied within clitic groups, not just single words, exactly like coda-to-onset resyllabification (see Ch. 4). The evidence from the ancient grammarians is, as always, difficult, since they did not operate within the same analytical framework that we do nowadays; additionally, Quintilians statement about circum litora could mean simply that circum was destressed as a proclitic before litora, not that the two formed a single phonological word stressed by the Latin stress rule, and the same could be true, mutatis mutandis, of Marius Victorinuss ingalliam, initaliam. These issues are important for understanding some of the metrical phenomena we discussed in the preceding chapter, and we will return to them in Ch. 7. For our present purposes, it is sufficient to say that prepositional phrases were clearly too tight to be split across line-boundaries, whether they formed single phonological words or clitic groups. Enjambed verbs Let us now turn to a category that is extremely commonly enjambed: verbs. To analyze these cases, it is important to distinguish two types. First are those where the verb is at the end of its sentence or clause and is not preceded by a major syntactic boundary; some examples are:

constituents is blocked in some languages; for examples from Homer and Old High German see Hale 1995, 18 ff. 64 I have no reason to cast aspersions on the I longa in these examples, but one nonetheless has to be careful with interpreting this symbol: in many cases it was merely decorative, being used for Is that stood at the beginning of a paragraph or in certain high-profile words such as Imperator. See the discussion and examples in Christiansen 1889. I examined the difficulty of interpreting the use of both I longa and the apex (a symbol used to mark vowel length) in Fortson 2004, after the completion of which another study on this topic came to my attention, Garc a Gonzlez 2001, unfortunately unavailable to me and not published in the proceedings of the conference at which it was given.

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Bac. 1184 … Quid tandem si dimidium auri / redditur, Mos. 1031 … Numquid Tranio / turbauit? Ps. 1240 … ubi cum stimulis aut flagris / insidiantur: Belonging to the rarer second type are enjambed verbs preceded by an embedded clause or infinitival complement: Aul. 765 Rud. 59

… Nam neque ego aurum neque istaec aula quae siet / scio … adulescenti qui puellam ab eo emerat / ait

Enjambement of the second type, where the verb is preceded by a major syntactic break, needs no particular discussion: the presence of a full clause boundary surely coincided with a prosodic-domain boundary as well. Regarding the first type, matters are more interesting because there is good reason to suspect that verbs in Latin were, or could be, prosodically deficient. (This is not to say that verbs were cliticized, just that they were more weakly stressed relative to adjacent constituents and were susceptible to entering into a neighboring prosodic domain rather than projecting their own). Verbal destressing is widespread cross-linguistically (fide Bolinger 1989),65 and is well-known from other members of the Indo-European family. On the basis of such evidence as the verbal accentual patterns in Vedic Sanskrit and Greek, and the behavior of verbs in older Germanic alliterating verse (Harkness 1991), it is thought that in Proto-Indo-European itself verbs were prosodically deficient. The only verb in Latin that is obviously cliticizable is the verb sum (Wackernagel 1892, 428 – 9; see Chs. 6 and 9), although good arguments exist for adducing other monosyllabic verbs (Gratwick 1981, discussed above). I will have more to say about the prosodic status of verbs in Ch. 9.66 65 The weaker prosodic status of verbs may result from their lower information content. Bolinger (1989, 235) argued that verbs are less “interesting” than nouns: “[T]he average noun easily outweighs the average verb in interest … Nouns far outnumber verbs. They are more explicit, and can more readily stand for the actions that are performed in connection with them than the actions can stand for the sense of the noun: Kool-Aid leads to drink more than drink leads to Kool-Aid. The verb, for all its importance, is relatively redundant. But this is not a rule. If the Predicate is more interesting than the Argument, then it gets the accent.” Cf. also Devine and Stephens 1994, 352 and the discussion below in Ch. 9. 66 Habinek (1985) noted a widespread orthographic practice whereby “individual finite verbs, even at the beginnings or ends of clauses and sentences, are gener-


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The Plautine material, however, does not unambiguously point to a lower prosodic status of verbs longer than monosyllables. Based upon the data I have collected, and counting as conservatively as possible, there are roughly 230 enjambed verbs not preceded by a major structural boundary.67 I have not found any constraints, either as regards syntactic category or heaviness of the constituent, on the material that can precede these verbs. I have also not noticed any indication that enjambed verbs were prosodically prominent. Note, however, that none of the enjambed verbs is a form of est that can aphaeretize (that is, contract, as est could to st; see Ch. 6), unless as part of a periphrastic tense;68 in other words, the forms es and est, which we independently know could cliticize, are not enjambed unless additional material follows (to which they were maybe proclitic). Other forms of esse are found enjambed; I know of the following instances: As. 345

Dico me nouisse extemplo et me eius seruom praedico / esse, Aul. 667 Fide censebam maxumam multo fidem / esse, Cap. 884 … Quia enim item asperae / sunt Cas. 547 … Vbi nuptiae / fuerint, Cist. 104 Nunc te amabo ut hanc triduom hoc solum sinas / esse Mer. 1007 … eadem breuior fabula / erit. Mil. 927 … Ni ludificata lepide / ero, Mos. 159 Euentus rebus omnibus, uelut horno messis magna / fuit. Ps. 541 … Quis me audacior / sit, Truc. 28 quot illic blanditiae, quot illic iracundiae / sunt, ally … grouped with following or preceding constituents” (p. 128). In Fortson 1996a I seized upon this as evidence that verbs in Latin did not form independent prosodic domains, but were prosodically subordinate to neighboring material. But I overlooked the fact that all single-word constituents, not just verbs, are generally not set off by punctuation from preceding or following constituents in the material analyzed by Habinek. Habineks study therefore provides no evidence one way or the other about the prosodic status of verbs. 67 A few are listed in Fraenkel 1928, 175 – 6. 68 Line-initial est occurs eleven times according to the Ibycus computer files, less often if one follows Lindsays edition. None of these is enjambed; line-initial est always begins its sentence or clause. Two odd cases are Ps. 140 and 1256, in lyric passages where it depends on the edition as to where the line-break is placed (in the first passage, for example, Questas edition of the cantica [1995] places est at the end of l. 139).

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Two of these require comment. As. 345 and Cist. 104 are structurally rather complex; the main verbs introducing the subordinate infinitival clauses (praedico, sinas) are, on the surface, embedded within the infinitival clause (me eius seruom esse that I am his slave, hanc hic unum triduom hoc solum esse (allow) her to stay here just these next three days), right before the infinitive esse. The question is whether praedico and sinas have been incorporated prosodically into the infinitival clause, or if it they sit in an acoustic trough as parenthetical material that is semantically rather weak and easily predictable from context, briefly interrupting the intonational contour of the rest of the phrase (with the intonational contour then resumed by esse; compare the intonational properties of vocatives and other parentheticals in English, which, when occurring phrase-internally, are accompanied by a sudden drop in intonation, but are then followed by a rise in intonation to the level preceding the parenthetical). Evidence that these verbs indeed had the prosodic status of parentheticals may come from their line-final positioning: the end of a line in Plautus is a favorite place for all sorts of (usually disyllabic) elements that were probably weakly stressed, such as meus, tuos, and verbs. (Of course, the line-final position of verbs could just as easily fall out from the fact that line-end often corresponds to clause-end and verbs normally are clause-final.) Regardless of the proper syntactic analysis of these constructions, it is clear that the matrix verb must have been incorporated into the dependent clause from outside. Counting the three instances of enjambed monosyllabic forms of esse given above, I know of only two other monosyllabic clause-final verbforms that are enjambed. This amounts to a grand total of five in Plautuss nearly 17,000 senarii and septenarii: Cap. 884 Ps. 541 Truc. 28

… Quia enim item asperae / sunt … Quis me audacior / sit, … quot illic iracundiae / sunt,

Bac. 997 Mer. 866

Pater, ducentos Philippos quaeso Chrysalo / da, … Ilico / sta,

One might initially think that the reason these five verbs are enjambed is metrical: it would have been impossible to place the verb line-finally and still give an iambic cadence, no matter which of the other words in the respective clauses preceded it. This is true in about two-thirds of the overall instances of enjambed clause-final verbs (sixty-five out of ninety-nine, by


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my count). But that assumes that the only other position the verb could occupy was line-final position, and it further assumes that Plautus did not have the technical means of avoiding enjambing these verbs. Plautus placed these verbs line-initially because that is where he wanted to place them.69 The important fact is that he almost always avoided isolating clause-final monosyllables across a line-break. While this avoidance does not indicate unambiguously that monosyllabic verbs acted or could act as clitics, it is definitely consistent with such behavior. Even if material in the same clause follows a monosyllabic verb, Plautus was averse to placing the verb after the line-break: Cap. 380 Cist. 56170 Mil. 1106 Rud. 1061

… ut uiginti minas / dem pro te. und tibi talenta magna uiginti pater / det dotis; … Omnia / uis optinere. … Si quidem / sis pudicus,

By contrast, the very high number of enjambed final verbs of more than one syllable is difficult for any theory that would have Latin verbs always be prosodically united with either preceding or following elements. Clearly, if Latin verbs behaved in this way, they only did so some of the time, and optionally they could be intonationally separated from adjacent material—which is hardly surprising, as they were full-content lexemes! The following examples have a form of esse that belongs to a periphrastic construction; here presumably the form of esse is proclitic or prosodically subordinate to the following participle: Ep. 406 Men. 96 Men. 237 Mil. 1009 Mos. 910 Mos. 975

Edepol ne istam * temperi gnato tuo / sumus praemercati. … quo iam diu / sum iudicatus; orasque Italicas omnis, qua adgreditur mare, / sumus circumuecti. … Vtinam, quoius caussa foras / sum egressa, Quin ego ipse et Philolaches in publico omnis porticul / sumus commensi. … et, postquam eius hinc pater / sit profectus peregre,

69 Truc. 28, for example, is a nicely balanced bipartite line quot illic blanditiae, quot illic iracundiae that would not have otherwise been possible, or at least would not have been as nice, with the intrusion of a verb, especially one as colorless as sunt. 70 For an additional remark on this line, see Ch. 9, p. 264.

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Mos. 995

sed etiam in terras solas orasque ultumas / sum circumuectus, Mos. 1008 … Nisi quid magis / es occupatus, Finally, the following examples show enjambed esse preceding an additional element or elements:71 Am. 1013 … apud omnis aedis sacras / sum defessus quaeritando: Bac. 540 … quos quom censeas / esse amicos, Poen. 298 … ibi tibi / erit cordolium Conclusion Enjambement is not free in Plautus, and the restrictions on it appear to reflect facts about Latin prosodic organization; the following conclusions may now be stated. The syntactic constituent with the tightest prosodic cohesion of the ones surveyed appears to have been the prepositional phrase, as shown by the complete lack of examples where a line-break separated a preposition from its object. I should also point out that the negatives non and nec are never line-final unless at the end of their phrase: there is not a single case of line-final non or nec modifying a following word in the next line.72 We may submit non as another word that formed a particularly close prosodic unit with whatever followed.73 Less certain, but quite probable evidence was seen for the proclitic or prosodically subordinate nature of conjunctions, especially of monosyllabic ones. That various proclitics do not occur line-finally because of their close prosodic relationship with following material was a fact already seen in its essentials by Hans Drexler in 1935,74 but he was more interested in line71 Add perhaps Cap. 119 Omnes profecto liberi lubentius / sumu quam seruimus, but quam seruimus is its own clause. This may belong better with the first set rather than the third. 72 The two cases of line-final non (Bac. 1163 and Ps. 1246) are sentence-final. 73 That is, word-level non as opposed to sentence-level non, which has the whole sentence as its domain and generally is sentence-initial. 74 Drexler 1935, 230 – 1 and 244. The article claims to be a refutation of the thesis of Meyer 1884 [1886], 44 and 48 that monosyllables were avoided at verse-end in Plautus; but Gustafson (1983, 40 – 1) faults Drexler for inaccurate statistics on this point. It is at any rate true, to recall the point from Ch. 4, that stressed monosyllables were avoided, unless standing in synaloephe with a preceding word. This latter fact may be evidence that the final D position was one of weaker prominence than other stressed positions of the line, and therefore well suited


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final phenomena than in enjambement per se (although, as has been implicit in the above discussions, the two are often related), and he treats all stressless monosyllables as essentially identical. We have seen that they cannot be subsumed under one hat; the demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns, for instance, are much more likely to occur line-finally separated from their head nouns than prepositions are from their objects.

for secondary stresses. This is also suggested by the ability of this D position to be filled by a lexically short syllable.

Chapter Six The Aphaeresis of Est Introduction In this chapter,1 we shall attempt to glean information about Latin prosody by investigating the contraction of the Latin copula and existential verb esse be. This verb could undergo contraction in the second and third person singular, whereby the full forms es and est were shortened to s and st by aphaeresis or loss of the initial vowel.2 Aphaeresis of es(t) happens only in a limited set of phonological environments: (a) after a vowel, e. g. fe¯minast < fe¯mina est, diu¯st < diu¯ est; (b) after a final -m, e. g. certumst < certum est; and (c) after a final -s preceded by a short vowel (with simplification of the resultant -ss- cluster), e. g. porta¯tust < porta¯tus est, ductus < ductus es,3 tristist < tristis est. 4 (a) and (b) are metrically indistinguishable from elided cert(um) est, femin(a) est without

1 2

3 4

Ch. 3 in Fortson 1996a, of which this is ultimately a heavily revised version, was published separately with some revisions as Fortson 1996b. So the usual definition, though aphaeresis by Plautuss day may not have involved any synchronic vowel-deletion at all. It is quite possible that it was an already lexically vowelless form s(t) that entered the prosody, as Nyman argued in a series of articles (1974, 1975, and 1977); note that this must be true of 1st sing. sum (see below in the main text). In all the unambiguous cases, -us scans as long because es was still pronounced ess in Plautuss day (recall Ch. 2, p. 22). Whether -is est could contract, and what it contracted to, have been controversial issues; I treat them in detail later in this chapter. There are also a few supposed instances of aphaeresis after long vowel plus -s, the most frequently quoted being re¯st < re¯s est, as by Lindsay (1922, 75) and O. Skutsch (1934, 57); note also haecst at Trin. 541, apparently the reading in A but uncertain, see Studemund 1889 ad loc. and Leo ad loc. Almost all scholars have emended these out of existence, but a few have taken them seriously; see Havet 1905, 184 – 5; Questa 1967, 34 – 5 (hesitantly); and especially Nyman 1975. Nyman deems them to be a marked stylistic feature; whether or not this is correct, he is certainly right that the arguments usually adduced to exclude them from the canon of possible Latin forms are problematic. Some other forms have been introduced purely by editors, such as illicst (Ps. 954 Lindsay, see n. 73 below); I do not believe these to be real. I am leaving all these problematic forms out of my investigation.

Chapter Six: The Aphaeresis of Est

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aphaeresis;5 outside of poetry, however, we know from inscriptions that aphaeresis did happen in these environments, as in scriptust (= -umst) CIL I2 1209, indiciost VI 14338, priuatast IX 4171, dedicatast X 3682.7, molestust, moriunust 5371 (for molestumst, moriundumst).6 In Latin literature, aphaeresis after -s is limited to comedy; after -m and vowels it does not appear in the orthography, though it might have been present in recitation.7 Aphaeresis was common to the other Italic languages as well, as in Oscan vu teremnatust uia terminatast Po 1 and perhaps destrst dextra est Cp 8.8

5

6

7

8

An exception is Lucilius 1238 Marx, as pointed out to me by Lucio Ceccarelli (…Gallo¯n(ı¯) es homo¯…), where it is clear that elision has taken place rather than aphaeresis, since the fourth foot is a dactyl -lo¯n(ı¯) es ho-. In Plautus, though, since es still scanned long (and est of course did also), no unambiguous sequences of this type can occur. Examples from Sommer-Pfister 215 and Soubiran 1966, 164. In inscriptions, the contraction product of -um est is always written -ust without the nasal, never -umst (Diehl 1899, 117); m is introduced only in later manuscripts (alongside also -unst and -ust). The spelling -ust could mean that the nasal was lost (or realized as nasalization on the preceding vowel) as generally the case word-internally before fricatives; although the nasals were reintroduced orthographically, sometimes spellings without the nasal remained standard, as in the title of Plautuss Mostellaria (derived from monstrum). But it is also possible that orthographic -ust represents lexicalized -st (cf. the preceding footnote) added to a nasalless ending -u, rather than nasalization in the sequence -umst; as Porzio Gernia (1974a) demonstrated, there is good evidence that word-final nasals were lost beginning in the fourth century B.C. It is generally assumed that -V(m) est at the end of the hexameter was read with aphaeresis rather than elision, because elision is otherwise avoided here (Soubiran 1966, 187 – 8). This assumption has no ancient support (only one passage, Marius Victorinus 6.22 Keil, mentions aphaeresis at all, and says nothing about this particular issue). It should be considered whether the rarity of elision before the last syllable in the line falls out from the avoidance of tonic monosyllables and of proclitics in this position. The remaining pool of vowel-initial atonic non-proclitic monosyllables was not a large one. Catalog numbers as per Rix 2002. Aphaeresis in Sabellic has been discussed in Cipriano and Mancini 1984, esp. pp. 30 f. Oscan destrst may not be an example, if Lejeune (1993, 264 – 5) is correct in taking it to be a graphic abbreviation of destr(u) st(ait) is located on the right; the traditional interpretation, he claims, is difficult because (e)st would be too weak a verb in the context, and destrst would contain a very unusual word-final consonant cluster resulting from a combination of syncope and aphaeresis (destr(u) (e)st). (I am indebted to Brent Vine for pointing out Lejeunes article to me.) While I find Lejeunes interpretation very attractive, his second argument is not as persuasive as his first, since claim-

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Originally, aphaeresis was not limited to the second and third persons singular; the first singular sum is the aphaeretized form of an older esum, which is noted by Varro (L.L. 9.100). Commentators have traditionally dismissed Varros esum as a fabrication,9 but the old grammarian has been completely vindicated by the discovery of this form (spelled esom) on the “Garigliano bowl” inscription (see Vine 1998 and Vine 2002, 3 n. 9, as well as Mancini 1997, 27 ff. on the form); and even before the discovery of this inscription, the existence of the form in Sabellic (e. g. Pre-Samnite and South Picene esum, Umbrian and Hernician esu; see the citations in Untermann 2000 s.v. ezum), not to mention the need for an initial vowel prehistorically to explain the vocalism of sum,10 had already tipped the balance strongly in Varros favor. Aphaeresis is due to the cliticization of est, as has long been realized.11 Cross-linguistically we know that cliticization is often licensed only under certain structural conditions. To take the English verb be, for example, the third singular is does not undergo contraction to s if it precedes the trace of a fronted constituent. Thus Johns in Pascagoula is a well-formed variant of John is in Pascagoula, but *I dont know wherei Johns ti, where is precedes the trace of the fronted wh-word where, is ungrammatical. In English, therefore, the cliticization of the copula manifests itself prosodically as enclisis to the previous lexeme, but is structurally proclitic to following material in a particular syntactic relation to the copula; if this following material is absent, cliticization is blocked.12 Plautus presents us with an apparently random collection of sometimes contracted, sometimes uncontracted instances of est. Years ago it

9 10

11 12

ing that destrst is an abbreviation opens the door to the possibility that it is part abbreviation (of destru) and also part aphaeresis (of (e)st). Cp. Kents statement, “This form seems to have been invented by Varro to suit his argument; all the evidence is against its ever having existed” (1951 ad loc.). *esmi > *esm (after Common Italic *m > em) > esom, aphaeretized to *som, ˚ ˚ sum. (I do not find credible the opposing view that sum represents an old thematization *eso¯m(i), as most recently in Schrijver 2006, 57 with n. 4.) For the aphaeresis, see Wallace and Joseph 1987, 689 f., as well as their follow-up study (1989; for a different account, see Mancini 1997, 27 ff.). They attribute the deletion of e- in esom (their *esom, as it was not yet attested at that time) to syncope after a consonant-final host, thus separating it from the aphaeresis of es and est; but I see no reason why the e-loss here must be historically different in origin. Wackernagel 1892, 428 – 9. This is the old analysis of Bresnan 1978 which, however, is disputed by some, as Kaisse (1985, 41 f.). Similar facts are, however, commonly found in other languages, e. g. the behavior of the Hausa emphasizing particle fa (Inkelas 1988; Zec and Inkelas 1990, 369 – 72).


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was possible for a scholar like Lindsay to write (1904, 142 n. q), “…-ust was the form of rapid -us est of more deliberate utterance,” and leave the matter at that. Lindsays comment boils down to attributing the distribution to stylistic differences (essentially colloquial or allegro speech vs. higher or more solemn style), and at some level this may well have been true (cp. the traditional prescriptive rule in English academic prose against the use of contracted verb forms). However, the distribution of contracted and uncontracted est does not correlate grosso modo with differences in meter, which themselves correlate with differences in style and register: 91 % of the occurrences of -ust and an identical 91 % of the occurrences of -us est are in iambo-trochaics, which is roughly consistent with the overall ratio of these meters to cantica (about 8.5 : 1). But all this rather misses the point of most interest to a linguist: even if contracted forms were proper only to informal and colloquial passages, the question still arises as to whether there were any structural constraints on the contraction. As far as I have been able to determine, this question has barely even been asked in the literature: almost all of the few discussions of aphaeresis center around the phonological facts.13 13 Brinkmann 1906; Kent 1940, 158 – 9; Leumann 1977, 123 – 4; Sommer 1914, 293 (repeated in Sommer-Pfister 215). Standard works on Latin syntax do not mention the phenomenon, as far as I see: Bennett 1910 – 14; Ernout and Thomas 1953; Szantyr 1965; so also Corssen 1868 – 70. Also useless for our purposes are works that concern orthographic questions or supposed instances of aphaeresis in particular passages of Roman poetry: Marouzeau 1908; Kenney 1986; Kershaw 1987; and Leonhardt 1988. Karl Lachmann has a famous note on aphaeresis in his 1871 edition of Lucretius (ad 1.993), but this also concerns orthography. Tordeau 1994 concerns statistical frequency of elided versus aphaeretized monosyllables. Among the sources I have consulted, only Questa (1973, 488) seems aware that there must have been specific conditioning factors (“determinate circostanze”) that licensed aphaeresis, but “secondo un meccanismo molto poco chiarito.” Martti Nymans three studies referred to above in n. 2 (1974, 1975, 1977) contain extensive theoretical treatments of the phenomenon, but without a consideration of the syntactic environments. For the present indicative of the verb, he sets up underlying /s + u + m/, /s + s/, /s + t/, etc., and for the full forms es and est he posits a rule of vowel insertion whereby s + C > es + C after a consonant or a major pause (1974, 21). Such an approach is both ad hoc and, among other things, does not explain why we also get est clause-initially, and why the vowel inserted is e, which otherwise does not occur in Latin as an anaptyctic vowel (as A. Calabrese reminds me; see the examples in Leumann 1977, 102 – 3). This analysis also cannot address the ultimate question of why, under identical phonological conditions, aphaeresis sometimes occurs and sometimes does not. Nyman is additionally forced to make the unconvincing claim that, since the

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To determine if there were any structural constraints on est-contraction, we must establish the environments in which contraction does not appear. This will only be possible by considering the cases where contraction is metrically unambiguous, namely those under (c) above—after a short vowel plus -s: as was noted at the outset, aphaeresis after an elidable final syllable is metrically indistinguishable from elision. Collecting the instances of aphaeresis and non-aphaeresis after -s is made more difficult by the fact that in manuscripts not only of Plautus but also of other Latin literature, the variation in representing aphaeresis is enormous, both in how it is represented and in whether it is represented at all. The graph st was a standard manuscript abbreviation14 for est after vowels and nasals, particularly at the ends of lines and before punctuation (more on which below).15 The researcher without access to the manuscripts has his or her difficulties compounded by the fact that different editors have different practices in printing these readings. For instance, P has quidem est at Aul. 421; this appears as quidem est in Lindsay, but as quidemst in Leo, and neither edition gives the manuscript reading in the apparatus (for which one has to go to the “large Teubner” of Loewe, Goetz and Schoell). The manuscript data for Plautus have been collected in Otto Brinkmanns dissertation (1906); he presents statistics on aphaeresis in tabular form on pp. 75 – 109.16 Brinkmann showed that as a general rule, the earlier the manuscript, the more likely it is to represent aphaeresis faithfully. Thus for example Brinkmann notes that the younger Palatine manuscripts C and D17 show massively more undone contractions than the older B. He also notes similar facts from the manuscript traditions of Vergil, Cicero, and Catullus (p. 23).18

14 15

16

17

18

e- in other “enclitic” words like enim, ego, etc. is not subject to apocope, aphaeresis in est cannot be due to enclisis. Here he fails to see that not all prosodically deficient words are equal: compare the classic distinction between “simple clitics” and “special clitics”, as proposed in Zwicky and Pullum 1983. Or phonetic spelling (with <s> = [es]), as Lucio Ceccarelli suggests to me (p.c.). Marouzeau 1908. The graph st as an abbreviation for est is not mentioned by Lindsay (1915, 69), who says the two standard abbreviations in early minuscule manuscripts were e¯ and . Note that under “II. -us est. Scriptum est: a) -us est” (pp. 98 ff.), only those instances where a manuscript has -us est for what must be scanned as aphaeretized -ust are noted. Even if Chelius (1989, xi) is right that B is younger than C or D (see Ch. 1, n. 29), stemmatically most of it is still a step closer to the Palatine archetype P than either C or D. The Catullus example is rather interesting: in the manuscripts, the first line of carmen 55 reads Oramus, si forte non molestus es, but the sense demands moles-


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While it is clear from Brinkmanns data that a manuscript spelling bonus est can represent either bonus est or bonust, he did not ask whether the same is true of a spelling bonust. I therefore examined the manuscript readings of eight of the plays, and I found only one clear instance from one manuscript of orthographic contraction that had to scan uncontracted. Moreover, this exception proves the rule: C reads equest for aequius est at Bac. 1159, and equest is also in other ways obviously corrupt.19 Uncontracted est is therefore not usually written contracted, which is hardly surprising. This finding could be of importance for the interpretation of aphaeresis after final -m. If unaphaeretized est was (almost) never abbreviated as st in the manuscripts after -s, then it is legitimate to suppose that this practice also obtained for est in any position. Unfortunately, we know from studies such as Marouzeau 1908 that both manuscripts and inscriptions did use the graph st as an abbreviation for full est at the ends of long lines or before punctuation when the scribe was running out of room. An example he cites (p. 294) is CIL XII 5271: ^ · NEC ^ SSEST MORTVA · CVM · FVERIS · FATI · QVOD · LEG

But Marouzeau points out that a number of cases of orthographic aphaeresis after vowels are not attributable to abbreviation, and it is for determining whether these cases represent genuine aphaeresis or not that tum est. The spelling molestus can only have come about if the archetype had molestust for molestumst, following the standard spelling conventions of the time (see above). The spelling molestust on its own is ambiguous between molestum st and molestus st; a later copyist undid the contraction incorrectly to molestus est, itself eventually corrupted to molestus es. Although most standard editions of Catullus do not print the verb as contracted, aphaeresis is likely here because the idiom si non molestumst is colloquial, and common in Plautus and Terence. Diehl (1899, 120) notes that in inscriptions, -ust for -um est is found almost solely in lines of iambic senarius. This is probably accidental. Certainly in literary texts there is no similar restriction; quite aside from all the Plautine instances that are not from senarii, Catullus 55 is in hendecasyllables. 19 The only other possible candidates are all from problematic lines rendered differently in different editions: Cas. 903, Ep. 168, Mil. 805, 881, Trin. 130. Questa (1967, 24), though, indicates that “non manchino casi” where the mss. transmit aphaeretized forms that must scan uncontracted, but does not elaborate. The eight plays I surveyed were the Aulularia, Bacchides, Casina, Epidicus, Mercator, Miles gloriosus, Persa, and Trinummus. Diehls tables of the relative frequency of -u(m)st/-um est and -ust/-us est in A and B (1899, 119 – 20) are unfortunately not useful for our purposes.

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our rule could be of value. However, that must remain outside the scope of the present investigation.20 Previous studies The only study I have yet come across which even comes close to engaging in a synchronic syntactic analysis of est-aphaeresis is the chapter entitled “Aphrse de est” in Soubiran 1966. He asks the question, “Les potes placent-ils est aprs finale lidable dans nimporte quelles conditions smantiques et syntaxiques?” (165). First he correctly dispenses with a conclusion reached in an earlier French study, Marouzeaus 1910 Paris dissertation, La phrase verbe Þtre en latin, which had stated (221, apud Soubiran 165) that les cas o la nature enclitique du verbe Þtre est phontiquement atteste sont prcisment ceux o nous lavons vu dpouill de toute signification et rduit au rle dun simple outil grammatical (postposition immdiate de la copule lattribut, du verbe dexistence au sujet).

Soubiran proceeds (166 – 74) to examine the instances of est in Vergil to determine under what condtions est occurs after a vowel or vowel plus -m: est has the peculiarity in the Classical hexameter of being the only monosyllable that can end a line and before which elision (or aphaeresis) is allowed. Soubiran concludes that when est possesses “un sens fort” (166), it is placed either verse-initially or after a consonant where no elision can take place, whereas when est is a copula or part of a periphrastic verb tense, it frequently occurs after a final elidable syllable. Pure existential est is verse-initial in Vergil and therefore a preceding word never elides with it. The figures are different for existential est contained within a conditional clause or in connection with an indefinite, where it is not clause-initial and always follows an elidable final syllable (167). When the complement of est is a locative expression, the verb usually follows an elidable syllable (168). In use with a first- or second-person dative of possession (mihi est, etc.), est is usually verse-initial and hence does not follow an elidable syllable, whereas with a third-person dative the opposite is the rule (168 – 9). As a copula, est is placed after an elidable syllable a little over half the time (169 – 70). Impersonal uses of the copula 20 Lucio Ceccarelli (p.c.) points out that medieval copyists were more likely to be unfamiliar with the archaic spelling bonust, whereas bonumst was normal in the Classical period. Bonust-type spellings therefore might have undergone emendation more frequently.


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(certum est, etc.) always occur after an elidable syllable, presumably by accident, since these expressions are frozen and consist of an elidable adjective followed by est (171 – 2). As an auxiliary, est usually follows an elidable syllable; when it cooccurs with a participle ending in -us, it is placed not after the participle, but somewhere else in the sentence, usually after an elidable syllable (173). Soubirans conclusion that the function of est determines whether it comes after an elidable syllable or not is dubious. Only in the case of existential est is this approximately correct. Existential est is normally sentence-initial, a syntactic fact likely inherited from Proto-Indo-European (cf. the similar behavior of existentials in Greek and Vedic Sanskrit, among other cognates of Latin); sentence-beginning normally corresponds with line-beginning, so the absence of a preceding elidable syllable is no surprise. The fact that existential est in a conditional clause is, in Soubirans sample, always preceded by an elidable syllable is at least partly expected, since est cannot be (or can only very rarely be) the first word in such a clause (it must at least be preceded by the subordinator).21 It could well be accidental that in every case in Soubirans sample the preceding syllable was elidable. Many of the other distributional facts pointed out by Soubiran fall out from elementary principles that are only indirectly related to the verbs function. Est is a heavy syllable; therefore, if not line-initial and preceded by a nonelided final syllable, it must be pre˘ (C)V ˘ C, with nonceded in the hexameter either by two short syllables (-V elidable final -C) or by another heavy syllable (-VC, also nonelidable). A polysyllabic word ending in -VC is possible only if the final consonant is -s; but since most words ending -Vs are either 2nd person singular active verb forms (which under normal circumstances are incompatible with an immediately following est), nominative plurals (incompatible with singular est), accusative plurals (also not expected with est unless est is an auxiliary in a transitive periphrastic construction), or first- and seconddeclension dative plurals (possible if the dative is ethical, posssessive, or the like, but not hugely abundant overall), we would not expect est to be often preceded by such a word. When est is an auxiliary, its usual 21 In Plautus, to my knowledge, the verb in a subordinate clause never precedes the subordinator (as opposed to other parts of speech, which often do); in Classical poetry, this rule was relaxed. (The Plautine situation may be inherited; cf. Kleins observation for Vedic Sanskrit, 1994, 115 – 6 n. 3, that verb fronting around relative pronouns is very rare by comparison with verb fronting generally.)

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placement (if other factors do not intervene) is directly following the participle that it accompanies; only participles in -us would be nonelidable, ˘ Cus (e. g. conditus) would fit the meter if foland only those ending in -V 22 lowed by a heavy syllable. Such participles would thus have to be placed either after est or elsewhere in the line. Participles ending in -a and -um, of course, are a different story; like those in -us, they almost always have a long penult, but the elidable ultima allows them to be placed in the normal position before est. Thus from the first two books of the Aeneid we have usa est Aen. 1.64, coorta est 148, data est 306, locuta est 614; where auxiliary est does not follow the participle, it is because it cannot for metrical reasons: interfata dolore est 1.386, est uoce insecutus 406, est reddı˘ta 2.740. Thus whether auxiliary est is preceded by an elidable syllable or not has nothing to do with its function or the fact that it does not have “un sens fort” in this case. Space does not allow a discussion of every one of Soubirans other conclusions outlined above, but all of them tend to fall out automatically from a combination of metrical practice and principles of word-order. In any case, I fail to see how ests occurrence after an elidable syllable should be evidence for its enclitic or nonenclitic status in any given case except possibly at line-end.23 At Aen. 1.603 – 4 si quid usquam iustitia est, we have no way of knowing whether this was pronounced iustitia st with enclisis and aphaeresis, or iustiti(a) est with elision. Elision itself seem too powerful a diagnostic for clisis, since any word can undergo elision. Presumably Soubirans thought is that if est in such sentences in spoken Latin was enclitic, the best way to capture that in poetry was to put it after an elidable syllable (he treats aphaeresis and elision as ultimately identical phenomena, p. 184).24 But that is a claim that would need independent substantiation.

22 Participles of that shape (and with heavy antepenult) are not very numerous: datus, status, situs, litus, and rutus (plus compounds); -ditus and -gnitus; and the rare participles in -itus to second-conjugation verbs with heavy root syllable. 23 The usual avoidance of elision before line-final tonic monosyllables, if not epiphenomenal, means that elision was avoided either in this position, or only specifically before tonic monosyllables. If the latter, then est in a line ending …usa est was clitic; if the former, then it was aphaeretized, and therefore also clitic. 24 Compare the remarks of Nyman (1974, 8 n. 3), noting that in an inscription like CIL XII 882 raptusque a fatis conditus hoc tumulost, the elision between -que and a is not orthographically indicated, but the aphaeresis of est after tumulo is. I doubt that this orthographic difference actually means anything, but his conclusion—that aphaeresis and elision are separate processes—is of course correct.


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If we turn now to aphaeresis in Plautus, the first fact to be noted is that semantics do not appear to play any role in whether est contracts or not, contrary to Soubirans claims about elision before est in Vergil. Aphaeresis occurs with all three senses of the verb—auxiliary, copular, and existential/locational:25 Auxiliary: Ep. 671

Quot illic homo hodie me exemplis ludificatust atque te, “The number of ways that man has made a fool of me today—and you as well …”

Mer. 833

interemptust, interfectust, alienatust. Occidi. “… has been cut off, killed, banished. Im done for!”

Per. 80

Sed aperiuntur aedes, remorandust gradus. “But the door is opening; Id better slow down (lit., my step must be delayed).”

Truc. 960

Tu dedisti iam, daturust: istuc habeo, hoc expeto. “Youve just given, hes about to give: Ive got that one, but I (still) need this one.”

Copula: As. 410

Nimis imperiosust. … “Hes too bossy.”

Cap. 463

ille miserrimust, qui cum esse cupit, quod edit non habet. “… the guy that wants to eat, and doesnt have anything to eat, is the most wretched.”

Poen. 861

Nam nostrorum nemo dignust. … “For no one of us is worthy.”

(This is not an isolated example, however; Brent Vine points to my attention the inscription CIL I2 1209, which also does not indicate elisions but does indicate aphaeresis [scriptust].) I would interpret these spellings as evidence that s and st were lexicalized (much like English nt), cf. n. 2, whereas elision was the product of more low-level sandhi rules like French liaison that are typically not represented orthographically. 25 I am combining existential and locational because of the very frequent overlap of these two senses.

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Existential/Locational: Rud. 1156 Ensiculust aureolus primum litteratus “First of all, theres a little golden sword, with writing on it.” Aul. 389

Et strepitust intus. … “And theres a noise inside. …”

Bac. 581

… Ecquis in aedibust? “Is anybody in the building?”

It is clear from data such as these that any constraints on contraction of est will lie either in the morphological and syntactic categories of words adjacent to est, or in the (resultant) effects of prosodic domain–construction that these categories entail. Aphaeresis after nouns I will now examine the instances of aphaeresis after -us arranged by morphological class of the element which contracted with the verb; we shall begin with nouns and adjectives. (Aphaeresis after -is will be treated in its own section below because of certain phonological complications.) After nouns in -us, est26 contracts in a little under half the instances.27 Before we present and analyze the data, we may first exclude from consideration the fixed grammaticalized expressions consisting of Noun + est such as opus est/opust and usus est/usust, both there is need (for, of). Their distribution is free; the choice between opus est and opust was surely stylistically or metrically, and not linguistically, motivated. (It is important to understand that by “free” I do not mean “random”, but rather that, as far as the grammar was concerned, Plautus was free to use either an aphaeretized or an unaphaeretized form in these contexts, and that his choice depended on what message he was trying to convey.) Compare English shouldnt and should not, which are mere stylistic variants whose distribution is not determined by structural or prosodic

26 For convenience I shall use est as a cover term for both es and est. 27 It is much rarer after nouns in Terence: aside from opust, the only cases of aphaeresis after nouns in -us are tempust at Hec. 597 (also once restored at Hau. 169), and usust at Ad. 21.


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facts.28 Leaving these out, we are left with thirty-five cases of nouns in -us followed by contracted es or est. In ten cases, est cliticizes to a bare noun, while in fifteen, the noun is preceded by a single modifier (usually a determiner). The eleven cases of aphaeresis after bare noun are: Aul. 389

Et strepitust intus. … “And theres noise inside …”

Bac. 774

atque hic quidem, opinor, Chrysalust. “and this man, I think, is Chrysalus.”

Bac. 937

Epiust Pistoclerus: … “Pistoclerus is Epius …”

Bac. 946

miles Menelaust, … “the soldier is Menelaus, …”

Bac. 947

Mnesilochust Alexander, … “Mnesilochus is Alexander …”

Cur. 414

Summane, salue. Qui Summanus? … “Summanus, hello. Why are you (called) Summanus?”

Ep. 49

Vtcumque in alto uentust, Epidice, … “However the wind is on the sea, Epidicus, …”

Mil. 88

Hoc oppidum Ephesust; … “This town is Ephesus; …”

Ps. 100129

… Sumbolust in epistula. “The sign is on the letter.”

Ps. 1216

… Mira sunt ni Pseudolust. “Its a wonder if it isnt Pseudolus.”

28 Cf. Lindsay 1922, 45, in a different context: “We could not frame a hard-and-fast rule for the use of Ill and I will, hes and he is (or he has) in English; and a foreign dissertation which should attempt it would make amusing reading.” 29 Probably best left as sumbolust which gives B c D; also, uncontracted sumbolus est in this position would have violated the law of Hermann-Lachmann (Questa 1967, 129 ff.), as Lucio Ceccarelli (p.c.) reminds me. This law states that a word of more than two syllables could not end in a pyrrhic except in certain positions in the line. I would merely claim that if the grammar had necessitated uncontracted sumbolus est, Plautus would have found a way to use it.

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Trin. 102730 … Non fugitiuost hic homo, commeminit domi. “This man is not a runaway; hes recalling home.” In the fifteen cases where the noun is modified, the modifier is typically a determiner, as statistically expected: Am. 362 Aul. 402 Bac. 308 Cur. 86 Men. 651 Mer. 945 Mil. 901 Per. 14 Ps. 119331 Rud. 1054 Rud. 1156 St. 134 Trin. 712 Truc. 31 Truc. 216

Haecine tua domust? glabriorem reddes mihi quam uolsus ludiust. Quis istic Theotimust? Quisnam istic fluuiust, quem non recipiat mare? Quis is Menaechmust? Calchas iste quidem Zacynthiust. Hic noster architectust. Toxilus hic quidem meus amicust. Quis istic Pseudolust? tuos hic seruost? Ensiculust aureolus primum litteratus. Idem animust in paupertate qui olim in diuitiis fuit: meus ut animust eloquar: primumdum merces annua, is primus bolust, magisque adeo ei consiliarius hic amicust quam auxiliarius.

In five cases the noun is modified by a genitive or dative of possession or reference: Am. 381

Quis tibi erust? “Who is your master?”

Cur. 184

… At meo more dormio: hic somnust mihi. “But Im sleeping after my own fashion: this is sleep for me.”

Mos. 980

… Patris amicus uidelicet. “Apparently you are a friend of (his) father.”

30 I take fugitiuos as a predicate nominative and not an attributive to hic homo, which seems to me the easier structural interpretation, though to be sure this cannot be proved. 31 Probably best left as is, since P reads -ust (see above). Uncontracted Pseudolus est would additionally have violated the law of Hermann-Lachmann (n. 29).


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Per. 244

neque tippulae leuius pondust quam fides lenonia. “Nor is the weight of a water-spider lighter than the trustworthiness of a madam.”

Trin. 368

sapienti aetas condimentumst, sapiens aetati cibust. “age is the spice for wisdom, wisdom is the food for age.”

In the four remaining instances, the noun is followed by an adjunct (either nominal or clausal): Am. 10032

Is nunc Amphitruo praefectust legionibus. “This Amphitruo is now the prefect of the legions.”

Am. 363

Amphitruo, qui nunc praefectust Thebanis legionibus. “Amphitruo, who now is the prefect of the Theban legions.”

Ps. 648

Nam istic sumbolust inter erum meum et tuom de muliere. “For this is the sign between my master and yours concerning the woman.”

Trin. 432

Tempust adeundi. … “It is time to approach (him).”

Per our general approach, which claims that contraction of est is constrained but lack of contraction is not, we would expect to see examples without aphaeresis parallel to the ones above, and that is indeed the case; the numbers33 are roughly comparable (8 after bare noun,34 14 after noun plus modifier35 [plus 2 with dative of possession], 7 after noun followed by 32 This and the next sentence can alternatively be interpreted as containing the adjective praefectus in charge of. 33 I omit the problematic lines Cas. 847 and Poen. 824. From bacchiacs one can add Cas. 839 (scio, sed meus fructus est prior; Lindsay prints fructust but I am uncertain on what grounds). In lines containing more than one sentence, I only quote the relevant sentence. In keeping with my practice in the rest of this book, I have not included lines from cantica. However, since the scansion of bacchiacs and cretics is less problematic, I have cited cases of aphaeresis from such lines in the footnotes. 34 Am. 533, As. 619, Cap. 574, Cap. 888, Men. 72, 724, Ps. 727, St. 655; I omit the corrupt Per. 120. 35 Bac. 85, 913, Cur. 499, Mil. 145, Mos. 983 (two modifiers; from this one example it is unclear whether that is significant), Rud. 1052, Truc. 470, plus six cases dis-

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nominal or clausal complement36). In these configurations, clearly contraction of est was grammatically licensed, though as usual not obligatory. However, there are two sets of cases where lack of contraction is the norm. The first is when est occurs with two nouns in apposition:37 Ps. 636

Sed quid est tibi nomen? :: Seruos est huic lenoni Surus, “…This pimp has (lit., to this pimp there is) a slave (named) Surus.”

St. 458

Hic quidem Gelasimus est parasitus, qui uenit. “Here is Gelasimus the parasite coming.”

Bac. 120

An deus est ullus Suauisauiatio? “Is there some god Suauisauiatio?”

The second is a subset of the cases where the noun has a modifier: in six38 of these (roughly half), the verb est renders a noun phrase containing a noun and modifier discontinuous: Men. 1070 … Noui equidem hunc: erus est meus. “I know this man—hes my master.” Mil. 665

liquidiusculusque ero quam uentus est fauonius. “I will be more gentle than the west wind is.”

Mos. 657

Nullum edepol hodie genus est hominum taetrius “By golly, nowadays there is no more disgusting race of men”

Poen. 1227 An patruos est, Agorastocles, tuos hic? … “Is this man your uncle, Agorastocles?” Ps. 782

cras mihi potandus fructus est fullonius. “tomorrow fullers earth is to be drunk by me.”

St. 665

ibidem erus est noster), hoc mihi dono datumst. “in the same place is our master) …”

cussed momentarily (Men. 1070, Mil. 665, Mos. 657, Poen. 1227, Ps. 782, St. 665); with dative of possession, Am. 362, Bac. 557 (also see below). 36 As. 495, 912, Cap. 12, Cist. 720 (mihi dat. of reference), Mil. 451, 1218, Poen. 741. 37 Also Per. 277 (Vbi Toxilus est tuos erus?), in cantica (iambic dimeter). 38 Except perhaps for Mos. 657, which is structurally ambiguous: taetrius could be attributive, as I have translated it, or predicative (no race of men is more disgusting).


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In only one line (Rud. 1156) is this structural configuration found with aphaeresis (repeated from above):39 Rud. 1156 Ensiculust aureolus primum litteratus. … “First of all, theres a little golden sword, with writing on it …” It is perhaps significant in this light (though the data set is rather small) that in the cases where a noun cooccurs with a dative of possession and where the phrase is rendered discontinuous by est, there is also no aphaeresis: Am. 362

… Quis erus est igitur tibi? “Who then is your master?”

Bac. 557

Nequam homost, uerum hercle amicus est tibi. … “Hes a worthless man, but its true hes a friend of yours.”

Contrast (repeated from above): Am. 381 Per. 244

Quis tibi erust? neque tippulae leuius pondust quam fides lenonia.

In the examples where est follows a noun, therefore, we see a markedly skewed distribution of aphaeresis versus lack of aphaeresis: if the verb occurs between a noun and its modifier, or between a noun and its appositive, or (perhaps) between a noun and a dative of possession, twelve out of thirteen times aphaeresis does not occur.40 In Fortson 1996a, 136 and 1996b, 100 I tried to explain away the one exception (Rud. 1156) by suggesting that aureolus was an afterthought (“First, theres a little sword—a little golden one, with writing on it”), but I now have considerable doubts 39 One other possible exception (Cap. 994) will be treated later. In Fortson 1996a, 134, 136 and Fortson 1996b, 98, 99 – 100, I also included Cur. 499 here (Item genus est lenonium inter homines meo quidem animo), arguing that genust would be a better reading, against all the mss. and editors, because it would form a c D measure-end. But there are far too many C D measure-ends for this to be anything but the weakest grounds on which to base an emendation. Rud. 278 (… nec locust ullus …; bacchiacs) is an emendation. 40 The lack of aphaeresis between two nouns in apposition will be shown below to be not significant.

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that that was correct (the position of primum strongly suggests that ensiculust aureolus is a unit and that only litteratus, if anything, is an afterthought). We thus cannot flatly say that contraction of est was ungrammatical within a discontinuous NP; but it appears nonetheless to have been disfavored, and may have indeed been ungrammatical in certain cases. I do not know whether the relative heaviness of both the noun ensiculus and the adjective phrase aureolus litteratus is implicated in the ability of est to cliticize to the noun, but it is a possibility which is well worth pursuing.41 This would not be unexpected: the more complicated the internal structure of a phrase, the greater the likelihood that cliticization will be affected in some way, even blocked (cf. the discussion in the previous chapter). Provisionally, then, cliticization of est to a nominal was free42 when that nominal was at the right edge of its phrase, and strongly constrained otherwise.43 I am being purposely vague in my use of “phrase” here because of the complicated structure of noun phrases in X-bar theory, which recognizes numerous hierarchically arranged binary branching levels; and it is not correct to say that est could not cliticize when it separated the head noun of an NP from any other element in the phrase. Specialists will have to work out the details of the phrase structure, which are not all agreed upon in any case; but it appears that cliticization of est to a noun distracted from a modifier was highly constrained, whereas est could cliticize to a noun if it separated the noun from a more distantly related subconstituent of the same NP, such as an adjunct NP (whence the acceptability of praefectust legionibus). Such adjuncts are separated by a deeper syntactic division (more intervening nodes) from phrasal heads than modifiers or determiners.

41 Recall from Ch. 5 the discussion of the effects of heavy constituents on prosodic domain–construction. 42 Recall my remarks above, p. 144, about what I mean by “free” here. 43 The few cases of aphaeresis after nouns in -is agree with this generalization; these will be treated below. I have abandoned the analysis in Fortson 1996a and 1996b, where I noted (with slightly incorrect tallies) that the majority of aphaeretized cases of est occur before a major structural boundary. I now see that this simply falls out from the more general rule given above: since verbs are normally clause-final, we predict that most cases of aphaeretized est will precede a major boundary.


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Aphaeresis after adjectives and participles Contraction of est is commoner after adjectives than after nouns, occurring roughly three-quarters of the time an adjective is followed by this verb. In light of our working hypothesis, this makes sense: normally, adjectives followed by est are predicatival, and since verbs are typically clause-final, normally est and the preceding adjective are at the right edge of the VP. No constraints are apparent on the ability of est to cliticize to adjectives that are at the right edge of their phrases; below are a few of the dozens of examples: Am. 379 As. 410 Ep. 643 Mer. 951 Mil. 348 Ps. 937 St. 290 Truc. 355

quia uaniloquos, uapulabis: ego sum, non tu, Sosia. Nimis imperiosust. … Quid pater meu? Vivost? … Hic homo non sanust. … Sed hic illi subparasitatur semper, hic eae proxumust, nam si exoptem quantum dignus tantum dent, minu nihilo sit. Sed tandem, opinor, aequiust eram mihi esse supplicem Quid tam inficetus Lemno adueniens qui …

Est cliticizes much less commonly to a phrase-internal adjective; I know of the following cases:44 As. 646 Aul. 196 Bac. 462 Ep. 411 Men. 312 Mil. 1043 Mil. 1227 Ps. 272 Rud. 1071 Truc. 173 Truc. 595

… :: Dignust sane. Nemini credo qui large blandust diues pauperi: uerum ingenium plus triginta annis maiust quam alteri. non carust auro contra. … (nam tu quidem hercle certo non sanus satis, … :: Non hercle humanust ergo— Vt tu inclutus apud mulieres! … uel, si dignus alio pacto, … si in mari retia prehendi, qui tuom potiust quam meum? certe hercle quam ueterrumus homini optumust amicus. … :: Dignust mecastor. …

44 From iambic octonarii: Truc. 216 (magique adeo ei consiliarius hic amicust quam auxiliarius). I take lepidus at Rud. 256 (…ita hic lepidust locus; also an octonarius) to be predicatival: the place here is so nice.

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In none of these cases does est come between an adjective and its head; all the adjectives are predicatival, separated by est from an adjunct or complement. At Aul. 196, the adjectival phrase is large blandus pauperi, with qui diues the subject; it is also possible that diues is part of the predicate and large blandus pauperi is a secondary predicate.45 Under either scenario, est does not separate an attributive from its head. At Truc. 173, optimus is likewise part of the predicate (quam ueterrimus tam optimus, essentially though not quite literally the older, the better) and is not attributive. To be sure, I have not found many instances of est placed between an adjective and its head (I know of Men. 1087 geminus est frater tuos,46 Mil. 915 ubi probus est architectus, and Poen. 200 scelestus est homo), so it is not absolutely certain that contraction was not allowed in this syntagm. Aphaeresis of est in its role as an auxiliary verb in periphrastic tenses after participles (verbal adjectives) was unconstrained; these cases are really a subset of the cliticization of est to predicative adjectives. Aphaeresis after pronouns and adverbs Let us turn our attention to contraction of est after other classes of words. As was true with most of the cases of aphaeresis after nouns, we will see a general tendency with most of these for aphaeresis to be free phrasefinally, but constrained otherwise; the cases of aphaeresis in this section that are not phrase-final will be discussed at the end of the chapter. After pronominal genitive singulars in -ius, est appears contracted four times and uncontracted seven:47 Mil. 986 Rud. 1021 Rud. 1091 St. 50

Haec celox illiust, quae hinc egreditur, internuntia, si ueniat nunc dominus cuiust, ego qui inspectaui procul si quidem hic lenonis eiust uidulus, quem suspicor; nam pol mihi grata acceptaque huiust benignitas.

45 Nixon translates, “I dont trust one of these rich fellows when hes so monstrous civil to a poor man.” 46 Hes your twin brother in the context, not your brother is a twin or the like. 47 Another case of cuiust is to be found in Leos edition at Rud. 963, which is an emendation; I will discuss it further below. Uncertain is Mil. 987 (… Ancillula illiust, quae hinc egreditur foras Leo and Lindsay), thought by Seyffert to be an interpolation. The manuscripts read simply illius, and est is not demanded by the sense or the syntax. Soubiran 1995, 222 takes illius to be a spondee (with synizesis of -ius).


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Aul. 35 Cap. 335

is adulescentis illius est auonculus, Priuatam medici Menarchi. :: Pol isquidem huius est cliens. Cap. 974 sex minis. :: Pro di inmortales, is quidem huius est pater Mos. 970 Philolaches hic habitat, quoiius est pater Theopropides. Rud. 1094 Si scelesti illius est hic cuius dico uidulus, Rud. 131748 Profecto huius est uidulus. Perge alia tu expedire. Trin. 536 alii se suspendere. Em nunc hic quoius est, Three of the four contracted cases show clisis to the possessive when it stands at the right edge of an NP (celox illius, dominus cuius,49 lenonis eius); by contrast, in six of the seven uncontracted cases, the verb intervenes between the possessive and the head of its phrase. In Mil. 986, the NP celox illius actually continues with a relative clause and another noun (internuntia) in apposition, with the result that aphaeresis occurs within an NP; but the relative clause is a separate syntactic constituent, and a significant structural divide exists between it and the preceding phrase. We have here a case like those of the praefectust legionibus type discussed earlier, where aphaeresis was licensed within an NP as long as the following elements were not tightly connected syntactically to the host of the clitic. The one exceptional case above is St. 50, where est cliticizes to a possessive that it separates from its head noun; but this line presents two major textual problems. First of all, it occurs in a passage (lines 47 – 57) bracketed by Leo and Lindsay that is missing in A and universally considered nachplautinisch (see also Petersmann ad loc.). Second, huiust is an emendation (by Ritschl, followed by Lindsay; Leo prints eiust, following Bach) of the ametrical huius est of the Palatine tradition. The emendation would be unexceptional except that the resulting form must scan with both syllables short (hu˘iu˘st) or with synizesis (essentially monosyllabic hu!iust). Normally, the first syllable of huius scans heavy (the -i- is geminate, hence the orthographic normalization huiius); but the whole word can also sometimes fill a heavy position, where it scans either as a pyrrhic or a long monosyllable. Questa (1967, 107), presenting the majority view, 48 So the mss., against Lindsay and other editors who avoid the hiatus after profecto by means of various emendations. But Lindsays est huiius is inferior wordorder to the mss., since the emphasis needs to be on huius (Its definitely this mans bag). 49 With the relative pronoun in demonstrative or connecting function, its owner.

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opts for treating huius as monosyllabic while noting that one verse, Cap. 1015, appears to require a disyllabic scansion. But if disyllabic scansion is required at least once, it is methodologically best to assume disyllabic scansion generally; I am not aware of evidence that requires monosyllabic hu!ius anywhere else.50 As for the second syllable of the possible scansion hu˘iu˘st, light -u˘st is found elsewhere too, generally as a result of iambic shortening (see Ch. 4; relatively commonly in the fixed expression opu˘st [7 by my count],51 as well as perhaps pene˘st in the canticum at Am. 653), but also in aequiu˘st a few lines later, at St. 97,52 and twice in satiu˘st (Bac. 151 and Ep. 60).53 These combined facts support the possibility of reading hu˘iu˘st, but of course do not guarantee it. These difficulties render huiust an unreliable datum. Even if it were textually and scansionally unproblematic, it is still possible to interpret the cliticization of est here in a manner consistent with our working hypothesis. The genitive is pronominal, not adjectival; therefore it is con50 O. Skutsch (1934, 57) says the monosyllabic pronunciation of huius is assured since it occurs at Lucilius 1093, but this is apparently an error; Lucilius 1093 does not contain this form, and both of the two certain instances of huius in Lucilius (413, 418; see Berkowitz and Brunner 1968 s.v. hic) scan as trochees (the first with s-loss). Lindsay believed that shortened hu˘ius and “slurred” hu!ius occurred in different contexts (1922, 65 – 6), but the claim is unfalsifiable since the two are metrically indistinguishable. Skutsch loc.cit. preferred the interpretation hu˘iu˘st because he followed the view that aphaeresis was not possible after long closed syllables, which for him thus ruled out synizesis in this word (recall n. 4 above for discussion of this issue), though he admitted the possibility of a hu!ius with synizesis having generated a hu!iust by analogy. 51 Though one of these, at Mil. 805, is dubious (Soubiran 1995, 198), as it occurs at the end of a phrase, where iambic shortening normally does not take place (see Ch. 7). This line is doubtful in any case, as discussed above, n. 19. 52 It is curious, and perhaps not accidental, that fully four of these examples of -u˘st are found within a few dozen lines of each other in the Stichus (opu˘st at 81 and 95, aequiu˘st 97, plus potentially hu˘iu˘st at 50). St. 97 also admits of other scansions; see Ch. 7, n. 104. 53 Brent Vine (p.c.) points my attention to an inscriptional case of short -u˘st in the Protogenes epitaph (CIL I2 1861), in the line ending … situst mimus; this is assuming the line is a hexameter, as Vine and most others believe (contra Wachter 1987, 417; see now Courtney 1995, 234 and more recently Kruschwitz 2002, 110). Compounds of est show shortening not infrequently in Plautus (see the examples in Ch. 7, passim); this is also known from inscriptions, e. g. pote˘st at CIL IV 1824.3 (also hexameter); see Fortson and Wallace 2003 [2005], 25. As we discussed in that article, there is evidence that est was pronounced es in some sociolects, and it is not impossible that the scansions discussed here reflect that pronunciation or some other word-final simplification.


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tained within its own NP inside the larger NP huius benignitas this persons kind-heartedness and is an adjunct of the head noun benignitas. As such, the syntactic division between the two was arguably deep enough to allow est to cliticize within the NP. Note that if this is true (which, again, is only possible if the emendation huiust is correct), then Aul. 35 and the other five lines where aphaeresis does not occur in this configuration are not significant (that is, using the full form est was simply facultative rather than obligatory). However, on balance I think they are significant and huiust benignitas is to be ignored. The pronominal possessive adjectives meus and tuos (suos est does not occur) license aphaeresis comparatively rarely. There are a total of eight instances of tuost and of meust: 54 Mer. 51355 nec mos meust ut praedicem quod ego omnis scire credam. Mos. 1157 stultitiae adulescentiaeque iius ignoscas: tuost; Per. 74156 Pater hic meust. :: Hem, quid? Pater? Perii oppido! Rud. 1054 tuos hic seruost? :: Meus est. :: Em istuc optime, quando tuost. Rud. 1057 Nempe hic tuos est? :: Meus est. :: Istuc optime, quando tuost. Rud. 1073 Quod primarius uir dicat: comprime hunc sis, si tuost.

54 A fourth possible instance of meust is at Ps. 521 (Bene atque amice dicis. †Nam nunc, nam meust) but the reading is uncertain (Lindsay reads nam nunc non meus or a question non meus?; Ritschl also read non meus; the ms. reading meust is followed by Leo, who suggests perhaps caue nunc, nam meust). Also, from bacchiacs, Bac. 1198 (tuost: …). At Cap. 994, Lindsay prints gnatus meust, while Leo and the mss. have gnatust meus; see discussion below. 55 Could scan as meus est, but meust is the reading at ACD1 (meus est elsewhere) and gives the preferred rhythm c D. 56 Meus est Lindsay, but meust would avoid a possible breach of Meyers Law. (I say “possible” because uncontracted est [as in meus est] was not clitic, and therefore, under my analysis, would not have formed a single phonological word of the shape cc D that would have caused a true breach.) Notice also that the line breaks down into three parts of identical metrical structure (thrice A B c D): pater hic meust j hem quid pater j perii oppido.

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Rud. 136057 Tene, si tuost. :: O di immortales! Meus est. Salue, uidule. Truc. 77558 Egon tibi male dicam tibique aut male uelim? Vt animus meust, Note the bunching of four cases of tuost in the Rudens, the first two in near-identical lines, though this bunching is probably accidental. The cases where est does not contract after meus and tuos are as follows : Am. 610 Bac. 872 Bac. 1044 Bac. 1146 Poen. 672 Poen. 826 Ps. 38159 Ps. 44560 Ps. 996 Ps. 1009 Ps. 1124 Rud. 491 Rud. 1054 Rud. 1057 Rud. 135861 Rud. 1360 Rud. 1361 Trin. 1055 Truc. 507

Tuos est seruos. … … Vbi erus tuos est? :: Nusquam. … … Tuos est, non mirum facis. Et praeter eos agnos meus est istic clam mordax canis: Quin hicquidem tuos est. … quam erus meus est, neque tam luteus neque tam caeno conlitus. Illic homo meus est, nisi omnes di me atque homines deserunt. … Meus est hic quidem seruos Pseudolus. ita erus meus est imperiosus. … Harpax calator meus est, ad te qui uenit— … Hic homo meus est. :: Quidum? … Sed ubi illi meus est hospes, qui me perdidit? tuos hic seruost? :: Meus est. :: Em istuc optime, quando tuost. Nempe hic tuos est? :: Meus est. :: Istuc optime, quando tuost. Habeo et fateor esse apud me, et, si tuos est, habeas tibi. Tene, si tuost. :: O di inmortales, meus est. Salue, uidule. … Si quidem hercle Iouis fuit, meus est tamen. Meus est hicquidem Stasimus seruos. … Meus est, scio iam de argumentis. …

57 With tuost scanning as a single long by synizesis, although A. S. Gratwick (p.c.) suggests reading tene, si tuos— with Labrax then interrupting, which would give two shorts without synizesis. 58 The reading is uncertain for the first part of this line. 59 Could also scan with aphaeresis. 60 So Fleckeisen, contra ms. meus hic est quidem, which is what Lindsay prints. But the positioning of quidem after est makes little grammatical sense. 61 Tuost would be normative, to give a short c, but a long C is possible especially if Plautus wanted to produce “drag” for special effect.


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Again, in all of the contracted cases meus or tuos is phrase-final; only among the uncontracted cases do we see examples of est coming between the possessive and noun (Am. 610, Bac. 1146, Rud. 491, and probably Ps. 445 and Trin. 1055). It is in light of all these that we need to consider the following: Cap. 994

eo miser sum quia male illi feci, si gnatust meus.

So P and Leo, while Lindsay emended it to … gnatus meust. Indeed the manuscript reading gnatust meus, with cliticization of est in the middle of a possessive phrase, is otherwise unparalleled, while gnatus meust would pattern exactly with mos meust, animus meust, and so forth in the lines cited above, as well as with all the other cases of est cliticizing to the right edge of a Noun–Adjective or Adjective–Noun phrase. We are faced with the usual conundrum: does this line in its transmitted form (along with the equally problematic ensiculust aureolus of Rud. 1156 that was discussed earlier) mean that we must revise or scrap our generalization? No hard-and-fast answer is possible, but I believe that the bulk of the data we have seen so far point strongly enough toward there having been constraints on aphaeresis that the manuscript reading can be considered suspect. I therefore follow Lindsay here in reading gnatus meust. 62 Secure examples of contraction of est after an adverb in -us are found only with intus inside: Am. 856 Mer. 720 Mer. 816 Mos. 44563

ecquis alius Sosia intust, qui mei similis siet? Quoia illa mulier intust? … Etiam nunc mulier intust? … Pultabo. Heus, ecquis intust? …

In all the four secure cases, intus is the sole adverbial complement of the verb in the predicate, and the verb cliticizes to it. A less secure example of aphaeresis after an adverb has the same configuration:

62 The passage is not preserved in A. If gnatus meust is in fact the correct reading, it would be an example of the transposition of est that has been claimed for P (see below, n. 66). 63 Intust here is an all-but-certain emendation (by Leo) for ms. ist, though Lindsay prints it as a crux.

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Rud. 1158

Post altrinsecust securicula ancipes, itidem aurea

The mss. read altrinsecus est, but probably altrinsecust is to be preferred; A. S. Gratwick informs me (p.c.) that if a trochaic septenarius begins with a monosyllable and has a break after the fifth place (second B), then iambic cadences are preferred over spondaic or anapestic ones (so – / [ – – – and – / – – [ –, i. e. B/ c D A B and B/ C D a B are fine, but – / – – – – and its resolution – / – – [ [ –, i. e. B/ C D A B and B/ C D aa B are disfavored).64 Aphaeresis does not occur after an adverb in -us in the following lines, which do not add anything new to the discussion: Am. 1078 As. 394 Mil. 483 Mos. 988 St. 498

Nec secus est quasi si ab Acherunte ueniam. … Nihilo mage intus est. … Certo illa quidem hic nunc intus est in aedibus, … Quid istas pultas ubi nemo intus est? Vno Gelasimo minus est quam dudum fuit.

Only two substantives in all of Plautus ending in dat.-abl. -ibus occur before est, and aphaeresis happens after both: Bac. 58165 Ps. 41866

fores pultare nescis. Ecquis in aedibust ita nunc per urbem solus sermoni omnibust,

After the dat.-abl. pl. of the relative/interrogative pronoun, however, aphaeresis does not occur:67

64 The reason for this curious rule may be similar to the one I propose in Ch. 4 to explain the exceptions to Meyers Law involving following clitics. Lucio Ceccarelli (p.c.) also reminds me that altrinsecus est would have violated the Law of Hermann-Lachmann (recall n. 29); but again, what is of interest to us is that aphaeresis was grammatically possible in this instance, for had it not been, Plautus would probably have written something else. 65 Given that the est in the manuscripts makes the line hypermetrical, it is entirely possible that it is a later addition and that we have here a nominal sentence, as A. S. Gratwick suggests to me (p.c.). 66 Editors follow the reading of A (sermoniomnibust); P has sermone est omnibus, which cannot scan. More than once P shows transposition of (e)st, see Lindsay ad Mer. 330 and Lindsay 1922, 74, as well as p. x of his Plautus edition (vol. 1). 67 All are metrically sure and cannot scan as quibust.


Am. 80 Cap. 291 Mer. 97 Poen. 52 Ps. 182

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si illis fides est quibus est ea res in manu. ad rem diuinam quibus est opus, Samiis uasis utitur. Quibus est dictis dignus usque oneremus ambo. :: Nullus sum. siquidem licebit per illos quibus est in manu. Cur ego uestem, aurum atque ea quibus est uobis usus, praebeo? [Aut] quid mi

It is not clear, given the limited quantity of data, whether aphaeresis was licensed after quibus or not. If not, the reason can hardly have been phonological, but further speculation must remain ad hoc. Relativizers and wh-words underwent wh-movement, and one might well wish to suppose that that blocked aphaeresis; however, there are a couple of instances of cliticization to the genitive cuius discussed below, rendering this account problematic at best. The thematic categories of these instances of quibus do not appear to group together, but syntactically they are all dependent on other words in their clauses: the first and fourth are datives of possession with in manu, the second an ablative with opus est, the third an ablative with dignus, and the fifth an ablative with usus est. Structurally they are therefore quite different from aedibus and omnibus in the preceding verses, and this may well be relevant—but only if the lack of aphaeresis in these few instances is not simply a statistical accident. Turning to pronominal nominative singulars, the emphatic pronoun ipsus himself and the quantifiers nullus none and totus every licensed contraction: Cap. 990 Cist. 602

… Quin istic ipsust Tyndarus tuos filius. Is ipsust. :: Eho tu, quam uos igitur filiam

Am. 293 Aul. 564 Aul. 790 Bac. 336 Mer. 169

Nullust hoc metuculosus aeque. … Quia ossa ac pellis totust, ita cura macet. Qui homo culpam admisit in se, nullust tam parui preti, Populo praesente: nullust Ephesi quin sciat. Hoc sis uide, ut palpatur. Nullust, quando occepit, blandior. … Nullust quem despondeam.

Mer. 614

In almost all of the ipsus and nullus cases, the pronoun fills its own NP that is the complement of est. Only Cap. 990 is potentially problematic, but it depends on ones analysis of istic ipsust Tyndarus that Tyndarus

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himself is…: the phrase structure from the Latin point of view is unclear. If ipsus is simply a modifier of Tyndarus, then this is a counterexample to our claim that est normally did cliticize when intervening between a modifier and a noun. But as an emphatic pronoun it could also simply be an adjunct, in which case the clisis is not exceptional. Aphaeresis is in any case not metrically assured in this line: it is possible that an archetype without word-divisions, reading ipsustyndarustuosfilius, was wrongly divided and one of the -st- clusters was mistakenly changed to -st t-. 68 In Bac. 336 it is followed in the predicate by a locatival adjunct (Ephesi), and cliticization could happen within the overarching NP nullus Ephesi just as before other adjuncts, as previously discussed. Totus in Aul. 564 is the subject NP. As usual, in none of these configurations was contraction obligatory, and Plautus used the full form in the following lines:69 Aul. 813 Bac. 195 Mer. 598

Ipsus est. :: Haud alius est. … si adest, res nullast: ipsus est—nequam et miser. Sed isne est, quem currentem uideo? Ipsus est. Ibo obuiam.

Aul. 813 Bac. 194 Bac. 543 Mer. 605 Ps. 294

Ipsus est. :: Haud alius est. … Animast amica amanti: si abest, nullus est; Nullus est quoi non inuideant rem secundam optingere; Impetrabilior qui uiuat nullus est. … omnes tibi patres sunt? Nullus est tibi quem roges Nec te aleator nullus est sapientior; profecto nullus est. :: Immo est profecto; ego qui sum piscator scio; Ridiculus aeque nullus est, quando essurit.

Rud. 359 Rud. 994 St. 217

68 Another possibility is that ipsust is a mistake for ipsest (i. e., ips(e) est, no aphaeresis), but I know of no examples of ipse being replaced by ipsus (whereas ipsus, being unfamiliar to later scribes, was quite frequently replaced by ipse or the truly erroneous ipsius; see Lodge s.v. ipse). 69 I omit from this list restored ipsus est at Truc. 891. From cretics: Bac. 622 (digna sunt, dignior nullus est homo), Ps. 930 (meque ut esse autumet qui ipsus est). From bacchiacs: Poen. 230 (Postremo modus muliebris nullus est).


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Requiring a much more detailed discussion is the fact that the pronouns is, quis, and quisquis never appear with aphaeresis at all.70 The examples of is est, quis est, etc. are too numerous to give in full; I count is est 30 , quisquis est 8 (plus one restored instance at Rud. 257), quis est 8 (including numquis est 2 ), and ecquis est once. Nobody to my knowledge has drawn attention to these data before, and their interpretation is more difficult than appears at first blush. It depends first of all upon ones view of a debate from earlier in the twentieth century that has not been discussed much since, namely, whether aphaeresis was licensed after words ending in -is. The problem may be presented as follows. It is clear that a number of adjectives in -is when preceding est frequently scan as though the verb were aphaeretized, although they are only rarely written in the manuscripts as -ist as one might expect.71 The number of nouns in -is after which aphaeresis occurs is much smaller, and one scholar in particular, Otto Brinkmann, argued (1906) that there was no aphaeresis after these nouns or after any other morphological categories in -is, suggesting even that the adjective cases are a mirage. In order to evaluate the is and quis facts we thus need to examine Brinkmanns arguments in some philological detail. Brinkmanns thesis and aphaeresis after -is There are seven putative examples of contraction of est after words in -is that are not full lexical adjectives, and Brinkmann tried to emend all of them out of existence. The first, Ps. 954, reads as follows in the Ambrosian and Palatine traditions: A P

illicinest#illice[ ]me[ ]csisuide SI. illicinest PS. illic est SI. mala mercist PS. illuc sis uide

70 The quist proposed by Fleckeisen for the corrupt Per. 120 is for qui est, not quis est. On ist at Mos. 445, recall n. 63. The reading isst found in A at St. 330 is meaningless; the form must scan as is est, and there are several other instances in A where est is abbreviated st but scans est (e. g. quidst, nonst, hicst for quid est, non est, hic est; see the list in Brinkmann 1906, 57). Additional instances of is est, (quis)quis est from cretics: Cist. 690, Ps. 261, Rud. 679, Truc. 116, 725. From bacchiacs: Cur. 113a, Ps. 246. 71 The manuscript readings will be presented in more detail below.

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This rather hopeless transmission has been repaired in various ways by editors, who differ with regard not only to how the lacunae are to be filled but also to where the speaker-divisions are: Bothe:

Illicinest? :: Illic est. :: Mala merx est, Pseudole: illuc sis uide. Ritschl: Illicinest? :: Illic est. :: Mala mercest. :: Illuc sis uide. Leo: Illicinest? :: Illic st. :: Mala mercist * * :: Illuc sis uide. Loewe, Goetz and Schoell:

llicinest? :: Illic st. :: Mala mercist. :: lluc sis uid.72 Lindsay: Illicinest? :: Illicst.73 :: Mala mercist, , illuc sis uide. Brinkmann himself read Illicinest? :: Illic est. :: Malast mers, Pseudole: illuc sis uide. The important thing is that the transmitted form mercist has to be corrupt, for mala mercist appears to mean hes a bad lot, a phrase that in Plautus always appears as mala mers. Friedrich Leo tried to read into it an exceptional nominative singular mercis plus est, which Brinkmann was right to reject.74 But the other passages that Brinkmann raises objections to should remain as they are. The first is: Cur. 40775

Quid eum nunc quaeris? Aut cuiatis? :: Eloquar.

As transmitted it contains the interrogative adjective cuiatis meaning 72 If the line is read this way, it would be too short. 73 Reading illicst with aphaeresis is rather willful; considering that both A and P agree on illic est and the fact that aphaeresis after final stops is not assured, it is inadvisable to introduce examples of it into the text. 74 In a more recent treatment, Gerschner (2002, 114) does not reject it out of hand but says it might exist (“liegt mçglicherweise vor”), as such forms “kçnnen jederzeit analogisch gebildet werden.” In principle that is correct, but the philology of this problematic passage should not be further complicated by positing otherwise unattested forms for it. 75 Lindsay prints quoiatis instead of cuiatis, as per his usual practice.


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from what country of origin. Brinkmann emends this to aut cuias es, but this cannot stand, since cuias is the later nominative singular; Plautus and all the rest of Archaic Latinity knew only cuiatis (or quoiatis). Here I see no compelling reason for emendation; the most one could do would be to remove the apostrophe (which is a modern editorial artifact) and read Aut cuiatis? as a nominal sentence.76 The last of these three passages is read in the editions as follows: Aul. 448

Nummo sum conductus: plus iam medico mercedist opus

Editors read mercedist opus for the faulty manuscript reading mercede opus est, which produces an unmetrical dipody. Brinkmann follows a suggestion by C. F. Mller to read pro mercede opust, but pro has no business here; a genitive singular mercedis is required with the quantifier plus, as the line means, “Ive been hired for only a dime, but Ill need more wages than that for the doctor.” The standard editors are surely right in reading mercedist opus, for the manuscript reading mercede opus est is easily attributable to a misreading of mercede est opus; as we will see in greater detail below, one of the most common representations in the manuscripts of -ist (< -is est) is -e est. If the emendation is correct, est cliticizes as normally to the right edge of the phrase plus mercedis. The next three forms that Brinkmann tries to dispose of are as follows; after each line I give his emendation in italics: Aul. 421

Pol etsi taceas, palam id quidemst: res ipsa testest.77 Pol etsi taceas, palam id quidem: est res ipsa testis.

Mer. 672

Nequeo mecastor: tantum hoc onerist78 quod fero. Nequeo mecastor: tantum oneris est, quod fero.

76 This would have an exact parallel at Poen. 992 – 3, as attested in both ms. traditions and twice in Priscian (1.595 and 2.122): Poen. 992 – 3 Adei atque appella, quid uelit, quid uenerit, qui sit, quoiatis, unde sit: ne parseris. “Go and ask what he wants, why hes come, who he is, what country (hes) from, what city hes come from: dont spare (any questions).” 77 testis est P. 78 oneri st B, oneris est CD.

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Mil. 99779

domo si bitat, dum huc transbitat, quae huius cupiens corporist, … quae huiust cupiens corporis

The first is a line of cantica that ends in a colon Reizianum (see further below). I find all Brinkmanns emendations ad hoc and poorly motivated; even though the first half of Mil. 997 is hopelessly corrupt (each of the editions has a different solution to it, none altogether convincing), the second half, containing the form corporist, is in perfectly good shape. The last of Brinkmanns examples—this time containing a word in -es, not -is—is the following line from a canticum: Am. 653

bona quem penest uirtus:

Although I have not normally been concerning myself with passages of cantica, this appears to be the only instance in all of Plautus or Terence of a postposition contracting with est, and is therefore of some interest. Brinkmann, suspicious of it because of its uniqueness, read bonast quem penes uirtus, arguing that the position of the est had been changed by a copyist—purportedly not an infrequent phenomenon (recall n. 66 above). However, a consideration of the syntax and the context renders this suggestion out of the question. Together with the preceding line the passage reads, according to Brinkmann: uirtus omnia in sese habet, omnia adsunt bonast quem penes uirtus. This is not syntactically plausible for Plautus. Est is the verb of the relative clause; though it was quite common for material in relative clauses to be positioned before the relativizer, the verb never (to my knowledge) underwent this kind of movement in this author (recall n. 21 above). Bona is neuter nominative plural agreeing with omnia, not feminine singular agreeing with uirtus; the passage means, in typically repetitive Plautine fashion, “Courage has all things in itself; all good things are present (in the one) in whose possession is courage” (rather than the weaker “… all things are present [in the one] in whom there is good courage”). 79 Corrupt. P reads domosibit ac dum huc transiuit atque huius cupiens corporist; bitat is Leos emendation (bitat Lindsay). For the last word, B has corpori st, CD corporis est.


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Another fact speaks in favor of the manuscript reading as well, or at least makes it less unusual than it first appears. I introduced this line above, as others have, as the only example of cliticization of est to a postposition. But this was somewhat disingenuous, for classifying penes as a postposition in Plautus is not accurate. As the following two passages show, the positioning of penes was fairly free; it did not have to be adjacent to its object, and was therefore adverbial rather than adpositional: Aul. 654

… neque tui me quicquam inuenisti penes. “You havent found anything of yours on me.”

Trin. 1145 – 6

thensaurum tuom jj me esse penes “… that your storehouse is in my possession”

I therefore take penes as a predicative locational adverb meaning on (my, etc.) person, in (my) possession with an accusative of respect. Aphaeresis after it would then be exactly parallel to the one adverb with which aphaeresis is best attested, intus—itself none other than a locational adverb in predicative position.80 Apparently overlooked by Brinkmann are the following two additional examples of aphaeresis after genitives in -is: Mil. 240 Rud. 761

tam similem quam lacte lactist; … Quid facies? :: Volcanum adducam, is Venerist aduorsarius.

These are guaranteed by the meter. We have seen that most of the cases of aphaeresis after nouns in -is that Brinkmann tried to emend have to stand, and these two additional cases only bolster that conclusion. Brinkmanns examples together with Mil. 240 contain aphaeretized est after a noun that is at the right edge of its phrase. Exceptional is Rud. 761, where the noun is a dependent genitive (Veneris); here again presumably the syntactic division between dependent genitive and head noun was

80 If this analysis is correct, Questas evaluation of penest as “problematico” (1967, 25) no longer obtains. I also do not understand Questas raising the possibility that penes had a long ultima, representing peness like e.g. miless (with question mark, 1967, 11; with second s in parentheses, 1973, 489); there is no etymological motivation for this, and it is not assured that est could cliticize to a heavy final closed syllable. On the scansion of penest, see the Conclusion.

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strong enough that est could still cliticize even when rendering the phrase discontinuous. The fact that there are relatively few examples of aphaeresis after -is need not disturb us for a very simple reason: there are exactly as many— eight—instances of nouns in -is before uncontracted est! Four are nominatives and four genitives:81 Poen. 975 Rud. 373 St. 140 Truc. 78a82

Sed quae illaec auis est, quae huc cum tunicis aduenit aedilis est: si quae inprobae sunt merces, iactat omnis. Hostis est uxor inuita quae uiro nuptum datur. Phronesium, nam phronesis est sapientia

Mer. 514 Poen. 1133 Truc. 489 Vid. fr. iv83

Oratio edepol pluris est huius quam quanti haec emptast. Aphrodisia hodie Veneris est festus dies: Pluris est oculatus testis unus quam auriti decem; Haec myrtus Veneris est.

That aphaeresis after nouns in -is was licensed is made all the more certain by the fact that it was unquestionably licensed after adjectives in -is. The most common adjective in this regard is similis and compounds: Am. 442 Am. 443 Am. 601

… nimis similest mei; … tam consimilest atque ego; Neque lac84 lactis magis est simile quam ille ego similest mei. sicut lacte lactis similest Bac. 685 Men. 1063 … Tam consimilest quam potest. Truc. 170 Amator similest oppidi hostilis. … Truc. 505 … Ehem, ecquid mei similest? :: Rogas? Truc. 507 … Nimium tui similest. :: Papae!

81 The two lines with pluris est were incorrectly listed with the adjective examples in Fortson 1996a, 149 and Fortson 1996b, 109; the genitive is nominal, of greater value. 82 Bracketed by Lindsay. 83 Only this incomplete line-beginning has come down to us (preserved in Porphyry), so it cannot be fully excluded that Veneris est scans Venerest, as pointed out by Calderan (2004 ad loc.). 84 Reading lac rather than Lindsays lact, following Gerschner 2002, 115. 85 A fragment transmitted by Probus and Pompeius, the latter without est.


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The other adjectives are as follows:86 Aul. 324 Cap. 518 Mer. 45187 Mer. 1005 Per. 20188 St. 74 St. 765 Trin. 679

Coquos ille nundinalest, in nonum diem Hic illest dies quom nulla uitae meae salus sperabilest, Post autem communest illa mihi cum alio. Qui sci Eamus intro, non utibilest hic locus, factis tuis, … Sophoclidisca haec peculiarest eius … Noui ego nostros: exorabilest. Prostibilest tandem? … Facilest inuentu; datur ignis tam etsi ab inimico petas.

Leo and Lindsay in their editions print these as contracting to -est (as I have also reproduced them), rather than -ist as one might expect; but -est is not secure, and the interpretation of the phonology of these contractions has occasioned some dispute.89 While I cannot provide a complete treatment of the problem here, it will be necessary to go into some of the relevant issues briefly, clear away some faulty arguments that have been made, and draw some tentative conclusions. First let us examine the manuscript readings. The Palatine manuscripts frequently write -e est: Am. 442 simile est P, Am. 443 consimile est P, Am. 601 simile est P, St. 74 exorabile est P, Trin. 679 facile est P, and Truc. 505 si mille e˜ BD, simille est C; note also Aul. 324 nundinale est Festus 176 Lindsay, Bac. 6 simile est Probus (simile Pompeius). The expected spelling -ist is found once in A (St. 74), whereas -est is found thrice in P (qualest Am. 538, uilest Mil. 1062, similest Truc. 507) and is inferrable at least thrice more90 (Mer. 451 communest B over against the later communis est of CD, likewise Truc. 170 similest B vs. similis est of CD, and St. 765 prostibiles tandem P surely dropped a t from earlier prostibilest tandem). Often the forms are written uncontracted in the Palatine tradition: Mer. 451 86 From bacchiacs: qualest Am. 537, 538 (essentially one example, since 538 echoes 537 almost word for word). From anapests: uilest Mil. 1062. Uncertain nobilest Trin. 828 (could be neuter). 87 Scanning cum lio with hiatus. Other scansions are possible, however, including ones without aphaeresis, but these are less likely. 88 Strictly speaking a noun here and not an adjective, in spite of its placement with adjectives in Brinkmanns lists; for convenience I include it with the other adjectives. 89 Why the editors print adjectival contracted -is est as -est but nominal -is est as -ist is unclear to me. Cf. n. 102 below. 90 Also nobilest inferrable from nobiles CD (nobilis B) if this is not a neuter (n. 86).

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communis est CD, Men. 1063 consimilis est B2 (over erasure), Aul. 324 nundinalis est P, Cap. 518 sperabilis est P, Per. 201 peculiaris est P, Truc. 170 similis est CD, Truc. 505 similis e˜ D3. The remaining variants are a miscellaneous, often corrupt bunch:91 Am. 442 similis D2FJ, Men. 1063 consiliaest CD, Mer. 1005 ut si B, utibile si CD, utibile F (presumably all corruptions of what was once utibile st), St. 765 prostibiles BD, prostipiles C. Editors differ on exactly how to interpret these data. Lindsay doubted that any conclusions could be drawn from these readings (1922, 133) because of the possibility that the spellings with -e represent medieval corruptions under the influence of Vulgar Latin (or pre-Romance) pronunciations of final syllables, analogous to spellings in -o for -us. To be sure, one must proceed with caution ; but a flat rejection of all the readings, without well-grounded reasons for emending specific cases, seems to me excessive. Brinkmann noticed that the overwhelming majority of the examples with aphaeresis involved an adjective in stem-final -l-, whereas adjectives with a different final stem-consonant do not aphaeretize ; he therefore wanted to follow Ritschl in emending peculiarist (peculiarest) at Per. 201 out of existence, to haec est peculiaris eius. This emendation is neither metrically necessary92 nor linguistically motivated, since the suffixes -a¯ris and -a¯lis are simply phonetically conditioned allomorphs (-a¯ris is used instead of -a¯lis if the stem to which it is added contains an l).93 The preponderance of stems containing l might well be accidental : a look at all the adjectives in -is listed in Maniets reverse dictionary for Plautus (1969) reveals nearly 150 adjectives in -lis or -ris, but only fifty-nine with a different consonant before the ending, and most of this second group of adjectives appear only once or twice in the whole corpus. But Brinkmann may have been onto something nonetheless. In over half the instances where est does not contract after an adjective in -is, the adjective indeed does not end in -lis (or -aris): 91 See Ch. 1, pp. 12 – 13, for identification of the minor manuscripts. I have also included some readings from the 15th-century manuscript F (Rep. I fol. 5 Lipsiensis). 92 The hiatus between Sophoclidisca and haec is unproblematic, as Lucio Ceccarelli informs me: it comes at the diaeresis (the meter is trochaic octonarius) and, as Woytek (1982 ad loc.) notes, hiatus after personal names is not uncommon anyway. 93 Leumann 1977, 350.


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Bac. 440 Ep. 102 Men. 608 Men. 777 Rud. 364 Truc. 246 Truc. 819

at nunc, priusquam septuennis est, si attingas eum manu, Tristis est. Cum Chaeribulo incedit aequali suo. tris es? :: Te scire oportet. … Quid tu tristis es? Quid ille autem aps te iratus distitit? mea Ampelisca, ut dulcis es, ut mulsa dicta dicis! Velut hic agrestis est adulescens qui hic habet, Res palam omnis est, meo illic nunc sunt capiti comitia.

Cap. 116 Per. 14 Per. 355 Rud. 1268 Trin. 55 Truc. 241

Liber captiuos auis ferae consimilis est: Similis est Sagaristionis. … Pater, hominum immortalis est infamia; Et popularis est? :: Opino. … Eho tu, tua uxor quid agit? :: Immortalis est, Nam quando sterilis est amator ab datis,

While it makes no sense that contraction would be licensed after -lis/-ris but not after other consonant plus -Cis, note that in the first group above all the adjectives have a consonant cluster before the ending. Though the data are again frustratingly limited, it is possible that contraction of -CCis to -CCist or -CCest was illicit. On the other hand, contraction after -CCus/-CCos was not blocked (e. g. interemptust Mer. 833, praefectust Am. 100), so this explanation must remain very uncertain; the distribution may well be simply accidental.94 Returning to the question of what linguistic reality is represented by the manuscript variants, Brinkmann supposed that spellings like similest did not represent contracted similis est, but an endingless byform simil plus est; he compared the endingless debil for debilis in Ennius (Ann. 321 Skutsch [324 Vahlen]). But this comparison, while clever, will not stand. Contrary to its being enshrined in handbooks (e. g. Leumann 1977, 449), debil is not an attested Latin form, but a conjecture. The passage in Ennius is transmitted as debilo homo, which is obviously corrupt; it was emended to debil homo by Lipsius.95 The conjecture is in my opinion almost certainly wrong, though unfortunately I can offer no better alternative.96 The only sure endingless adjectives of this general type in Latin are neuters like 94 Other explanations for the lack of aphaeresis in individual cases can also be entertained, such as considerations of euphony (avoidance of *tristist or *tristest; Lucio Ceccarelli, p.c.). 95 Skutsch 1985, 497. 96 Skutschs tentative suggestion (ad loc.) of debile is equally unlikely.

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sat uolup facul simul and procul, some of which are adverbial; those that are masculine are all nominalized (unlike (*)debil), namely pugil uigil and mugil. Even if that were not a problem, uigil pugil mugil go back to *uigill etc. < consonant-stem nom. sg. *uigils.97 A (*)de¯bil, if not analogical, would thus have to go back to *de¯bils, which is impossible, since first of all de¯bilis is an i-stem and second it does not contain the -il- suffix of uigil (the preform is *de¯-bel-is, root *bel- strength). Thus whatever underlies the inaccurately transmitted debilo, it is unlikely that it could have been debil.98 Finally, Brinkmann has no explanation for why such endingless forms would only have occurred before est. Leo (1912, 285 ff.) famously (or infamously) claimed that -is est lost the -s by sound change and became -e est and later -est, wishing to explain with the same development such forms as potest < potis est. This view has been rejected in subsequent scholarship (most prominently in Lindsay 1922, 76 and 129 – 33), though no better idea has been put forward. Leumann (1977, 123) opined that -ist is the correct spelling (and pronunciation) of these forms and that ms. spellings in -e est are “Erfindung[en] der Grammatiker; ursprngliches -is est des Textes (fr Aussprache -ist) war in der Plautustradition um des Metrums willen zu ntr. -e est korrigiert worden.” But the manuscript evidence shows clearly that -is est is the absolute latest stage of the transmission, not the earliest.99 At Am. 442, the Palatine tradition agrees on the reading simile est, which only D2 has corrected to similis. At Truc. 170, B has similest, but the later C and D have both undone the contraction to similis est. The agreement of si mille e˜ BD and simille est C allows simille est to be reconstructible for P, and only D3 corrected this to similis e˜. That -e est is an old spelling is confirmed by readings in Nonius (early fourth century), who explicitly interprets -e est as the use of a neuter form in place of a masculine (198.33 Mller regarding qualest at Am. 537, and 224.30 f. regarding similest in a variety of authors). For qualest the mss. of Nonius transmit cul est, but F3, an important correcting hand written by someone who had access to the antique archetype (or a good copy of it),100 has either quale or quale est here; 97 Leumann 1977, 94, 360; Sihler 1995, 304. Cf. also Cowgill 1978, 40 – 1 (= 2006, 263). 98 Unless Ennius simply made the form up, which admittedly cannot be discounted; but that would not help Brinkmanns case, either. 99 See also Leos examination of these readings; I formulated the material in this and the following paragraphs independently of his discussion, however. 100 See Reynolds 1983, 251.


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since at 224.30 the mss. agree on simile est, surely Nonius had read and written quale est in the first passage as well. Given that, as we saw earlier (p. 139), aphaeretized -ust was generally spelled as such in the first instance, with replacement by orthographically uncontracted -us est creeping in only at a later date, there is no reason not to claim that -est or -ist were the original spellings, with -est sometimes mistakenly undone as -e est. 101 On balance the evidence that -est was either a or the genuine contraction product of -is est is overwhelming, for I can see no other way of making sense of the ms. spellings in -e est and -est, and there are too many of them simply to dismiss out of hand. But this does not mean that Leo was right in taking -est as a phonologically regular outcome of the sequence -is est. Rather, it is more likely that -is est developed as expected to -ist (as occasionally attested), but this -ist was under double pressure to be replaced analogically by -est: first of all, as I am not the only one to point out, the combination of est with the neuters of these adjectives (-e est, earlier *-i est) regularly contracted to -est, and second the verb est itself (and compounds) was always a constant presence lurking in the background. Potest would admit of the same explanation: a *potist would have been subject to replacement by potest under influence of adest, inest, etc., as well as of the potest that was the regular outcome of neuter pot(e) est or aphaeretized pote (e)st. Whether or not these claims are correct, the ms. spelling -ist (or -i st, as in the nouns oneri st B, corpori st B for onerist, coporist at Mer. 672 and Mil. 997, respectively)102 is a clear lectio facilior, explicable by simple restoration of the i, which could happen sporadically at any time. All of the preceding discussion has shown that Brinkmann was wrong to reject aphaeresis of est after words in -is as a genuine linguistic fact of Archaic Latin. It ultimately would make little phonological sense if est could not cliticize to -is and -es when it could perfectly well cliticize to -us and -os. This means, returning to our point of departure, that the 101 Leumanns view cannot be completely disproved, since the many centuries between the Plautine original and the surviving Palatine manuscripts allow ample time for many changes, including his hypothetical -is est > -e est > -est. But it involves more assumptions than the interpretation that I am proposing. 102 It does not appear to be the case that -is est became -ist in nouns and -est in adjectives (a fact that would lend itself to no easy explanation anyway). Beside oneri st and corpori st we have adjectival exorabilist A (St. 74) and probably nominal mercedest opus underlying the corrupt and unmetrical mercede opus est at Aul. 448, as discussed above, p. 163.

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lack of aphaeresis after is and quis cannot have been due to the actual sequence -is. In the case of quis, one is reminded of the lack of aphaeresis after the plural quibus that was noted earlier, and one might be tempted to combine these two facts and say that wh-movement blocked cliticization; but that will not help with the non-wh-word is. 103 The answer probably rests rather with the prosodic status of the two pronouns: they likely did not possess enough phonetic body to host a clitic, being themselves short monosyllables. The most straightforward conclusion is that est could not cliticize to monosyllables.104 The “immunity” of is, quis est to contract to *ist/est, *quist/quest may be related to the fact that is and quis also never undergo final s-loss to i or qui (cf. Questa 1973, 487), which only affected polysyllabic words. Lack of aphaeresis after quisquis, nequis, etc. is not problematic, for there are far fewer examples of these bisyllabic forms followed by est than there are of plain quis est; it is therefore possible that aphaeresis was in fact licensed here but happens not to show up in the corpus.105

103 It also is perhaps contraindicated by Cur. 407 (Aut cuiatis?) discussed earlier, and by the following, since relativizers underwent wh-movement too: Rud. 963 Rud. 1021

Vidulum istum cuiust noui ego hominem iam pridem. :: Quid est? si ueniat nunc dominus cuiust, ego qui inspectaui procul

The second line is philologically more secure than the first; for fuller discussion see Fortson 1996a, 150; Fortson 1996b, 110. 104 Whether the lack of aphaeresis after monosyllables was part of a more general constraint on cliticization is not altogether clear. Forms like quisnam, quiscumque, quislibet are due to univerbation of phrases and are not the product of a synchronic morphosyntactic rule like the cliticization and contraction of est. On the other hand, -que and -ne had no restriction like what I have theorized for est (isque and isne are well attested), but then again they are sentential clitics positioned by Wackernagels Law, which (pace e. g. Adams 1994) is not true of est. Univerbations like inest are also a different phenomenon, as are contracted parentheticals like sı¯s < early Latin *sei ueis (cp. dat.-abl. pl. dı¯s < *deiueis). Cliticization of quidem is limited to certain pronominals and wh-words, just like -cum in mecum etc. (recall the analysis of the latter in Ch. 5). A full discussion of cliticization and univerbation in Latin must distinguish many chronological layers and syntactic structures and is outside our scope here. As mentioned above in n. 3, there is a slight chance that est could aphaeretize in re¯st; if true, then our hypothesis would require modification so as not to exclude aphaeresis after heavy monosyllables. 105 Terence also has no certain instances of aphaeresis after quisquis. Kauer and Lindsay (1926) read quisquis at Ad. 321, their interpretation of the reading quisquis in the Codex Bembinus; but all the other mss. have quisquis es, which allows


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One loose end to tie up about the adjectival -est cases is the syntactic analysis. First I repeat the data for convenience: Am. 442 Am. 443 Am. 601

… nimis similest mei; … tam consimilest atque ego; Neque lac lactis magis est simile quam ille ego similest mei. Men. 1063 … Tam consimilest quam potest. Truc. 170 Amator similest oppidi hostilis. … Truc. 505 … Ehem, ecquid mei similest? :: Rogas? Truc. 507 … Nimium tui similest. :: Papae!

Aul. 324 Cap. 518 Mer. 451 Mer. 1005 Per. 201 St. 74 St. 765 Trin. 679

Coquos ille nundinalest, in nonum diem Hic illest dies quom nulla uitae meae salus sperabilest, Post autem communest illa mihi cum alio. Qui scio Eamus intro, non utibilest hic locus, factis tuis, … Sophoclidisca haec peculiarest eius … Noui ego nostros: exorabilest. Prostibilest tandem? … Facilest inuentu; datur ignis tam etsi ab inimico petas.

As can easily be seen, these are for the most part unremarkable: the adjective either is at the right edge of its phrase (Am. 443, Men. 1063, Truc. 505, 507; Aul. 324, Cap. 518, Mer. 1005,106 St. 74, 765) or is followed in its phrase by an adjunct (genitive of comparison at Am. 442, 601, Truc. 170; prepositional adjunct at Mer. 451; genitive of possessive pronoun at Per. 201; and ablative of the supine at Trin. 679). According to our hypothesis, there is nothing grammatically out of order with any of these cases of aphaeresis. To complete the section on aphaeresis after -is, the only other relevant words are adverbs, after which aphaeresis does not occur: Am. 601 As. 704107

Neque lac lactis magis est simile quam ille ego similest mei. Em sic. Abi, laffldo, nec te equo magis est equos ullus sapiens.

the line to scan unproblematically. Martin (1976) and other editors read quisquis es. 106 Assuming that non utibilest is the predicate: this place is not useful. 107 Could theoretically scan with aphaeresis.

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Cap. 623 Mer. 502 Poen. 348 Truc. 858108

ut istic Philocrates non magis est quam aut ego aut tu. … Quin tibi quidem quod rideas magis est, quam ut lamentere. Quam magis aspecto, tam magis est nimbata et nugae merae. Vidi, audiui quam penes est mea omnis res et liberi.

Again, the data are limited, so the lack of aphaeresis may well be accidental. No conclusions can be drawn from penes est; recall the discussion above of aphaeresis after this word. As for the five lines containing magis est, in three of them, magis modifies an adjective; a closer syntactic relationship obtained between locational est and a locational adverbial complement (such as intus) than between est and an adverb that formed a syntactic phrase with another word elsewhere in the sentence. Magis would be expected therefore to form a prosodic unit (minor phrase) with the word it modifies, meaning cliticization of est to it would be unlikely. In all three of the examples above, there is the additional complication, and potential barrier to aphaeresis, that magis has been distracted: in Am. 601 and Poen. 348 by est itself (magis … simile, magis … nimbata), in As. 704, by est plus additional words (magis … sapiens). Conclusion We have seen evidence that the ability of est to undergo aphaeresis was constrained by syntactic structure, and represents a good example of how syntax influences prosodic structure. With one, perhaps two, exceptions, est was found not to cliticize when it renders a noun discontinuous from its modifier. Aphaeresis was licensed at the right edge of a noun or adjective phrase, or between a noun or adjective and a following adjunct or appositive; additionally it could be attached to its adverbial complement. The pronouns is and quis (and maybe compounds of quis) did not license aphaeresis, apparently for prosodic reasons: their phonetic body was not sufficient to host the clitic. The ability of est to cliticize to right edges of NPs has a direct parallel in English. In a sentence like The man from Pascagoulas here, is cliticizes not to the head noun, but to the right edge of the whole subject NP the man from Pascagoula. It is clear that a number of the structures we have examined in this chapter are rather complex, and that movement has shifted many of the elements 108 The beginning of the line is problematic.


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around. Hopefully, further research into the movement rules of Latin will allow the hypotheses above to be refined,109 for the general rubric of “discontinuity” subsumes the results of diverse processes, not all of which will have necessarily had the same effect on the ability of est to cliticize. If it is true that est could not cliticize when rendering an NP discontinuous, that would fit very well with certain findings in Ch. 5, and not so well with other findings elsewhere in this book. We saw in that chapter evidence from the prosodic behavior of constituents fronted around subordinators and (potentially) from magna cum laude constructions that fronted elements projected their own prosodic domain. If phrases of the type X1 est X2 were generated by fronting the first element, the inability of est to cliticize to it would be another instance of this same phenomenon, with the movement blocking cliticization. However, we also saw from Ch. 3 evidence that at least some discontinuous NPs of the type X1 V X2 were produced in a different way—by interposition of the verb rather than fronting of the noun—and this did not block the ability of the verb to cohere prosodically with the preceding element. But things are more complicated with a phrase like erus est meus, where, under these hypotheses, both the verb and the noun have been moved, by different processes.110 Further work is needed to resolve this paradox, but the material assembled here will be important for that endeavor.

109 Especially in light of the findings of Devine and Stephens 2006; see also the next note. 110 Consistent with this are the independent findings of Devine and Stephens (2006, 531 ff., 604), who show that postmodifier hyperbaton (N.–X–Adj.) is structurally more complex than premodifier hyperbaton (Adj.–X–N.) and involves several different movement processes. Important also is their finding that the position of the focused element relative to the interposed element (i. e. whether it comes before or after the latter) is not uniform across different authors (605). In their view, premodifier hyperbaton with nonfocused modifier, found especially in historical writers and poets, is the older order, but I have not yet been able to examine the Plautine data in light of this claim.

Chapter Seven Breuis Breuians I Introduction Breuis breuians (henceforth BB), also known as iambic shortening or correptio iambica, can be most strictly defined as a process (or the cover term for processes) affecting a sequence of light syllable followed by heavy syllable that allows the sequence to be mapped onto a metrical position normally reserved for at most two light syllables. This is usually interpreted to mean that the heavy syllable is shortened, and therefore that the original iambic sequence ([ –) becomes a pyrrhic ([ [). BB was first clearly defined, and most of the examples first listed, by C. F. W. Mller (1869, 83 – 448), building on previous work of Alfred Fleckeisen and others.1 The iambic sequence that is shortened can be a word (e. g. bene˘ male˘ < 1

For a lengthy review of the history of the scholarship on BB, see Bettini 1990, 264 – 94, followed by summaries of the metrical and linguistic interpretations of the phenomenon. There have been several useful and only partly overlapping collections of BB since Mllers study. Leppermann 1890 lists all instances of iambic words, shortened and unshortened, in senarii and iambic and trochaic septenarii in Plautus, arranging them according to parts of speech; he only includes those whose long syllable is long by nature. Esch 1897 is a collection of all polysyllabic words beginning with an iambic sequence, both with and without shortening, arranged according to number of syllables and parts of speech. Brenot 1923 lists all shortened iambic sequences, both single words and wordgroups, in the septenarii and iambic senarii, septenarii, and octonarii in Plautus and Terence. Drexler 1969a contains most, but not all, instances of shortening within single words in Plautus and Terence, and includes data where the same words (and words of similar shape) do not undergo shortening; the merit of this work is that he reproduces the surrounding context of many of the forms, but unfortunately some of the sections are less exhaustive than others and leave much sleuthing to the reader. He and Leppermann also leave out final s-loss in iambic words, which I think is the same phenomenon as BB; see below. A portion of the data that is not included in this work can be found in various places in Drexler 1932. A desideratum is therefore a comprehensive list of all unambiguous cases of iambic shortening and final s-loss in iambic words, contrasted with the cases where shortening does not occur, and that is sensitive to syntactic and prosodic environments. I have not myself been able to compile such a work, so some of the analyses I present are necessarily tentative.

Chapter Seven: Breuis Breuians I

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*bene¯ *male¯ ; mihı˘, sibı˘ < mihı¯ sibı¯), the first two syllables of a polysyllable (e. g. egesta¯tem scanning as [ [ – –),2 a monosyllable followed by the first syllable of another word (e. g. sed o˘ stendere),3 or two monosyllables (e. g. hic e˘st). In a handful of words, the pyrrhic value became lexicalized, as in bene˘ and male˘ above. Normally, but not always, the syllable preceding or following the shortened syllable was stress-bearing (so bne˘, mle˘). The phenomenon of BB is never mentioned by the ancients (Skutsch 1934, 91; Questa 1967, 68; Questa 1973, 497; Soubiran 1988, 252), although there are indirect references to it. Quintilian (Inst. 1.6.21) says that aue¯ was pronounced with short ultima in ordinary speech, and Ciceros well-known quip (Div. 84 [2.40]) about how a fig-sellers cry of Cauneas Caunean figs could be interpreted as an omen caue ne eas be careful not to go would have made little sense to his Roman readership if caue¯ could not have been shortened to caue¯ (and further apocopated to cau). In Roman comedy, BB is widespread and productive, especially by comparison with other poetry. In inscriptions containing popular Latin verse, BB is limited to single words of iambic shape, and does not affect polysyllables or word-groups (Questa 1967, 68); in later Republican and Imperial poetry, there is the additional restriction that the only iambic words that license shortening are those ending in a vowel, or a long vowel plus consonant if the next word is vowel-initial. Similar limitations on what kinds of final syllables can be shortened are actually observable in Plautus as well: as noted already by Lindsay (1893 – 94, 203) and established by Drexler (1969a, 79 et passim), the heavier the heavy syllable, the less likely it is to be shortened. In particular, words ending in -ns or long vowel plus -x almost never undergo BB, and words like fore¯s are much more likely to be shortened prevocalically than preconsonantally. However, these and other limitations that have been observed or proposed are probably epiphenomenal; as we will see further below, BB typically affects function words, which happen not to end in -x or -ns. 4 2 3 4

The type cale˘ facere < *cale¯ facere, frequently adduced as the Paradebeispiel, does not belong here, since the univerbation happened later than the shortening. Following standard practice I will indicate BB with a breve over the vowel of the shortened syllable, even when the vowel itself is short to begin with. This is true also of the constraint forwarded by Peters (1898), who noted that BB rarely happened in an iambic sequence containing muta cum liquida (type patre˘ s), and argued that the putative examples should be emended out of existence. The emendations were criticized by Sonnenschein (1905, 316), followed hesitantly by Lindsay (1922, 45); Safarewicz (1936, 19 f.) agreed that the few examples

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BB has been the subject of extensive dispute for well over a century. The debate has revolved around two main issues. The first has been whether BB in Plautus was a true linguistic process in the living speech of the day that was conditioned in some way by the placement of the word-accent, or whether it was a metrical rule only, conditioned by the placement of the verse ictus. The second issue has been how to characterize and to motivate BB, on the assumption that it was a linguistic process naturally occurring in Latin speech. This includes establishing the environments in which it was licensed and the constraints on its occurrence, as well as determining whether all instances of it fall under one rubric, or whether what we call BB is actually a number of disparate processes that conspire to yield the same surface outcome. The first issue has been at least partly settled, with all modern scholarship agreeing that

are secure, and suggested that the nature of muta cum liquida clusters were the source of the skewed distribution. But the iambic words with internal muta cum liquida (listed by Safarewicz on p. 20) comprise twenty-three different lexical items, of which all but three (the adverb supra¯, the determiner uter [stem utr-], and the frequent conjunction utrum) are full-content lexemes, which, under the analysis forwarded below, are not expected to undergo BB very commonly to begin with; the fact that they contain muta cum liquida clusters is purely accidental. It is true that the lack of BB in the conjunction utrum is a bit surprising, but all words that were not actually lexicalized with BB could trivially appear without it. Traina (2000, 33) points out that in a few passages in Roman comedy, utrum presents metrical difficulties in that the -tr- might make position; these instances are all verse-initial. Whatever the solution to these problematic lines is, utrum otherwise always has a light first syllable. (I am indebted to Lucio Ceccarelli for this reference.) There is a long-standing view that the shortening of 3rd sing. -a¯t -e¯t -ı¯t to -at -et -it that happened by the time of Classical Latin had its start in iambic-shaped forms by BB, and then spread by analogy to monosyllabic and polysyllabic 3rd singulars. This view is vitiated (or at least made difficult) by the variation in Plautus, where iambic third singulars sometimes scan with BB and sometimes without. It is much simpler to assume that iambic shortening of such forms is ˘ t, which, when it > -V a separate process from the global sound change -Vt took effect, shortened all the 3rd singulars (and other forms ending in the same sequence, such as the adverb dumtaxat) in one fell swoop. Note too that the pyrrhic scansion of uidet before a following consonant reflects more reduction than simply shortening of the e, meaning that if the short stem-vowel in Classical 3rd singulars was really the product of BB, we would expect the Classical forms to be likewise able to scan short before a consonant, which does not ˘ t are separate phe > -V happen. This is further evidence that BB and the rule -Vt nomena.) Cf. also n. 34 below.


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BB had an actual linguistic basis,5 and disagreement remaining only on whether all the instances of it in Plautus are linguistically real, or whether some might represent extensions metri gratia. 6 One internal piece of evidence from Plautus in favor of the view that BB was a real linguistic phenomenon is that BB is well-represented in iambo-trochaics but is virtually absent from the lyric bacchiac and cretic meters; as we have seen, iambotrochaics are usually deemed to reflect natural fluent speech more closely than other meters.7 Another piece of evidence is that BB affects some words extremely frequently but others rarely or not at all, which led researchers as early as Lindsay (1893 – 94) to assume that the shortening was a part and parcel of normal speech. The allied debate, over whether the word-stress or the ictus conditioned the shortening, is something of a pseudo-problem; Drexler (1932, 2:350 n. 1) called the dispute “gegenstandslos.” As Devine and Stephens (1980, 145 – 6) point out, linguistic conditioning of one sort or another is going to be present whether it is the verse ictus or the word-accent that is responsible for BB:

5

6

7

This is the view of such authors as Lindsay (1893 – 94; 1922, 35 ff. and 49 ff.); Jachmann (1916, 63); Sturtevant (1919, 237); O. Skutsch (1934, 5 f.); Safarewicz (1936, 91); Questa (1967, 67); Drexler (1969a, 35 et passim); and Soubiran (1971, 409 and 1988, 251). Compare also Soubirans note (1988, 248 n. 33) that words and phrases undergoing BB are no more metrically convenient than unshortened ones. Note also Quintilians statement mentioned above that aue¯ was shortened in ordinary speech. I cannot agree with the views of Beare 1957, 167 (“Breuis Breuians seems to me to have been essentially a metrical convenience … The fact that this licence disappeared so soon from Latin versification strongly suggests that it did not reflect a fundamental fact in ordinary pronunciation”). For a much fuller account of this debate, see Bettini 1990. Bettini 1990, for instance, considers only BB of vowel-final syllables to be linguistically real, and BB of closed syllables a metrical license. For a critique of this view, see Ceccarelli 1994, 296 ff. and further below. Vollmer (1916, 136) attributed the rarity of BB in bacchiacs and cretics to the fact that the rhythm of these meters was unnatural in comparison with the normal rhythm of Latin speech. The general consensus nowadays places the emphasis not on the nature of cretico-bacchiac meters, but on the fact that they contain more stylized and artificial language. On the subject of naturalness of speech, a cautionary note is in order. Though I have been characterizing iambo-trochaic meters as containing relatively natural speech, they are in fact varied in style and not exclusively repositories of natural fluent speech. (One need only scan the Prologue of the Menaechmi to get a sense of this.) However, I must leave to others to determine whether the more solemn or formal passages (comical or not) in iambo-trochaics have on average less BB than the more colloquial ones.

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The question posed by the phenomenon of BB is to motivate the metrical permissibility of certain iambic syllable sequences in positions in the line that otherwise admit only monosyllables or pyrrhic syllable sequences. The old question of whether BB is a linguistic or a metrical rule does not constitute the main problem … The difference between the “accent” theory and the “ictus” theory of BB is not the difference between a linguistic and a metrical explanation (a linguistic motivation of one sort or another is required … in any case), but concerns merely the degree to which the environments of the rule could be artificial (i. e., predicated on presence or absence of a metrical ictus not coincident with a conceivable natural speech stressing).8

There do, in fact, exist BB-like processes outside of Latin conditioned by a metrical ictus that does not necessarily correspond to the normal stressaccent. Devine and Stephens dug up a parallel from heroic verse in Bahima (Uganda), citing Morris 1964, 37:9 [When] the stress … fall[s] on a syllable with a short vowel standing immediately before … an unstressed syllable with a vowel which would in ordinary circumstances be long … there is a tendency for the unstressed syllable to be pronounced short.

Concerning the second issue—how to characterize and motivate BB—I will have some remarks in the next section. There are few limitations on the distribution of BB within the line,10 aside from the fact that both syllables of the pyrrhic sequence produced by BB must belong to the same metrical element.11 In iambo-trochaics, BB can appear in any metrical position12 except for the last C. 13 Underly8 Bettini (1990, 332 – 3) points out that invoking the ictus to explain BB is circular, since the ictus must automatically fall either on the first syllable of a pyrrhic sequence or on the first syllable after the sequence. 9 Incorrectly cited as pp. 19 – 20 by Devine and Stephens. 10 See the overview in Questa 1967, 62 ff. 11 See the discussion in Bettini 1990, 326 ff., with alternatives to the few lines that have been claimed to violate this principle. I do not know if some phonetic facts underlie this, or if it simply falls out from the law of the split resolution. (There should be no issue, though, if the sequence in question consists of particles.) 12 Jachmann (1912) claimed that a pyrrhic resulting from BB could not occupy the last B (Jachmanns Law); this was disputed by O. Skutsch (1934, 61 ff.), who showed that the rarity of examples in that position was statistically expected (see also Questa 1967, 66). (Both these authors count only pyrrhics resulting from synchronic BB, rather than already lexicalized forms like bene, tibi, etc., of which there are dozens of examples occurring in this position.) Note further that synizesis of iambic words like meus, tuos occurs freely in this position (e. g. at Bac. 508, 931, Cap. 588, 987, 1032, Men. 783, among others), and it is not al-


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ing these restrictions is either (a) a desire to keep the last metron as “normal” as possible so that the cadence is uncomplicated, or (b) the general lack of pyrrhic words filling the last B or … b c (cf. Questa 1967, 63). Questa doubts that the nature of iambically-shortened words would have by itself caused any difficulties, and shows (ib. et seq.) how other restrictions also fall out from more elementary considerations of construction of the line. BB generally does not occur before a metrical break (caesura or diaeresis) or major syntactic break;14 this will be seen to fall out from the prosodic conditions for BB, on which much more below. Jachmann (1916) noted that BB is especially favored in anapestic meters; this may be a bit problematic, for, as Gratwick (1990, 216) points out, the anapestic meters are not repositories of either everyday or rapid speech. However, one must remember that the anapestic meters are still not well understood, and Ruijgh (1986, 439) is correct to remark that the disproportionately high frequency with which iambic and cretic shortening15 is invoked in order to make anapests scan is suspect. (For a somewhat different view, see Lindsay 1922, 297 – 9.) Iambic shortening is too complex and the examples too numerous to be fully covered even in these last two chapters; the many dissertations and monographs devoted solely to it have themselves not succeeded in exhausting the topic. I will be limiting myself primarily to a discussion of previous attempts to provide a phonological motivation for BB, followed by an exploration of the prosodic and syntactic conditions on its ways possible to distinguish synizesis from iambic shortening (recall on this the discussion in Ch. 3). 13 This is not surprising given that the last metron is more conservative than the other metra so as to ground the end of the line and resolve any rhythmical abnormalities (cf. Ch. 4). The absence of BB in the last C also falls out from fairly elementary principles: the following word would have to be a monosyllable (of very restricted occurrence line-finally, as we have seen), and the preceding syllable would have to be a short accented initial syllable, forcing a split resolution bb with word-break. That iambic shortening is otherwise free, though favoring the first foot, was shown in Manning 1898. See also O. Skutschs monograph (1934) for a further demonstration of this fact. The high frequency of shortening in the first foot is partly related to the greater frequency of “licenses” line-initially; see the discussion in Ch. 5, and below. 14 A couple of exceptions are treated in Ch. 8, p. 226 and n. 21. 15 Cretic shortening, similar to iambic shortening, is a phenomenon whereby a cretic sequence (– [ –) is scanned dactylic (– [ [). It will be mentioned occasionally in passing, but I have not undertaken any detailed investigation of it; compared to BB, it is quite uncommon, and in iambo-trochaics limited only to certain positions in the line (Questa 1967, 44).

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occurrence to see what it might tell us about prosodic domain–construction in Latin speech—a topic about which the literature in BB has, with a few notable exceptions, not had much to say.16 Along the way I will make numerous points about some particular words and phrases undergoing BB and about some details of Latin phonology. I have divided up the data that I will examine as follows. After exploring the general question of phonological and syntactic conditioning just alluded to, this chapter will examine the rather varied assemblage of sequences other than single iambic words in which BB can occur—iambic sequences across two words, polysyllables beginning with iambic sequences, etc. Shortening in full-content iambic lexemes and before clitics will be treated in the next chapter. Phonological studies of breuis breuians Once the position was taken that BB represents a phenomenon of ordinary speech and not one simply metrically conditioned, two main spheres of thinking have emerged to provide a phonological explanation for it. It was noticed some time ago that most of the instances of BB are in words of high textual frequency. This has led in particular the Polish linguist Witold Manćzak to claim (1968) that frequency alone is the cause of BB. Manćzaks thesis was cited approvingly by Allen (1973, 180 – 1), and the same notion is endorsed by Devine and Stephens (1980, 148), who cite Fidelholtz 1975 for a parallel. Fidelholtzs study argues that greater frequency of usage causes vowel reduction in American English; there the now famous claim was made that the reduction of the first o in trombone is greater among people who frequently talk about trombones, e. g. orchestra players. Without being able to discuss these theories in detail here,17 I fundamentally do not agree with the view that cases of sound change can be accounted for solely on the basis of textual frequency. There is no denying that frequency is often correlated with phonological reductions of one sort or another, but—as the old saw goes—correlation does not mean causation, and usually a more immediate explanation is at hand. For example, the most frequent words are generally function words; function 16 A systematic and compact overview of the types of sequences undergoing BB, with examples of each type, is Ch. IV of Questa 1967 (31 – 70, outlined on 35). I will not be able to examine all these types individually here, but almost all of them will be encompassed in one way or another by my discussion. 17 A fuller treatment may be found in Fortson 2003b.


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words are typically unstressed and occupy acoustic troughs, an environment conducive to phonological reduction. Cases like Fidelholtzs trombone admit easily of other explanations. In particular, before one can claim that the reduction of the first vowel to schwa is due to the influence of frequency, one must demonstrate that it is not in fact lautgesetzlich, and that the unreduced pronunciation is not a spelling-pronunciation (as one would very easily expect to be found among people who learned the word from books rather than from musicians chatter). Other examples of reduction could be simple lexical replacements by a “cooler” innovated reduced form, analogous to fridge replacing refrigerator in many peoples speech. Frequency may play a role here, but these are not sound changes.18 In the case of BB, where a particular word can surface both shortened and not shortened, Manćzaks theory cannot account for the variation, nor for any of the distributional facts that we will be discussing below. The other group of explanations finds the phonetic motivation of BB in the position of the accent, and one or another of these is what will be found reproduced in most or all of the handbooks.19 As was noted earlier, the syllable that undergoes shortening is typically preceded by the wordstress, yielding the (pre-shortened) sequence [´ – , and this fact has usually become part of the definition of the change.20 This sequence is claimed to be typologically unnatural, on the grounds that it contains a clash between the position of greatest stress prominence and the position of greatest durational prominence. An old and widespread theory, originally a creation of E. Sievers for Germanic and extended to BB by Ferdinand Sommer and, later, by W. S. Allen (1973, 170 – 85, with references to earlier literature), contends that such a sequence was pronounced as a single stress-matrix, forming a sort of super-syllable termed a “Drucksilbe” that 18 I think the majority of Fidelholtzs examples are either lautgesetzlich or analogous to fridge, including his list of reduced forms of place-names. Dressler (1973, 137) points out that Manćzaks explanation is at variance with another of his own principles, that the most frequently used words actually undergo change more slowly than those used more rarely. In its standard formulation, however, this principle refers to morphological change rather than phonological change, so this contradiction is really only apparent. For other arguments against Manćzak see Posner 1970, 442. 19 As well as in shorter works; most recently to my knowledge Adiego Lajara 1999. 20 For example, F. Skutsch (as quoted in Leumann 1977, 109) wrote, “eine iambische Silbenfolge, die den Wort- oder Verston auf der Krze trgt [emphasis mine], oder der die tontragende Silbe unmittelbar folgt, wird pyrrhichisch.”

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constituted an accentual unity (or, as Leumann 1977, 109 put it, “die Zusammenfassung der zwei Silben zu einem einzigen Sprechakt”). When such Drucksilben were mapped onto metrical positions normally reserved for a pyrrhic sequence or a long syllable, there was actually no shortening that took place, it is claimed, but rather an infringement of metrical rules that was made possible by such words being unitary accentual sequences. Actual (nonmetrical) cases of BB, such as bene and male, are said to be a separate phenomenon, due to a further shortening of long vowels in such a disyllabic stress matrix. Aside from resting on no phonetic basis of which I am aware, the Drucksilbe theory merely relocates the problem by a terminological sleight-of-hand: whatever it really means to label a disyllabic sequence a “single speech-act”, the labeling only succeeds in redefining the original sequence as already shortened. A more recent account that is similar to certain elements of the Drucksilbe approach is that of Mester 1994. The study seeks to establish a bimoraic foot rather than the usually posited trimoraic (trochaic) foot as the basis for the rhythmic organization of Latin. Mester claims that his theory accounts for a broad range of phenomena, such as iambic and cretic shortening, the complementary distribution between stem-vowels -ı˘and -ı¯- in third- and fourth-conjugation verbs depending on the weight of the root (par-ı˘-mus vs. farc-ı¯-mus, reper-ı¯-mus), and the avoidance of abstracts in -ie¯s to heavy roots (gra¯tia auda¯cia but *gra¯tie¯s *auda¯cie¯s). “Iambic Shortening … is a structure-changing imposition of a [bimoraic foot] on otherwise unfootable words” (p. 15). BB is therefore a repair strategy that operates to increase metrical well-formedness. These and allied theories based on a supposed unnaturalness of the sequence [´ – are not very compelling, for they suffer from several difficulties.21 First of all, they cannot account for the hundreds of lexical items of this shape (whether by nature or by position) that never underwent any repair strategy and that were unproblematic for countless generations of Latin speakers. Secondly, recall that only certain kinds of final heavy syllables were shortened with any frequency, namely the least heavy ones. This means that where the discrepancy between the position of 21 The other attempts along these lines are not worth discussing at length. One example is Rix 1989, who claimed that an accented syllable required two morae (an inexplicable assumption except for monosyllables), and therefore that a word of the shape [´ – shortened the last syllable (by reasoning that I do not follow; it appears to have something to do with the Drucksilbe approach). Compare also the remarks of Kuryłowicz 1975, 37 – 8 for a similar, and also unconvincing, account.


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the stress and the quantity of the final syllable is actually greatest, we see shortening happening the least often; this invalidates the main theoretical motivation (stress-quantity discrepancy) of the supposed repair strategy. Third, the distribution of shortened and unshortened words is left unaccounted for. As regards specifically the Drucksilbe theory, I would add that its rather willful separation of words in which BB was lexicalized from those in which it occurs only some of the time risks missing important generalizations.22 Aside from these objections, I think the real nail in the coffin of this family of approaches comes from an observation of Devine and Stephens (1980, 148): those words which are lexicalized with BB are in the main unstressed words. In groups undergoing BB that begin with a monosyllable (discussed in more detail below), that monosyllable is usually a prepositive like et, at, or in, and a stress on the prepositive seems very unlikely on cross-linguistic grounds. Devine and Stephens conclude that there is an overall inverse correlation between rate of BB and degree of stress. Thus the invocation of the stress contour of the word or sequence undergoing BB to explain the shortening is open to serious question from the start.23 Devine and Stephenss own account, however, invokes the stress placement all the same: … stress and quantitative pattern are in greatest conflict in [´ – sequences; we assume that in such sequences the light syllable … was preferentially subject to destressing in allegro phonostyles; and that, concomitantly, the following heavy syllable was reduced by a related fast-speech rule according to which [ – became [ [ (sometimes – ) not if and only if the light syllable was stressed (accentual theory) but whether it was originally stressed or not. (p. 149)

The rule did not apply if the heavy syllable bears the full word accent, nor if the light syllable retains its full stress, or is followed by a full word boundary, or is already rhythmically grouped with a preceding light syllable…24 22 For some additional arguments against Mesters theory, see Lahiri, Riad, and Jacobs 1999, 384 ff. (notably the fact that the supposedly disfavored light-heavy sequence was in one group of words actually generated anew, namely by the “uocalis ante uocalem corripitur” rule that shortened long vowels before another long vowel, as in scio¯, fleo¯, etc.). 23 See also the arguments against the role of the accent in Bettini 1990, 334 ff. 24 This last condition is necessary to explain the lack of BB in anapestic sequences.

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Their theory allows them to combine iambic shortening with cretic shortening of the type dı¯xero˘ , which the accentual theory must treat separately. They insist that it is not stress, but rather absence of stress, combined with unnaturalness of [´ –, that conspire to cause such sequences to enter “into a set of temporal (re)organization rules that reduce the iambic shape to a pyrrhic (or monosyllabic) shape by means of various segmental reductions and deletions” (p. 157). The observation that it is primarily unstressed words and sequences that undergo BB is extremely valuable; in my examination of various data to follow, I will be highlighting this fact on more than one occasion, as it has not made its way into the general scholarly consciousness on BB.25 However, Devine and Stephenss own proposal is unsatisfactory. Their statement, “[W]e assume that in such sequences the light syllable … was preferentially subject to destressing in allegro phonostyles,” makes little sense unless there is some other motivation for the destressing; an “allegro phonostyle” in and of itself just means faster speech, not destressed speech.26 Devine and Stephens try to have their cake and eat it, too: they want BB to be caused by an unstressed environment, yet they also want it to be caused by the unnaturalness of the sequence [´ –. But at the point when [ – becomes either weakly stressed or destressed, the unnaturalness of [´ – should no longer be relevant. The fact that a sequence [´ – becomes temporally reorganized once it is destressed should not be dependent on where the stress was originally located, although how it is reorganized presumably is.27 And Devine and Stephens make this point themselves when they argue, against the Drucksilbe theory, that not all iambic sequences that undergo BB start out as [´ –. In other words, while the original stress-placement is clearly going to constrain 25 To be fair, most of the books that have molded the “general scholarly consciousness” predate Devine and Stephenss study, but even a recent and otherwise thorough work like Soubiran 1988 does not seem to have taken note of it. 26 “Allegro phonostyles” are invoked too frequently for my taste anyway as a catch-all explanation for various sound changes. Language learners are exposed to speech, which on its own is generally pretty fast (rates of over a dozen segments articulated per second are quite normal; see e. g. Ladefoged 1978, 920 – 1). Significantly faster (or slower) speech is, on the whole, not hugely common, and seems an unlikely source of robust data for a learner to generalize from. 27 If the sequence had started out [ –´ , then one would not expect destressing to result in shortening of the heavy syllable, although it might well result in syncope (or apocope) of the unstressed light syllable (cp. the Romance definite articles in l- from ˘ıll-).


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the reorganization in certain ways, it is hard to see how it could be the source of the reorganization: again, the stress-quantity pattern [´ – was tolerated in countless forms in Latin without a problem. The prosodic and syntactic conditioning of breuis breuians As Devine and Stephens and earlier scholars28 noted, and as we will be discussing in more detail shortly, BB did not operate when the heavy syllable was followed by a “full word boundary”.29 If BB did not occur at the ends of sentences or clauses, we must ascertain whether the words in which it could occur stood necessarily in any particular syntactic relationship to the word that followed. Hans Drexler claimed that BB is a sandhi phenomenon that applied within close syntactic groups (1969a, 3, 18 et passim; 1969b, 365); this theory is accepted by Soubiran (1971, 409; 1988, 247 ff.). I will not reproduce all his evidence for this, but discuss just two sets of examples; as will be quickly seen, his conclusion regarding syntactically close relationships is open to question. One of the most important categories of words that undergo BB consists of iambic imperatives of the sort abı¯, mane¯, tace¯, uide¯ ; these are often shortened to abı˘ mane˘ tace˘ uide˘ . According to Drexler, the shortened forms are most frequent in such groups as abı˘ prae, abı˘ rus, abı˘ dierectus, uide˘ sis, uide˘ quaeso, abı˘ domum, caue˘ malo, iube˘ uenire, tace˘ parumper, redı˘ nunciam, tene˘ me opsecro (1969a, 3).30 Exceptions, where a shortened imperative ap28 E.g. Vollmer 1916, 136 (“Die Iambenkrzung als sprachliche Erscheinung [wirkt] viel mehr auf die durch scharfe Satz- und Kolenakzente verflchtigten Teile gefgter Rede als auf einzelne Wçrter”). 29 The lack of BB in such a position, especially as regards the ends of clauses and sentences, may well be connected with the lengthening rules that affected final syllables in this position, as discussed in Ch. 4. Compare also Drexlers observation (1932, 1:106 n. 2) that the imperative face without apocope is regularly used as a Pausaform, occurring nine times at verse-end. 30 Phrases like abı˘ prae abı˘ rus falsify a claim made by Ruijgh, who said that the proper domain of BB is a group of more than three syllables beginning with an iambic sequence (1986, 440). While it is true that there are many notable contrasts that speak for this (e. g. uolu˘pta¯tis but not [freestanding] *uolu˘pta¯s), I think it is far more likely, with Devine and Stephens, that the unstressed nature of the initial iambic sequence in all his examples is the key; such a sequence would only be unstressed if the word- or phrase-stress were no earlier than the following syllable. This could only be the case (by the Latin stress rule) if that syllable were followed by yet another syllable in the same accentual domain, or if (for other prosodic reasons independent of following material) the iambic sequence were weakly stressed. In this latter case (where I have pronouns, illocutionary parti-

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pears alone, are explained away on a variety of grounds that need not be repeated here; normally in phrase- or sentence-final position the imperative is not shortened. This latter fact is particularly evident from the old imperative uale¯, which because of its meaning [Goodbye] is almost always used alone and sentence-finally; it practically never undergoes BB (p. 10).31 These phrases adduced by Drexler represent a considerable variety of syntactic relationships between the words: verb followed by nominal argument (abı˘ domum, caue˘ malo), verb followed by adverb (abı˘ prae, tace˘ parumper, redı˘ nunciam), verb followed by pronominal object (tene˘ me), verb followed by another verb form meaning please (uide˘ sis, uide˘ quaeso), and verb followed by infinitival complement (iube˘ uenire). These are not entirely disparate: most of the elements following the verb are still within the VP, although this is not true of the sentence particles sis and quaeso. But neither Drexler nor any of the other authors who have invoked “close syntactic connection” have attempted to define what they mean by that phrase, or give any hierarchy of degrees of “closeness” such that the claim can be scientifically tested. As we have started to see, though, the problem is moot, because close syntactic cohesion of any kind is not a precondition for BB. If we look at another of Drexlers data sets, such as the one comprising contracted and shortened forms like uide˘ n < *uide¯sn(e), we see the same variety of syntactic configurations. From his mostly undigested data I make the following analytic list: uide˘ n ut, uide˘ n tu, uide˘ n plus nominal or pronominal object, and uide˘ n plus dependent infinitival or other clause. Other second singulars to which -ne has been cliticized and which have undergone shortening occur, inter alia, before a nominal or pronominal object, before an adverbial complement (abı˘n hinc, fugı˘n hinc), before an, before a prepositional phrase, before a pronominal indirect object, and before a dependent clause. The syntactic relationships that hold between the shortened forms and what follows are various, comcles, adverbs, and other unstressed words in mind), it is irrelevant whether a stress or at least one more syllable followed immediately; and since these words by their nature mostly occur sentence-internally, they will not as a rule occur before a pause. 31 This is nonetheless a little odd since forms of address and interjections tend to undergo phonological reduction (e. g. Engl. Bye from God be with ye). Compare also Quintilians remarks on aue that I mentioned above. Niedermann (1953, 52 f.) already saw that the shortening of caue˘ and puta˘ was to be attributed to their prosodically weak status; see further below.


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prising many of the ones we saw in the preceding paragraph as well as others. By contrast to second singulars, third singular verbs plus -ne (e. g. licetne) practically never shorten. The only phonological explanation for this that seems possible is that -tn- was more resistant to shortening than -sn-; but I think the lack of shortening is more likely attributable to the fact that no such forms were lexicalized as illocutionary particles. Drexler correctly realized that the semantic fullness of verbs was implicated in the frequency of shortening: “Von den … Stellen her wird vielleicht der Unterschied zwischen rit cordlium, rit praesdium usw. [i.e., forms with shortening] und Plact conslium, Plact princpium [i.e., forms without] … verstndlich: dort ein Hilfs-, hier ein volles, aussagekrftiges Verbum” (1969a, 38).32 The fact that he saw the prosodic motivation for the shortening makes it a bit mysterious why he also invoked close syntactic cohesion (unless his concept of “close syntactic cohesion” differs widely from mine). In the case of the semantically bleached words that have become illocutionary particles (caue˘ uide˘ n uolo˘ modo˘ scio˘ ), close prosodic connection with the following word may or may not obtain, and any syntactic connection is surely excluded. Some of these words functioned as sentence particles, others as parentheticals; I mention the difference because these two classes of words do not have identical prosodic behavior. Both parentheticals and sentence particles are unstressed, but parentheticals have the additional property of being much lower in pitch and being set off by pauses from surrounding material.33 Thus the only thing these particles have in common with each other is their weakness or absence of stress. That absence of stress is the main factor in the shortening of these verbs is still clear from later Latin data. In two related studies, Laurence Stephens investigated the distribution of BB in iambic-shaped first singular verbs in -o¯ in Classical Latin, and found—quite in keeping with Drexlers statement quoted above for Plautus—that iambic shortening is attested in those forms that have become auxiliaries or semantically bleached discourse particles, but is far less common in semantically full verbs and nouns like homo¯ (Stephens 1985a, 1986).34 32 There are in fact differences in the rate of shortening in full-content verbs compared with the rate in nouns; see further Ch. 9. 33 I am grateful to Andrea Calabrese for drawing my attention to this fact. 34 I do not subscribe to Stephenss view that the spread of final short -o˘ to other verbs is either a “sound change in progress” or the analogical diffusion of iambic

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Drexler makes much the same point on the subject of full lexical adjectives, the most common of which (of iambic shape) are bonus and malus: “Im ganzen ist zu sagen, dass die beiden Addjektiva [sic] sowohl mit natur- wie mit positionslanger Endsilbe nicht gern gekrzt werden” (1969a, 100). The bonus and malus data furnish us with yet more evidence against the claim that close syntactic cohesion was necessary for shortening to have occurred. Seven times in iambo-trochaics in Plautus the adjectives undergo shortening: Bac. 546 Mer. 620 – 135 Per. 645 Poen. 301 Ps. 142

. . . ex ingenio mlo˘ malum nueniunt suo. Hem istucinest operam dare / bnu˘m sod lem? Haec erit bono˘ gnere nata: bno˘ med sse ingenio ornatam quam auro multo mauolo. At faciem quom aspicias eorum, hau mlı˘ uidntur: opera fallunt.

shortening. Length distinctions in final unstressed vowels were lost in Vulgar Latin; the increasing frequency of full lexical verbs (and other words) with final -o˘ in later Latin is simply due to the incursion of forms reflecting Vulgar Latin sound changes. (Admittedly, this is what is often meant by the misleading phrase “sound change in progress”, so perhaps Stephens meant that also.) The analogical spread of iambic shortening is unlikely because it would be difficult to account for the spread of a phonetic feature of a handful of illocutionary forms to the thousands of full lexical verbs in the language (especially given the semantic divergence that led to the creation of these illocutionary forms to begin with). A distinction was maintained between shortened unstressed illocutionary scio˘ and full lexical scio¯, for instance, and the eventual replacement of full lexical scio¯ by scio˘ was an independent change. According to Stephens, the fact that nom. sing. homo in Vergil is always elided with the following word and is therefore prosodically ambiguous “is prima facie evidence for change in progress. Vergil wishes to avoid committing himself to either prosody” (Stephens 1985a, 49 n. 5). This description of the distribution of homo is accurate but disingenuous, as the form only occurs twice in all of Vergil (Aen. 9.783 and 10.720), so the sample is much too small to draw conclusions from. But even if there were more examples, Stephenss reasoning begs many questions: to say that Vergil waffled in matters of prosody is without foundation; to say that syllables could be elided for the purpose claimed by Stephens is based on an undemonstrated assumption about the linguistic knowledge of the poet and the poets motivation for using elision; and to imply that any poet avoided linguistic variation rather than exploiting it is simply wrong. 35 Possibly a later interpolation (Leo and Lindsay).


St. 726 Truc. 22436

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Bnu˘ m ius dcis. … Bonı˘s sse oportet dentibus lenam probam,

(Ps. 142 might better be left aside, as the adjective is predicatival here rather than attributive.) These cases do not have much in common with one another except that the adjective is not clause-final. The closest syntactic relationship that can obtain between an adjective and a following word is that between an adjective and its nominal head; only three of the shortened examples of bonus (none of malus, accidentally) directly precede their head (Mer. 620 – 1, Per. 645, and St. 726). The sample is not large, but there is no obvious propensity for bonus or malus to shorten when directly preceding their heads. By contrast, counting from Drexlers lists, there are eighty or more Adjective–Noun phrases containing iambic adjectives without shortening.37 Breuis breuians across word-groups Soubiran (1988, 247) extended Drexlers syntactic claims to include sequences of two monosyllables (or pyrrhic disyllables with the ultima elided), which he says also underwent shortening only when the second monosyllable was in close syntactic connection with what followed. The same author later modified this claim (1995, 16), replacing the syntactic conditioning with a prosodic one: “Un monosyllabe bref … peut abrger une initiale longue suivante, atone ou faiblement accentu.” This latter claim is not generally found in the literature on BB; to test which claim is more accurate, I reproduce below the examples from the first foot of the senarius collected by Brenot 1923. Those cases where the shortened iamb fills the first A of the senarius are on the left, and those where the shortened iamb fills the first B position (as bb) of the senarius are 36 The meter of this line is not certain; see Lindsay ad loc. 37 Bonus and malus are shortened an additional five times in substantival use in senarii and septenarii (I exclude the instances of the intensifying particle malu˘m damn it: Am. 721 Cas. 825 Rud. 656 St. 99 Truc. 429

Verum tu malu˘m m gnum habebis … Malo˘ m xumo suo hercle ilico … At malo˘ cfflm magno suo fecit hercle. Ite istinc foras, Bna˘s ut aquomst facere facitis. Sic facito. Quidquid attulerit, bonı˘ cnsulas.

These cases too, for the most part, show no close syntactic connection between the noun and the following word. I discuss these lines in greater detail in Ch. 8.

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on the right. I have divided them up according to the part of speech of the first of the two words.38 Bac. 329 Cap. 49 Per. 380 Poen. 1171 Ps. 400 Trin. 595

quia ˘ıd signumst ut ˘ın seruitute Et u˘t ui surrupta ut haèc inueniantur neque a˘d detexundam sed ˘ıd si alienatur

Aul. 21 Aul. 322 Cap. 698 Cas. 849 Ps. 445 Trin. 1093

is e˘ x se hunc reliquit ego u˘t multo melior quid ho˘ c sit negoti Quid e˘ st? :: Pectus quis hı˘c loquitur quid ho˘ c hic clamoris

Aul. 403 Bac. 887 Men. 530 Men. 732 Mos. 444 Poen. 619 Trin. 1006 Vid. 25

Cap. 124 Mil. 822

ita u˘t dicis Eho a˘n dormit

Bac. 226

sed quid ho˘ c clamoris oritur Si tibi e˘ st machaera scin quid ho˘ c sit spinter? Tun tibi ha˘nc surreptam sed quid ho˘ c? sed quid hu˘c tantum hominum sed quis hı˘c est qui Est tibi ˘ın mercede seruos dum quidem ho˘ c ualebit pectus

As can be seen, sometimes the syntactic connection between the second monosyllable and the following word is close (e. g. hanc surreptam, ut dicis, in seruitute), sometimes not (huc tantum, id si, hoc hic, sentence38 It might be objected that this and the following lists of data showing BB should be contrasted with data that do not show the shortening. But recall that, like aphaeresis in Ch. 6 or contraction of not in English, BB was an optional rule; the environments in which it took place are in complementary distribution with those in which it could not, but not with those in which it did not (of which they are just a subset). Thus a collection of the environments where BB-induced shortening of hoc (for example) does not take place would be tantamount to all the possible environments in which hoc occurs in the text (after either a heavy or light syllable, after a function word or full lexeme, clause- or sentence-initial or -medial or -final, etc. etc.) and would shed no additional light on the constraints on BB.


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final est, hoc). The cases where the connection is close are not in the overwhelming majority. The same can be said about the syntactic connection, or lack thereof, within the iambic sequence, both in these cases and in the ones we are about to see—sequences of short monosyllable (or elided pyrrhic disyllable) followed by the initial syllable of a longer word. I have arranged the data below according to the part of speech of the initial monosyllable, and it will again be readily apparent that the syntactic relationships are so disparate as to be meaningless for a characterization of BB. The data are too numerous to cite in full; I give only a representative sampling. In the first A of the senarius we have thirty-four examples with the initial member a conjunction, such as the following (data again from Brenot 1923):39 Aul. 483 Bac. 205 Cist. 767 Men. 565 Mos. 610 Per. 460 Poen. 620 Trin. 421

et ˘ıllae malam rem metuant quam metuont magis, Vt ˘ıstuc est lepidum! … Sed ˘ıstanc cistellam te opsecro ut reddas mihi. Sed e˘ ccam coronam quam habuit. Quod ˘ılluc est faenus, opsecro, quod illic petit? et ˘ıstas tabellas quas consignaui tibi, Et ˘ılle chlamydatus quisnam est qui sequitur procul? et ˘ılle aedis mancupio aps te accepit? …

In twenty cases, the first word is an interrogative pronoun, as in the following: Bac. 885 Cap. 133 Cist. 539

Quid ˘ılli molestus? … Quis hı˘c loquitur? … Quot ˘ılli blanditias, quid illi promisi boni,

39 As should be fairly obvious from the examples, the frequency of BB in the first foot is not due to an inherent connection between BB and word-groups in lineinitial position, but rather falls out from the fact that most of the word-groups in question gravitate towards clause-initial position, to which line-initial position typically corresponds. Questa (1967, 52 – 3 with 53 n. 1) observed that a goodly number of these begin with sed, and supposed the conjunction to be strongly stressed in many of these, with the following word prosodically subordinate and hence shortened. As should be clear from my discussion, I do not think it necessary to claim that sed (or any of the other conjunctions in this position) had to be strongly stressed for BB to take place; in fact in my view the conjunction was only weakly stressed, even atonic.

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Cur. 277 Mer. 812

Quid ˘ıstic clamorem tollis? … Quid ˘ıstuc negotist? …

In the remaining cases, the first word is either a personal pronoun (14), a demonstrative (5), or some other word (pol 3, ita 3, also iube, abi, tua, em, and the prepositions ab and ob). In the first B of the senarius, we see essentially the same set, with only fewer conjunctions (5) because of the later position in the line. Pronouns are the first word 18, followed by the particle quidem (7), pol (2), and miscellaneous short words (in, ad, ubi, meus). Overwhelmingly the most frequent syllable shortened in such groups is the first syllable of the demonstratives iste and ille;40 also rather common is shortening of eccum. 41 A few cases involve shortening of the first syllable of a full-content lexical item; I will discuss these in the next section. The syntactic connection between the demonstrative and what precedes or follows need not be close, or even exist at all. If the connection that obtains within the iambic sequence for shortening to occur is not a syntactic one, then it must be a prosodic (i. e., phonological) one,42 and given the nature of the words that comprise all the examples that we have just seen, the iambic sequence must be unstressed or weakly stressed relative to what follows.43

40 The shortening of the first syllable of ille is only found in iambic shortening contexts (i. e. after a preceding short syllable; the point is also noted in Lindsay 1922, 56). This must have become extremely common in ordinary speech in other contexts too, though, since the shortening became lexicalized and yielded the Romance articles in initial l-. Alternatively, shortened allomorphs occurred only in BB contexts in the first instance (the stage represented by Plautus) and in some varieties of Latin were later generalized. (I must gloss over the complications of divergent outcomes within the same paradigm like Spanish masc. el vs. fem. la.) 41 Some discussion of e˘ccum may be found in Bach 1891, 389 n. 1. 42 It should be recalled that prosodic domain–construction, while (as we have seen) reflecting syntactic structure, can also be independent of it. Elements, especially clitics and particles that are independently moved (by the syntax) into positions neighboring one another (forming clitic chains, for example), can belong within the same prosodic domain in spite of not belonging to the same syntactic constituents. 43 The frequency of sentence-initial BB, of the type represented in the lists above, may be related also to the fact, discussed in Ch. 5, that a left-hand environment is needed to establish a particular rhythm.


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By most accounts BB was restricted to a word- or phrase-initial iambic sequence.44 An interesting question is therefore raised by the second set of data above (shortening in the first B)—whether, for example, in a line like Rud. 491

Sed ubi ˘ılle meus est hospes qui me perdidit?

the phrase ubi ille is phrase-initial. We have seen at several points throughout this book evidence that sed and other conjunctions could be proclitic to following material, and we attributed the ability of resolutions to begin with sed, et, ut, etc. to this fact.45 On the other hand, nothing would stand in the way of assuming that these conjunctions, as with their equivalents in languages today, could also be tonic. Now the sequence sed ubi il- opening a senarius is theoretically able to be scanned either aa B with no shortening, or a bb with shortening. If we had nothing else to judge this by, scansion with shortening would be unmotivated and ad hoc, especially if one wanted to insist that BB occurred only in phrase-initial iambic sequences and that sed was proclitic. Such line-openings in trochaic septenarii are likewise ambiguous (between bb c and bb C). One has to move a syllable farther into the line before encountering unambiguous cases of BB in such sequences in the septenarius, as in the following line-beginnings from Brenots collection: Aul. 165 Cur. 311 Mil. 288

Nunc ego ˘ıstum, soror, laborem degam et deminuam tibi. Viden ut e˘ xpalluit? … atque ego ˘ılli aspicio osculantem Philocomasium cum altero Mos. 1086 Dixi ego ˘ıstuc idem illi. … St. 513 quam me ad ˘ıllum promittere, … St. 599 atque ad ˘ıllum renuntiari? The list could easily be expanded; in all cases a vowel-initial iambic sequence of the ubi il- type is preceded by a heavy syllable or a resolved 44 If, following the traditional formulation of BB, an iambic sequence with stress on the first syllable is needed for BB to apply, then words in which this environment occurs internally had to be at least five syllables long if the penult is heavy, otherwise six syllables; see Bettini 1990, 342. (I am indebted to Lucio Ceccarelli for this reference.) A very occasional form such as adminı˘stra¯ret may be analogical to minı˘stra¯ret. 45 Recall the discussion of split resolutions in Ch. 1.

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long, yielding either B cc or bb cc. In these sequences, BB occurs even though the iambic sequence is not phrase-initial. The following are even more telling examples, from senarii: As. 817 As. 818 Men. 22 Men. 336 Poen. 664 Trin. 58 Trin. 559

Iam quidem he˘ rcle ad illam hinc ibo, quam tu propediem, nisi quidem ˘ılla ante occupassit te, ecfliges scio, ut quidem ˘ılle dixit mihi qui pueros uiderat: ut quidem ˘ılle insanus dixit qui hinc abiit modo. ut quidem ˘ıpse nobeis dixit, apud regem Attalum; Dum quidem he˘ rcle tecum nupta sit, sane uelim. Meus quidem he˘ rcle numquam fiet. …

We know that quidem was a left-leaning particle; it is reasonable to assume that there was a drop in pitch and intensity beginning with quidem, and that this dip provided the correct, prosodically weaker environment for the shortening to take effect.46 We conclude that scanning sequences of the type Sed ubi ˘ıl- at the beginning of a senarius is perfectly plausible (if not provable) and, more importantly, that BB was not limited to phrase-initial iambic sequences.47 Iambic shortening in later Republican and Augustan Latin poetry, particularly Ovid, is of significance for these data, because it is by far most common after a preceding non-lexical monosyllable, at least in the first singulars of verbs (Stephens 1985b). What apparently happened was that the monosyllables were proclitic to the following verbs, and the two words formed a prosodic unit of the shape – [ –, potentially a single accentual unit (phonological word); this then underwent the cretic shortening rule to – [ [ . This is important evidence that such sequences united to form single “words”; although the evidence postdates Plautus, the behavior of the iambic sequences above—and of the ones to be discussed in the next section—indicates that the phrasing was surely identical in Plautuss day. Among the data above were four examples of shortening of a preposition:

46 These could be early examples of cretic shortening; see the next paragraph. 47 The discussion in Fortson 1996a, 172 – 3 and the conclusions reached there are erroneous. I am indebted to Lucio Ceccarelli (p.c.) for helpful discussion of this material.


Aul. 21 Cap. 49 Ps. 400 Vid. 25

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is e˘ x se hunc reliquit ut ˘ın seruitute neque a˘d detexundam Est tibi ˘ın mercede seruos

In light of the remarks in Ch. 5 concerning the prosody of prepositional phrases, such lines deserve a closer look. Let us expand the pool of data somewhat by including all the shortened prepositions from the long positions in senarii and septenarii that are given in Brenot 1923:48 Aul. 456 Aul. 534 Bac. 66 Bac. 188 Cap. 441 Cas. 530 Cur. 354 Mil. 62349 Poen. 827 Ps. 1136 St. 127 Trin. 482

Heus, senex, pro uapulando hercle ego a˘ps te mercedem petam. Nam quae indotata est, ea ˘ın potestate est uiri; Penetrare [me] huius modi ˘ın palaestram, … Salutem tibi a˘b sodali solidam nuntio; serua tibi ˘ın perpetuom amicum me, … Sed tu caue ˘ın quaesitione mihi sis. … Postquam cenati atque adpoti, talos poscit sibi ˘ın manum, eam pudet me tibi ˘ın senecta obicere sollicitudinem. Ita me di ament, uel ˘ın lautumiis uel ˘ın pistrino mauelim Heus ubi estis uos? :: Hicquidem a˘d me recta habet rectam uiam. Sed hoc est quod a˘d uos uenio quodque esse ambas conuentas uolo de honore populi; uerum quod a˘d uentrem attinet,

These are useful in showing that, while prepositions freely procliticized to a following noun (the shortening indicates lack of stress) and formed a clitic group with it, the resultant clitic group was not stressed as a single word according to the Latin stress rule (see again Ch. 5). This is evidenced by five of the phrases above: e˘ x se, a˘ps te, a˘d me, ˘ın manum, a˘d 48 I omit Am. 816 (tua ex) and three other examples of that type (Aul. 258, Cist. 634, and Trin. 1133) because an alternative scansion is possible with synizesis of the possessive and no shortening. Ps. 1136 is given by Brenot as an example (…Hicquidem a˘d me), but as Questa (1967, 74) notes, hicquidem otherwise always scans with the first syllable short, so hicquid(em) ad should scan here as an anapest. (I am indebted to Lucio Ceccarelli for reminding me of this.) 49 Soubiran 1995, 170 considers the BB here odd because of the lack of syntactic connection between tibi and in; but, as we have seen, such a lack is no impediment to the occurrence of BB.

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uos, indicating stress on the following object in all cases. But a potential problem for this analysis is met with in the form of certain disyllabic prepositions, notably apud, which show both shortened and unshortened forms. Before monosyllabic objects (always pronouns), the preposition normally does not shorten (apffld me¯), whereas before disyllabic objects, it always shortens (apu˘d nstram, apu˘d mtrem); apffld me would not be expected if apud was proclitic to me. Questa (1967, 37 n. 1) says that apffld me¯ shows enclisis of the pronoun and the concomitant formation of a single trisyllabic accentual unit. In light of the discussion in Ch. 5, apffld-me must have been a fixed phrase, chez moi, lexicalized and with the stress reassigned according to the word-level stress rule, like Iuppiter and others of that ilk that we have discussed before. The rare instances where apud is shortened before me are attributed by Questa (1967, 37 n. 1), following earlier scholarship, to emphatic stressing of the pronoun; in such cases we are simply dealing with the default rules for constructing a prepositional phrase, rather than the retrieval of a prefabricated lexeme, with apud proclitic like other prepositions.50 Since the shortening of monosyllabic prepositions only occurs following a short monosyllable or (much more commonly, as it happens) an elided pyrrhic disyllable—that is, it does not occur when the preposition is at the left edge of its phrasal domain—it is reasonable to suppose that the initial monosyllable/pyrrhic disyllable was incorporated into a prosodic unit with the preposition, the two together forming a larger unit with the following noun, which bore the main accent of the sequence: uel-in-pistr no or sib(i)-in-mnum. 51 There are a few instances at the beginnings of senarii and septenarii of prepositions followed by BB: Aul. 310 Cas. 453

ab ˘ıstoc sene, ut det qui fiamus liberi? ob ˘ıstanc rem quin te deosculer, uoluptas mea.

50 One might be tempted to think that aps te, in spite of the shortening, was a lexicalized idiom as well, as it contains the older form aps and by the time of Cicero was the only phrase in which aps still occurred. But this form was still a productive variant of a(b) in Plautuss day, as witnessed by e. g. aps chorago Per. 159, aps terra Cato Agr. 51. 51 I no longer believe, contra Fortson 1996a, 195, that two accentual domains were formed, of the type [ul in] [pistr num], and that the preposition was phonologically leftward-leaning while syntactically rightward-leaning.


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Men. 34452 Nunc in ˘ıstoc portust nauis praedatoria, Per. 129 Non ad ˘ıstuc quod tu insimulas. … These do not indicate stressing of the preposition, but rather subordination of both it and the first syllable of iste to the rest of the phrase; this phenomenon will be discussed in more detail below. Monosyllables followed by polysyllables As noted by Devine and Stephens, in shortened sequences consisting of a short monosyllable or elided disyllable and the initial syllable of a longer word, the first word is almost always unstressed. Below are the examples known to me from the first foot of senarii of full lexical items whose first syllable is shortened after a preceding unstressed monosyllable or elided disyllable (taken again from Brenot 1923). Most involve shortened preverbs (listed by preverb):53 Cap. 71 Ps. 1055 St. 418 Poen. 733 Aul. 482 Mer. 726 Mer. 751 Cap. 83

Scio a˘psurde dictum hoc derisores dicere, et a˘bducere a me mulierem fallaciis. Age a˘bduce hasce intro quas mecum adduxi, Stiche. Ibi e˘ xtemplo leno errabit. … et ˘ınuidia nos minore utamur quam utimur, Scio, ˘ınnoxius. … Sed— :: I˘nterii! … in o˘ cculto miseri, …

The others are: Rud. 895 Aul. 32 Rud. 87 St. 179

Sed u˘xor scelesta me omnibus seruat modis, sibi u˘xorem poscat. … ita o˘ mnis de tecto deturbauit tegulas; Per a˘nnonam caram dixit me natum pater:

52 Following Brenot and Gratwick (after Bentley) in reading portust instead of mss. portu stat, which Lindsay has in his edition but nonetheless objected to on the grounds that it would force nauis to scan as a monosyllable. 53 I omit cases like meum e˘ xenterauit Ep. 511, since m(eum) ex- could scan as a single long with synizesis and elision. In none of those cases, however, is the alternate scansion with shortening of the initial syllable unparalleled.

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For several of these (the serial verb construction age abduce, the prepositional phrases in occulto, per annonam, the conjunction-initial et abducere, et inuidia, sed interii), no special pleading seems necessary: these began with proclitics that united prosodically with the following noun into a clitic group. The resulting groups would have had one lexical stress,54 ag-abdfflcere in-occffllto per-annnam etc., and the prosodically deficient two opening syllables would have licensed BB. However, the remaining cases are not as straightforward. Two are clearly artificial (Mer. 726 and 751), as there is punctuation or change of speaker between the two words.55 In some others, the word preceding the polysyllable is unstressed, but not syntactically connected to the following word (like sibi uxorem); here the shortening appears to indicate that they were sentence-enclitics whose host was the first stressed word to their right. However, sed uxor and ita omnis present a new difficulty because the accent should have fallen on the syllable that actually winds up shortened (sed-fflxor)!56 To avoid this problem, proponents of the ictus-accent theory would expand the accentual domain to include the following word: under this view the whole phrase sed uxor scelesta (and, mutatis mutandis, the phrase sibi uxorem poscat if the verb were weakly stressed) would be taken to be a single accentual domain, stressed seduxrscelsta, yielding the appropriate environment for BB. But as said in Ch. 2 and repeated or implied passim, there is no convincing evidence that whole phrases consisting of two full lexemes could productively form a single phonolog54 N.b. not by virtue of forming a single phonological word, which I do not think clitic groups were, but because there was only one lexical stress in the sequence to begin with. 55 Note that the change of speaker in Mer. 751 is a conjecture of Leos, as Lucio Ceccarelli points out to me (p.c.). Assuming it is correct, it probably does not pose a problem for the presence of BB here; see the discussion in Enk 1932 ad Mer. 683, and his apt quotation from Fraenkel 1928, 345 that this and similar lines are cases where “an die Stelle der realen Einheit des gesprochenen Satzes die ideale Einheit des in sich geschlossenen Verses getreten ist.” (Not that this is really an explanation, but it is the normal state of affairs in Classical poetry; the interest and value of Plautus lies in his willingness to allow linguistic reality to disturb that state of affairs.) 56 In Rud. 87, Mark Hale (p.c.) makes the interesting suggestion that if prosodic weakening is implicated by the shortening in omnis, it may be due to quantifier float (separation of sentence-internal quantifiers from their NP, of the type The guests have all arrived). There are, however, other contexts in which omnis is weakened (see Questa 1967, 54). As we noted in Ch. 5, the prosody of words in hyperbaton in Latin still needs to be thoroughly investigated.


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ical word with stress reassignment; additionally, in a case like sibi uxor poscat, while we saw evidence in Ch. 3 that certain light disyllabic verbs could potentially act like clitics, poscat is less likely to pattern with these. We will discuss a way of improving this account shortly. The line-initial data with shortened prefixes can be augmented by adducing all the examples of shortened prefixes in the heavy positions of senarii and septenarii except the first heavy (from Brenot 1923):57 Am. 793

Id quod uerumst. :: At cum cruciatu iam, nisi a˘pparet, tuo. Cap. 80 Quasi, cum caletur, cocleae in o˘ cculto latent, Cap. 571 negas te Tyndarum esse? :: Nego, ˘ınquam. :: Tun te Philocratem Cap. 572 esse ais? :: Ego, ˘ınquam. … Cas. 96558 Redi sis in cubiculum; periisti hercle. Age a˘ccede huc modo. Ep. 237 duae sic post me fabulari inter sese—ego a˘pscessi sciens Ep. 722 ut liceat merito huiius facere. Cedo tu ut e˘ xsoluam manus. Men. 320 tribus uobis opsonatumst, an o˘ psono amplius, Mer. 941 rogito quis eam uexerit, quis habeat si ibi ˘ındaudiuerit. 59 perque tua genua— :: Quid o˘ psecras me? … Mil. 542 Poen. 1078 Pol istam rem uobis bene e˘ uenisse gaudeo. Trin. 964 Vel trecentis. :: Haben tu id aurum quod a˘ccepisti a Charmide? Truc. 272 An eo bella es, quia a˘ccepisti tibi armillas aeneas?

57 Again, omitting the cases of the type discussed in n. 48. 58 Punctuated in Lindsay with a comma after Age, but this is a serial verb construction (Just come on and come over here, as it were). 59 Considered “tr s irrgulier” by Soubiran (1995, 157) because it is the only occurrence of shortening of the first syllable of a cretic-shaped word. I do not know what the significance of that might be. It is true that in all the other examples, the shortened syllable is followed by a heavy syllable or a sequence of two light ones. (One is reminded of the mamilla-rule, whereby, in a sequence of two geminate consonants [*mammilla], the first was degeminated; in this process, a sequence of two heavy syllables was turned into a sequence of light followed by heavy. The shortening in the data above may reflect a similar process.)

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Truc. 514 Adsum, adduco tibi e˘ xoptatum Stratophanem. … Truc. 90760 numquam hoc uno die e˘ cficiatur opus quin opus semper siet; The boldfaced sequences are at the left edge of their clause or larger phrase a little over half the time.61 In Ep. 722 the shortened sequence is preceded by a (fronted?) monosyllable; cp. Mer. 941, where only the subordinating conjunction precedes. In Cap. 80 and Trin. 132, the boldfaced sequence begins a small phrase not set off by punctuation (in occulto). This leaves only Poen. 1078, Truc. 514, and Truc. 907 as not starting a phrase, of which the last contains a stressed lexeme that surely was phrased with the preceding word (uno die); this example of shortening might thus be a poetic artificiality. Cap. 571 and 572 clearly play on each other (Nego inquam and Ego inquam); the parenthetical nature of inquam probably aided the application of BB.62 Otherwise, in all the other verses the two boldface syllables can be argued to have belonged to a clitic group, and the high frequency of unstressed monosyllables before shortened prefixes is in direct contrast to their low frequency before the unshortened prefixes in the previous data set.63 It may have been noticed that a rather large number of the examples above are of the type quia accepisti with elision of the second syllable of the first word. This leads Mark Hale (p.c.) to suggest that elision may have led to a close prosodic connection between the first syllable of the elided word and the following. If true, this sequence of events would have provided the right environment for BB regardless of the original prosodic connection between the two words. One assumes, though, that 60 Scan opus both times as opu. 61 Am. 793, Cap. 571, 572, Cas. 965, Ep. 237, Men. 320, Mil. 542, Trin. 964, Truc. 272. 62 Verbs for speaking, when used as quotatives, frequently undergo phonetic reduction, sometimes becoming mere sentence particles, as Russian colloquial gyt (< govorit says), Hittite -wa(r) (quotative particle, < *u 7ert). In Latin, inquam and inquit gravitated toward second position in the manner of clitic particles; see Fortson 1998, 26 n. 17 and cf. Questa 1967, 55. 63 Note that of the seventeen shortened prefixes and preverbs, only three (at Cap. 80, Mer. 377, and Truc. 82) are prefixes of nonverbal forms, two of which are underlyingly verbal (occulto, aduorsum). Depending on the overall proportion of compound verbs to other compounds, this may or may not be significant; if the number of shortened preverbs is disproportionately high, that is further evidence for the weak prosodic status of verbs. Compare the further remarks in Ch. 9.


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the first word was already prosodically weak in its phrase, an assumption that is necessary anyway to explain those cases where there was no elision. Returning now to the shortening in phrases of the type sed uxor scelesta, the most promising line of inquiry is to consider BB in stressed syllables of full-content lexemes an artifact of the phrasing of word-groups, whereby the shortened word does not bear the strongest phrasal stress. This has been assumed by many scholars (e. g. Lindsay 1922, 51 ff.; Questa 1967, 62; Drexler 1969a passim), and has potentially much more to offer than relegating these cases to poetic license.64 It also has much better cross-linguistic parallels than the ictus-based approach outlined above, parallels for which are not known. Cross-linguistically, the rhythmic articulation of larger prosodic units (minor and major phrases) brings with it the subordination of the underlying primary stresses of some of the individual lexemes within the phrase. Rohlfs (1938), as pointed out in Devine and Stephens 1980, lists some very interesting examples from modern Italian dialects where umlauting of certain underlying stressed vowels does not occur in phrases where the word does not receive the phrasal stress. For example, the Italian dialect of Pozzuoli has an umlaut rule of stressed a > e, as in fully stressed kande ta = standard cantto, but the umlauting is not triggered in a clause like ag˘g˘© kandat© na kantsuna ho cantato una canzne, where kandat© is accentually subordinate to surrounding material. The variation between kande ta and kandat© is strongly reminiscent of the variation between uxor and shortened u˘xor (or, in trisyllables, modestus vs. mode˘ stus), with shortening of an underlyingly stressed syllable; scholars have generally inferred that the relevant prominence of different stresses within a phrase is the main factor in the shortening or its absence. We will treat shortening of trisyllables like modestus later; for sed uxor scelesta, positing a phrasal stress-pattern sed- xor-scelsta is supported by the fact that Daemones is contrasting his “rotten wife” with the clientas … ambas forma scitula atque aetatula “protges, delicious little darlings … the both of them” (Nixon) in the preceding two lines: scelesta can be assumed to have received the strongest contrastive focus in the phrase. Although the effects of phrasal stress have been widely assumed to cause BB in (normally) fully stressed lexemes, and many examples of the phenomenon noted, to my knowledge it has never been systematically 64 Cf. Drexler 1969a, 137: “Man entdeckt immer neue Feinheiten … und sollte daher mit der Erklrung aus Versnot sehr vorsichtig sein.”

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examined and the literature is very vague about the conditions or description of the phenomenon. In addition the same authors who attribute shortening of full lexemes to the workings of phrasal stress also invoke “close syntactic cohesion” or similar notions; thus e. g. Questa (1973, 496 – 7) avers that “ innegabile che il contesto sintattico della frase doveva favorire o no, in misura per noi ancora del tutto problematica e oscura, il prodursi del fenomeno.” We have seen repeatedly that syntactic structure does not directly condition BB, and it is no different in the case of full lexical items. In the next section we will examine one subset of these in order to try to characterize more precisely the conditions under which they could shorten; another, larger case study will be undertaken in the next chapter. Breuis breuians in polysyllables As has been repeatedly noted (Lindsay 1922, 45; Questa 1967, 48; Drexler 1969a, 240), BB rarely affects syllables long by nature within polysyllabic words.65 Lindsay (ib.) lists only six words that attest this besides calefacere 66 that he considers to be “clear” cases. Far more common is the shortening of closed syllables containing short vowels. Most of these are four- or five-syllable words where the main stress fell on the syllable immediately after the shortened syllable (e. g. Arı˘starchi Poen. 1, sede˘ ntarii Aul. 513, uicı˘ssatim St. 532, Ale˘ xander Bac. 947). These may be evidence that in relaxed Latin speech, pretonic geminate consonants or consonant clusters were simplified or resyllabified as onsets, or that pretonic vowels were syncopated. One group of polysyllables with BB have a medial s-plus-stop cluster: egestat- potestat- uetustat- magistratus peristroma. The evidence for how internal s-clusters were syllabified in Latin is conflicting. Devine and Stephens (1980) consider epigraphic -sst- (e. g. Augussti, Iusstus, magisster CIL X 6071) support for tautosyllabicity, although I cannot follow their

65 BB in polysyllables is the subject of Ioannes Eschs dissertation (1897). His lists are not as useful as one would wish: quite a few of the line-numbers are incorrectly cited, and many examples have to be reconsidered because modern editors scan the lines differently. For this reason I have subjected all of his examples of shortening in trisyllables to a new examination, the results of which are outlined below. 66 This Paradebeispiel is an exception proving the rule, for it is a non-example; see n. 2 above.


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reasoning.67 By contrast, in pre-Plautine Latin this cluster was not tautosyllabic, as we know from the castus/incestus rule: normally, unstressed vowels were weakened to i, but in closed syllables to e, so the fact that (pre-Latin) *nkastos did not become *incistus shows that -stwas heterosyllabic. But since this concerns an earlier stage of the language, it may not have been synchronically true anymore in Plautuss day. One must also take into account studies such as Dennison 1906, who showed that the prevailing line-divisions on some 80,000 inscriptions surveyed resulted in splitting the cluster down the middle, contrary to the rules taught by Roman grammarians (whereby one was supposed to divide words before a medial consonant cluster). Even medial sT clusters are divided as -s.Tin 86 % of the cases (p. 62).68 As always, the interpretation of orthographic practices is tricky; the rules might have been artificial,69 or reflected slower speech rates. In the Romance languages, apparently medial -sTwas syllabified -s.T-, but muta cum liquida was tautosyllabic.70

67 They further compare these spellings to Oscan kvasstur, passtata, pusstst, claiming that Latin Augussti etc. were “substratum-based”. If they mean the orthographic practice was borrowed from Oscan (rather than the syllabification in the spoken language), they could well be right (depending crucially on the date and provenience of the relevant inscriptions); cf. Vine 1993 for a detailed investigation in favor of positing “substratum” influences on Latin orthography of the Archaic period. 68 For a more in-depth treatment and some additional observations that escaped Dennison, see Vine 1993, 299 – 322; but I do not see how any of this material is useful for determining the syllabification of these clusters. This goes as well for line-divisions like posterijsque (CIL I2 1273.9 – 10, see Vine, ib. 315 – 16). 69 Compare the situation in written English, where (orthographic) syllabification is partly phonological, partly morphological, and varies from publishing house to publishing house. From The American Heritage Dictionary of English, 4th edition, may be cited the morphological syllabifications bound.ary, bound.en, bound.er alongside the phonological boun.ty, boun.teous. 70 There is debate concerning the position of the accent in words whose last three syllables are short (e. g. hominibus), which have been claimed by many to have had stress before the antepenult (hminibus) in Plautine Latin. This theory is based on the ictus placement and on certain syncopated words such as post-Plautine balneae from earlier (Plautine) balineae: the -i- could only have been syncopated if it was not stressed, and therefore the stress fell on the preceding syllable. Sturtevant (1919, 243) claimed that the shortening seen in words of the shape minı˘serium and amı˘citia proves that these words were accented ministrium, amic tia; but these forms are not telling counterevidence unless it can be proved that the shortened syllables in mode˘ stus, mole˘ stus, etc. were unaccented. (A recent defense of the four-syllable rule is Parsons 1999, who attempts to apply it to

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Aside from the interpretational problems posed by the inscriptional spellings, there is the more immediate, and more embarrassing, difficulty with claiming tautosyllabicity for medial s-clusters—namely, the cluster makes position in forms like nom. sg. uenustas, where it must have been heterosyllabic. However, the apparent paradox is rather easily resolved. It is clear from the scansional contrast between shortened uenu˘sta¯tem and unshortened uenusta¯s that the position of the main stress is implicated: uenusta¯´tem versus uenfflsta¯s. One is immediately reminded of the contrast in the pronunciation of word-medial t in American English between atp and tomto, and between intr and nter, where in relaxed speech the t in the first member of each pair is pronounced [th], and in the second as a flap [R]. The English flap rule is the subject of considerable debate, but the old theory of Daniel Kahns71 is still viable, namely that flapping is an optional rule that applies to ambisyllabic t 72 in English, meaning ultimately the rule is a reflection of syllable structure.73 Regardless of the precise theoretical interpretation of the rule, it is conditioned, among other things, by the placement of the stress, and if flapping is a manifestation of ambisyllabicity, then the environments for it match those for heterosyllabic s.t in Latin almost exactly: tautosyllabic pretonic atp intr uenu.sttem, ambisyllabic bzw. heterosyllabic posttonic tomto nter uenffls.tas. 74 The syllabification rules for medial -st- could have obtained during the earlier period also, when *nkastos was weakened to *nkestos (on the assumption that -st- that was not immediately posttonic did not meet the conditions for onset maximization), or -st- could have simply been heterosyllabic across the board. With internal muta cum liquida,

71 72 73

74

analyze the structure of Saturnian verse, though I am not persuaded by his account.) Apud Kaisse 1985, 25 f. That is, belonging to two syllables (as opposed to heterosyllabic, which properly refers to consonant clusters and not single consonants). Alternatively, if one follows an analysis such as that in Nespor and Vogel 1986, 223 f., flapping applies to a t or d that is not foot-initial; syllable structure plays no role in their analysis. This would probably work mutatis mutandis for st-syllabification in Latin as well, but I leave it to others to work out the details. Note I am not claiming that resyllabification affected all consonant clusters pretonically. Muta cum liquida clusters, for example, remained heterosyllabic across derivational morpheme boundary regardless of the position of the stress, and otherwise were tautosyllabic also posttonically.


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however, the syllabification rules shifted, as is standardly acknowledged, from heterosyllabicity to tautosyllabicity.75 Returning to BB, more problematic than the pretonic shortening in quadrisyllables and longer words are the instances of shortening of the heavy penult of trisyllables, where the shortened syllable ostensibly bore the word-accent; recall that BB is not supposed to have affected tonic syllables. These represent not only a phonological but also a philological problem, and it is difficult to say which is the greater. BB in these words has understandably been a source of discomfort, with the result that few of the lines in question have been left untouched by attempts at emendation. Editors have often transposed or deleted words or introduced other changes to circumvent the need of scanning trisyllabic words with BB. Unfortunately, neither individual scholars nor the accumulated body of scholarship has been consistent in this regard.76 Lindsay, for in75 Later muta cum liquida clusters became heterosyllabic again, to judge for instance from Fr. entire, It. intero < intgrum, with stress before the cluster, as Andrea Calabrese (p.c.) informs me. Agostiniani and Giannecchini (2002) believe that heterosyllabic muta cum liquida was a feature of lower-class Latin (whence its continuation in Romance), and claim that this is what lies behind the scansion of sacres as a spondee at Rud. 1208 (porci sacres). It seems inconceivable to me that an archaic religious phrase, of all things, would be the one place in all of Plautus where this particular lower-class pronunciation would shine through. Timparano (1965, 1084 ff.) claimed instead that this phrase preserves the earlier Latin heterosyllabicity of muta cum liquida clusters; this would be possible if we imagine that the Romans faithfully preserved heterosyllabicity of muta cum liquida in religious recitation, or that in elevated solemn styles of speaking the clusters remained heterosyllabic (which might be another way of saying the same thing). On some supposed additional cases of heterosyllabic muta cum liquida in Plautus, see Stockert 1983 ad Aul. 471. The traditional explanation of the scansion of sacres is that the first vowel was long, and that the pair sa¯k-ri- : sak-ro- is parallel to or modeled on a¯k-ri- (a¯cer) : *ak-ro- (see e. g. Ernout-Meillet s.v. sacer). But this is problematic; there is no *ak-ro- in Italic to have built a proportion around (only an i-stem *ak-ri- is found in *ak-ri-dho-, the probable ancestor of acerbus) and short-vowel *sakri- is indicated anyway by sacerdo¯s < *sakri-do¯s. The Sabellic cognates of sacri- are never spelled with doubled a (the Umbrian form saakri- reported at Weiss 1998, 44 is a typo; see the attested forms collected in Untermann 2000 s.v. sakrim), though that hardly decides the matter. The source of the length in a¯cer is still an unsolved problem, but at least the root shows other lengthenedgrade forms. 76 Cf. Bettini 1990, 357 (“la rimozione dei casi sgraditi mette in gioco criteri variabili, la cui probabilit appare pi o meno alta a seconda di convinzioni personali, adesioni metodiche, etc.”), though he finds no fault in this.

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stance, found nece˘ sse suspect77 but admitted mole˘ stus (to be sure, under the hypothesis that in phrases such as molestae sunt the accent shifted rightward; see further on this below). I must assert that the aggregate of evidence that BB could affect the second syllable of trisyllables is far too great78 to be easily dismissed. In my view, we need to return to basics and construct our database afresh: the evidence as it appears in the manuscripts must be given priority; we can then weed out lines that are incontestably corrupt, and only then may we construct hypotheses concerning what principles might have been at work in the scansion, and, if it still appears necessary, engage in emendation on some basis other than the mere assumption or feeling that these shortenings were not possible.79 Cross-linguistically, while tonic syllables resist syncope, they are not immune from shortening and other reduction processes; we must simply try to recover the conditions (if any) under which this was possible in Plautine Latin. The data below contains all the examples known to me of trisyllables scanning with BB from iambic senarii and iambic and trochaic septenarii that are not incontestably corrupt.80 I include quite a few lines that are not 77 See e. g. As. 217 ad loc. 78 To my taste, but not necessarily to others. Bettini (1990, 354 ff.) notes that the vast majority of trisyllables with penultimate accent do not show BB in Plautus—ca. 4000 without versus ca. 150 with, of which he considers only those that show up repeatedly to be sure examples (ca. sixty). But even though each individual example out of the remaining ninety may be unique, as a group they reinforce each other (even subtracting the examples that I too find dubious; see further below). 79 Or on the highly fallacious grounds that if it is easy for modern editors to “correct” these lines (as by a simple transposition or bracketing of a nonessential word), it should have been even simpler for Plautus to have done so, and therefore the emendation is in order (Bettini 1990, 357 – 8). 80 The data are based on Esch 1897, 30 – 5 and 69 – 71. I omit examples of Philippus and Philippi (coins containing a likeness of Philip; both words almost always scan Philı˘pp8, which may reflect preservation of the Greek accent [V_kippor], as per Lindsay 1892, 342 and others), fene˘ stra (illusory because the word was a disyllable, fe(n)stra; note the spelling fenstras at Rud. 88, and festram Festus 80 Lindsay; see Esch 1897, 37 – 8 and Lindsay 1922, 77), and Achı˘lles (shown by Lindsay 1922, 147 – 8 to have a heavy first syllable, so ignore the speculations in Fortson 1996a, 190 and, earlier, Esch 1897, 36). I also omit examples of uolu˘ptas, which I treat separately below. Additionally, I have omitted the following examples, which are from lines that I think can safely be taken to be corrupt or that have other problems that render the data too uncertain for use: noce˘ bo Am. 391 (hypermetrical line), reso˘ luit As. 433 (clear ms. error; see Lindsay ad loc.), Athe˘ nis As. 492 (corrupt), habe˘ re


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in agreement with the readings adopted in the standard editions; some of the emendations go back several centuries and have become hardened into unquestioned doctrine, so I realize I am bucking a long-standing genAul. 461 (hypermetrical), mino˘ re Aul. 482 (only if ms. minore nos is kept, but all editors transpose to nos minore to keep parallel with the same phrase two lines later; I am not sure they are right, given that the scribal transposition is difficult to motivate and the two lines are not exactly parallel otherwise, but the line is on balance best left out), caue˘ to Cap. 431 (emended to caue tu; uncertain), nego˘ ti Cap. 698 (editors transposition of mss. quid sit hoc negoti to quid hoc sit negoti probably right), ama˘rum Cur. 318 (mss. os amarum clearly corrupt for gramarum and easy to explain, see Lindsay ad loc.), mole˘ stus Cur. 572 (I follow editors here in deleting superfluous mihi at the beginning of the line, probably accidentally copied from the previous line-beginning; Esch 1897, 43), habe˘ re Cur. 595 (hypermetrical), quie˘ to Ep. 338 (metrically too ambiguous), Ape˘ lles Ep. 626 (mss. appelles clearly erroneous, but Apella is an equally possible correction and would not require shortening), abı˘sse Mer. 804 (too uncertain; ms. reading could easily be mistake for abiisse, which is what editors emend it to; cf. St. 507 below), nece˘ ssum Mil. 1118 (mss. necessum esse could easily be dittographic for just necessum), scele˘ ste Mos. 478 (corrupt), remı˘tte Mos. 1169 (Lindsays emendation of Tranioni to Tranio [o-stem dat., cf. Tranium 561; Lucio Ceccarelli, p.c.] is open to debate, but editors are probably right that remitte (hanc noxiam) is a mistake for amitte or plain mitte, the usual verbs for pardon an offense in Plautus), quie˘ tus Mos. 1174 (ms. order uerberibus ut sit quietus would additionally require that uerberibus scan with ultima long, which is difficult, if not impossible), habe˘ bo Per. 734 (so A, but context demands the habeo of P), tace˘ re Poen. 875 (metrically ambiguous), amo˘ res Poen. 1165 (only an example of BB if one accepts Pyladess transposition of meos amores to amores meos in order to make the line scan as a senarius; otherwise it scans as a lone trochaic septenarius in the middle of a passage of senarii; unclear overall what to do here, if anything), mamı˘llae Ps. 180 (corrupt), amo˘ ris Ps. 498 (difficult scansion, probably corrupt), roga˘to Ps. 1073 (possibly an interpolated line; so Lorenz, Leo), perı˘nde St. 100 (so P, but proinde A; unclear which is correct; see Petersmann 1973 ad loc.), lube˘ nte St. 474 (ms. reading ametrical), redı˘sse St. 507 (so P, but rediisse A; too uncertain), bibe˘ ndum St. 715 (unclear scansion overall), bibı˘sti St. 723 (unclear scansion overall; Lindsay takes age to be extrametrical, and deleting it would make the line scan normally), uenı˘re Truc. 504 (quite possibly a gloss [Lucio Ceccarelli, p.c.]), tace˘ bo Truc. 817 (corrupt). Eschs lubı˘dost purportedly at Truc. 858 (1897, 33) is a typo, but I cannot determine what he meant instead. Finally, I have omitted words like deinde, which, when scanning disyllabically, could be read either with synizesis or BB; such words are simply ambiguous and best left aside. (The scholarship going into Petersmanns insistence on the scansion de˘˘ınde at St. 86 strikes me as wasted time and energy, and I do not see why he objects to synizesis here in the first place.) Eschs list of these trisyllables was subjected to a thorough analysis by Bettini (1990, 354 ff.), which was not available to me when I undertook my own analysis and is somewhat different in both focus and content. As I noted earlier, Bettini

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eral consensus about the text in these cases. As stated above, I believe these lines must be adduced: however much it might annoy some readers, they should not be excluded purely on the grounds that the manuscript reading forces a scansion with BB in the second syllable of a trisyllable. In the footnotes to these passages I indicate (without attempting to be exhaustive) what Lindsay and others read, if different, and add extra commentary as necessary. Am. 761 As. 21781 Aul. 18582 Aul. 39583 Aul. 59984 Bac. 27285 Bac. 59286 Cur. 34587 Men. 689 Men. 82788

81 82

83 84 85 86 87 88

dedı˘sse dono hodie, qua te illi donatum esse dixeras? aues adsuescunt: nece˘ sse est facere sumptum qui quaerit lucrum; Iam illic homo aurum me scit habe˘ re, eo me salutat blandius. confige sagı˘ttis fures thensaurarios Erı˘le imperium ediscat, ut quod frons uelit oculi sciant. Duce˘ ntos et mille Philippum. :: Tantum debuit. Non it. Nega˘to esse ituram. Abi et renuntia. Dedı˘sti tu argentum? inquam. Immo apud tarpezitam situm est tute ultro ad me detulisti, dedı˘sti eam dono mihi; tibi aut adeo isti, quae mihi mole˘ sta est quoquo modo?

separated those trisyllables showing BB only once from those that show it multiple times (like Philı˘ppus). The latter category consisted only of words whose second syllable is long by position (356), a generalization he also makes about polysyllables undergoing BB (369 – 70). Aues (with BB) bracketed by Lindsay, who objects to the scansion nece˘ sse; but aues is necessary for the sense. Mss. aurum me scit habere has been emended to aurum scit me habere, but the ms. word-order is perfectly idiomatic (matrix verb inserted before the last word of the dependent infinitival clause). sagitas mss. herile imperium mss., emended by editors to eri ille imperium, but I see nothing intrinsically wrong with the ms. reading. Lindsay reads mill. Emended in various ways by editors. With hiatus after tu and immo and iambic shortening of apud. Schoell and Lindsay, followed by Gratwick, emend to molestiaest (predicative dative), but there is nothing wrong with the ms. reading unless one dislikes the shortening on principle (so also Leo). The same kind of emendation would also be of no help with Mil. 69 below.


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Mer. 32789 Bene ambulato. :: Bene uale˘ to. :: Bene sit tibi. Mer. 448 Quie˘ sce, inquam. Istanc rem ego recte uidero. :: Quid ais? :: Quid est? Mer. 738 Immo sic: seque˘ stro mihi datast. :: Intellego. Mer. 84190 ibi quidem si regnum detur, non est cupı˘ta ciuitas. Mer. 98891 Iam opsecro hercle uobis habe˘ te cum porcis, cum fiscina. Mole˘ stae sunt: orant, ambiunt, exopsecrant Mil. 6992 Mil. 185a93 profe˘ cto ut ne quoquam de ingenio degrediatur muliebri Mil. 290 Profe˘ cto uidi. :: Tutin? :: Egomet duobus his oculis meis. 94 Mil. 1193 prorsum Athenas protinus abı˘bo tecum. :: Atque ubi illo ueneris, Mos. 21795 dum tibi nunc haec aetatulast, in sene˘ cta male querere. Mos. 28396 Non me curare istuc opo˘ rtet. :: Quem opsecro igitur? :: Eloquar: Mos. 50197 deceptus sum: hospes hic me neca˘uit isque me Mos. 50498 Scele˘ stae hae sunt aedes, inpia est habitatio. Poen. 41999 perque meos amo˘ res perque Adelphasium meam 89 Emended to uale by editors; but ualeto would make better comedy after ambulato. (Lucio Ceccarelli points out to me [p.c.] Men. 1076 tu salueto: tu uale, but that is not a case of one speaker echoing another.) 90 Mss. est cupita transposed to cupita est (cupitast) by editors. 91 Lindsay prints hercl, which he himself deems “suspectum”; Enk suggests monosyllabic scansion (1932, 2.142 – 3, cf. also his long note ad 699), but it is very difficult to prove that monosyllabic dat.-abl. plurals of the first and second pronouns (nis, uis) existed in Plautus; see Leumann 1977, 463 – 4. Servius cites the line as uobiscum habete (in Georg. I 266), which is probably erroneous and does not change the scansion one way or the other anyway. 92 obsecrant P, which renders the line ametrical. 93 Bettini 1990, 360 – 1 resuscitates a tentative suggestion of Lindsays that profecto was accented prfecto like xinde and some other forms, but I find this ad hoc. 94 Bentleys emendation of protinus to protinam is unlikely, and none of the various other emendations proposed seem better than what the mss. have to offer; see Soubiran 1995, 259 for discussion. 95 tibist … aetatula Lindsay, following Klotz against P, on the grounds that -st was often transposed in P (see Lindsay ad Mer. 330). 96 Mss. curare istuc transposed to istuc curare by editors, which causes quem to sit in hiatus (itself not a big problem, but again the question is raised as to how a putative istuc curare was transposed in the first place). 97 Mss. hic me transposed to me hic by Guietus. 98 Considered corrupt by Lindsay, who suggests reading Scelestae sunt; I see nothing wrong with the text as it stands (nor apparently have other editors), and either way scelestae must scan with shortening. 99 Lindsay scans perq to avoid BB of amores.

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Poen. 907 Poen. 1206100 Ps. 995101 Rud. 714102 Rud. 736103 St. 97104 St. 165105 St. 256106 St. 520107 St. 692108 Trin. 127

100 101 102 103 104 105

106 107

108

Profe˘ cto ad incitas lenonem rediget, si eas abduxerit. quodque haru˘spex de ambabus dixit— :: Velim de me aliquid dixerit. Nam nece˘ sse est hodie Sicyoni me esse aut cras mortem exsequi, si tuas esse oportet niue eas opo˘ rtet esse liberas numqui minus hasce opo˘ rtet esse liberas? :: Quid liberas? quem aequiust nos potiorem habe˘ re quam te? Postidea, pater, uteri dolo˘ res mi oboriuntur cottidie, Nega˘to esse quod dem nec mihi nec mutuom ut quoique homini res paratast, perı˘nde amicis utitur: Sat est seruo homini mode˘ ste melius facere sumptum quam ampliter. Dedı˘stin argentum? :: Factum neque facti piget.

Mss. quodque emended to quod by Bothe; [ali]quid Lindsay. Lindsay bracketed est to avoid scanning nece˘ sse. Mss. oportet esse transposed to esse oportet by editors. Mss. oportet esse transposed to esse oportet by editors. If we scan aequiu˘st with Lindsay or delete nos (tempting, since it is not required by the sense), habere would scan normally. Lindsays oboriunt is extremely unlikely (“unberechtigt” Petersmann 1973 ad loc.); orior conjugates actively only at Naevius Trag. 12 (adoriant). Agostiniani and Giannecchini (2002, 25 – 6), following Garca (1952; 1953), suggest instead of BB in dolores that oboriuntur scans o˘ bo˘ .ri7untur, comparing ori7undi at Lucretius R.N. 2.991; they claim this to be an example of a syllabification typical of a lower sociolect that Plautus used here for comic effect. (Such an explanation would not work well for the scansion in Lucretius.) But there is much less evidence for this type of scansion in Plautus than there are parallels for BB in polysyllables like dolores, and Agostiniani and Giannecchinis claims concerning different syllabifications in different sociolects, while intriguing, are in the end merely speculative and stipulative (but cf. n. 75 for one example that I find more attractive). The scansion of oboriuntur is also rejected by Ceccarelli 1988, 60. Emended to nega by editors. Esch (1897, 43 – 4) prefers to read proinde, but neither his arguments nor his rather casual dismissal of Charisius, who cited the line expressly as an example of the use of perinde in Plautus, are convincing. According to Priscian (3.67 Keil), this and other compounds of inde were accented on the antepenult. Lindsay brackets melius; the ms. reading does scan, if a bit awkwardly, and Lindsay is wrong to dismiss it out of hand.


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Trin. 725109 Egomet autem quom extemplo arcum [mihi] et pharetram et sagı˘ttas sumpsero, Trin. 983110 Properas an non properas abı˘re actutum ab his regionibus, In addition there are ten instances of the phrase uolu˘ptas mea, always line-final, from senarii and septenarii,111 plus one instance of uolu˘ptas tua which echoes uoluptas mea in the previous line (Cas. 453 – 4). As various authors have remarked,112 plausible special explanations are available for some of these words;113 but the number satisfactorily explained in this way remains very small. Aside from Philippus and fenestra (recall n. 80 above), perı˘nde and other (quadrisyllabic) forms in which the shortened syllable contains coda n may be partly due to transformation of the vowel-nasal sequence into a nasalized vowel, a known feature of Latin pronunciation deducible already from the orthographic suppression of nasals in syllable codas in early inscriptions.114 However, the result of the nasalization was probably a long nasalized vowel, so this would not in itself explain the shortening. Given the likelihood that shortening in uenustatem was due to resyllabification engendered by the position of the cluster before the main stress, it would be attractive to seek a similar explanation for the shortening in modestus, molestus, etc. This leads us back to the topic of phrasal 109 Bracketing of mihi seems reasonably secure to me. 110 Mss. abire emended to ire by editors. 111 Cas. 136, 453, Mil. 1346, Mos. 249, 294, Rud. 439, Truc. 426 (uoluntas mehiea mss.), 540, 546, 860. 112 E.g. Esch 1897 passim; Lindsay 1892, 342; Lindsay 1922, 45, 77; Drexler 1969a, 240; Allen 1973, 183; Devine and Stephens 1980, 155. 113 See the discussion in Bettini 1990, 358 ff. Fortson 1996a, 189 – 90 is not as complete and partly outdated. 114 Some scholars would put quadrı˘ngentı¯ here, but the shortening is a mirage; although the manuscripts read quadring8, the form in Plautuss day was simply quadrigentı¯. (The intrusive nasal is usually attributed to analogical spread from septingentı¯, but the immediately following quı¯ngentı¯ is a more immediate source: quadrigentı¯ quı¯ngentı¯ > quadringentı¯ quı¯ngentı¯. Or the form may have arisen purely by internal nasal spreading, as in the pronunciations uninted, ompen in certain varieties of American English.) The scansion trape˘ zita would not be exceptional if here represented [z] or [s]; the Hellenistic pronunciation of f was [z]. Lat. massa < l÷fa, however, would seem to indicate that intervocalic f was borrowed and pronounced as a geminate (unless the Romans pronounced it ma¯sa in the first instance, with later change to massa by the lı¯tera/littera rule). See Allen 1978, 46 and cf. Allen 1987, 46 (sic).

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stress-patterns. In the phrase simı˘llumae sunt, for example—a quadrisyllable, to be sure, but a word where the stressed syllable is shortened—it has long been claimed (e. g. Lindsay 1922, 52; more recently Soubiran 1988, 316) that the primary accent was thrown forward to the syllable -mae before the presumably unstressed monosyllabic verb.115 This explanation has also been proposed for mole˘ stae sunt at Mil. 69. The main problem with this approach is that sunt and uncontracted est have never independently been shown to form a single phonological word with the preceding adjective, which would automatically cause the reaccentuation of molstae, sim llumae to molestaé, simillumaé. It may have been the case that the clitics -que, -ne, and -ue caused the hosts stress to be thrown forward onto its last syllable—a topic I will return to later— but in the case of s-initial forms of sum this is counterindicated by scansions such as uisu sum Mer. 245, ludificatu sit Mos. 1124, which strongly suggest that the syllable preceding the copula was unstressed.116 As Soubiran himself notes (ibid. and cf. 1995, 88), molestus and simillimus are the only putative examples of iambic shortening in a polysyllable before sum “en face des innombrables cas o labr gement napparat pas.”117 It is nonetheless striking that most of the shortened trisyllables above are followed by a weakly stressed word or clitic:118 necesse est (2), ducentos et, negato esse, dedisti tu, dedisti eam, molesta est, sequestro mihi, cupita non, habete cum, molestae sunt, profecto ut, abibo tecum, senecta male, necauit isque, scelestae hae, amores perque,119 profecto ad, haruspex

115 Earlier, Lindsay (1892, 342 n. 1) objected that if the accent had been thrown forward in this way, there should at least have been secondary stress on the syllable that underwent shortening (sim llumaé-sunt). But a secondary stress, if one existed, might not have been sufficient to block BB, as he himself realized later (1922, 58), though still harboring doubts about this explanation. 116 Most of the examples were listed in Fortson 1996a, 203 – 4, but I no longer believe what I wrote about them then; see further Ch. 8, n. 5. 117 That consonant-initial forms of sum could form a clitic group with preceding words seems assured (cf. the historical origin of sum from (*)esum by cliticization-induced aphaeresis; see Ch. 6), but whether they united to form a single accentual domain is not so certain, nor can we say whether the contraction (aphaeresis) of vowel-initial forms makes it any more likely for the consonantinitial ones. 118 So already F. Skutsch (1896, 132 = 1914, 102) on four word-internal shortenings (praestigia˘tor Cist. 297, pollice˘ ri 455 [moved to 456 in Lindsay to avoid the shortening], dolo˘ res St. 165, and ama˘tori Truc. 46). 119 Per must have received at least some stress here, in order to be a suitable host for -que (assuming that destressing of per happened before cliticization; alternately,


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de, oportet esse (2), habere quam, dolores mi,120 negato esse, dedisti-n. These represent twenty-seven out of the forty-one examples, or just shy of two-thirds (65.9 %).121 These are, however, not all of a piece, since in ten of them the clitic stands in synaloephe with the preceding final syllable; applying the molestaé-sunt explanation would essentially involve claiming for these phrases that the clitic was stressed and the preceding full word unstressed (necess(e) st or necess() est), which seems unlikely. There is at least one other place in Plautus where shortening occurred in a normally stressed syllable of a word preceding a (potential) clitic. In Ch. 4, in our discussion of the violations of Meyers Law in the first measure of the senarius, we saw that words with heavy penult were prevented from filling the second foot of the first measure of the senarius unless followed by a monosyllabic clitic. I proposed that this reflected a desire on the poets part to avoid filling C positions, which are underlyingly light, with stressed heavy syllables, and that such a syllable was durationally somewhat reduced when the word was followed by a clitic. If all this is true, it is clearly another example of the same phenomenon that produced the scansion mole˘ stae sunt. (In the case of Meyers Law, though, I do not wish to claim that the penults were shortened so much that they could count as light.) Clitics and other unstressed particles are known from many languages to act as phonological “bridges”, and it is at least possible that BB in these forms is a reflection of such a process in Plautuss spoken Latin. (The data would of course have to be subjected to a stricter statistical analysis than I can undertake here, to insure that the rate is significantly higher than the average frequency of clitics and particles after full-content words.) But this line of explanation cannot apply without postulating completely ad hoc accent shifts, and may run into difficulties in any case with molestae sunt in Mil. 69, which is simultaneously a full clause. -que was positioned first, followed by destressing of the whole sequence and incorporation of it into the prosodic domain of the following word, cf. Ch. 8, n. 57). 120 Agostiniani and Giannecchini (2002, 24) claim that mi here is proclitic, not enclitic, and that therefore one cannot explain the (putative; recall n. 105) shortening in dolores as due to mi. I do not know what evidence they have in mind as support for this claim. That mi here is enclitic was assumed at least as far back as F. Skutsch (above, n. 118) and is defended in Petersmann ad loc. 121 I do not know what the significance is of the fact that in all but five of these lines, it is a bacchiac sequence that is shortened, rather than an amphibrachic ([ – [ ; I consider the last syllable to be the last syllable of the shortened word when not elided, else the first syllable of the following word).

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I confess I do not know what the explanation for these scansions is, but if we are to find it, we must include most or all the data assembled above and not immediately jump to meddle with the word-order in the text out of discomfort with the scansion. It is clear from the undisputed example of uoluptas (mea), which I will account for in the next chapter, that shortening of the penult of a trisyllable was perfectly possible under the right conditions, meaning we should exhaust all possible avenues of explanation for the remaining forms before emending them. The fact that the fixed phrase uoluptas (mea) always scans with shortening while molestae (sunt) and its ilk only sometimes do is not evidence that the latter type is not linguistically real. Plautus could avail himself of more than one pronunciation of such words or phrases as he saw fit, and just because BB was a characteristic of colloquial speech does not mean that colloquial speech was always characterized by BB, or that Plautus had to (or even could) use all available colloquial features all the time when mirroring colloquial language in his verse. Although the relation between possible phrasal-stress patterns and the BB in these polysyllables remains inconclusive, there are other phrases for which the connection is much clearer. It is to these cases that we turn in the next chapter.

Chapter Eight Breuis Breuians II BB in full-content lexemes: the noun data We established in the previous chapter that a precondition for BB was deaccentuation, and based this conclusion especially on the occurrence of BB in function words. But BB can affect full-content lexemes as well, a category that I did not investigate systematically in Fortson 1996a and only touched on incidentally in the previous chapter (with regard to polysyllables and BB in sequences of monosyllable plus longer word); most of this chapter is devoted to remedying that gap. Based on the results of Ch. 7, it stands to reason that full-content lexemes that exhibit BB do so because they were pronounced with a lesser degree of tonicity than surrounding material. The source of this lower tonicity that I will propose is lesser pragmatic salience, leading to prosodic subordination similar to that already seen in cases like ad meam uxo˘ rem. Whereas in small prosodic domains like clitic groups the reason for prosodic subordination of the clitic is lexical (the clitic enters the derivation as a stressless element), the stress contour of phrases consisting of two or more full-content words often reflects discourse and pragmatic factors, that is, it represents how the flow of information is phonetically articulated. Though it is not a hard and fast rule in every language, old (given), backgrounded, or otherwise less salient information (topic or theme) tends to be prosodically subordinate to new, contrasted or otherwise more salient information (comment or rheme). In common with many other languages and as we briefly saw in Ch. 5, old information in Latin is typically expressed first and new information delayed until later in a sentence or within a phrase; but, as is well known, new information can also be syntactically highlighted by fronting at the local (phrasal) level or at the level of the full clause or sentence, and many variations in word-order are possible to express subtle differences in emphasis, contrast, and empathy (the speakers emotional distance from or identification with what is being talked about). I have collected well over one hundred examples. The interrelationship between pragmatic focus, syntactic structure, and phonological representation is very complex and the subject of much ongoing language-

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Chapter Eight: Breuis Breuians II

specific and typological research. Several different kinds of focus and emphasis have been identified in the literature, not all of them having identical phonetic correlates. In the investigation that follows, I can only attempt a fairly schematic presentation of the facts; a more fine-grained analysis that takes different kinds of focus into account must be left to another study. I also cannot treat all examples of BB in full-content lexemes here, but will limit myself to BB in iambic nouns in the senarii and septenarii of diuerbia. In the more standard word-orders in Latin, old or less salient information precedes new or more salient information; given that prosodic subordination could trigger BB, we would predict that shortened nouns typically precede an emphasized or otherwise more salient word. Most of the data indeed bear out this prediction. Let us begin with the examples (cited in n. 37 of the previous chapter) of BB in substantival bonus and malus: Am. 721 Cas. 825 Rud. 656 St. 99 Truc. 429

Verum tu malu˘m magnum habebis … Malo˘ maxumo suo hercle ilico … At malo˘ cum magno suo fecit hercle. Ite istinc foras, Bona˘s ut aequomst facere facitis. Sic facito. Quidquid attulerit, bonı˘ consulas.

The first three examples contain the idiom malum magnum, roughly nasty punishment, literally a big bad thing. Taking into account Devine and Stephenss examination of the placement of magnus in Plautuss contemporary Cato (2006, 471 – 2), where magnus is locally focused1 and follows its head noun, which is a topic, we can assume that in malum magnum, malo maxumo suo, etc., the noun malum was a topic and magnum was focused; as the focused element, it received the main phrasal stress. The same is likely true of malo cum magno suo at Rud. 656, which is a transformation of cum magno malo suo with the topic head noun fronted around the preposition.2 The situation is similar at St. 99 (“You act as it is proper for good [wives] to act”), where aequomst bears the focus, bonas 1

2

The importance of local focus or (lack of) givenness (i. e. givenness relative to a sister) for the assignment of phrasal stress has been recently emphasized (for English) in Wagner 2007. This word-order is especially interesting given that, as we saw in Ch. 5 (and cf. Devine and Stephens 2006, 604), it is far commoner for the modifier rather than the head noun to be fronted in a magna cum laude construction.


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has been topicalized in front of the conjunction,3 and a phrasal stress pattern bonas-ut-a’equomst appears to be reflected. Finally, boni consulas in the last verse is a fixed idiom, attested only here in Plautus but also several times in other authors (Tovar 1968, 336 – 7); the BB is evidence that the phrasal stress was on cnsulas. Let us now see if these claims can be extended to the other cases of BB in nouns; the material is taken from the lists in Drexler 1969a, 118 – 63 and 182, with modifications.4 In the material to follow, I include words ˘ s, where shortening could indicate loss of the -s; although ending in -V s-loss also occurred in non-iambic words,5 there is no reason to separate out the cases of s-loss in iambic words from regular BB.6 To avoid typographical confusion, however, I use a breve in all highlighted cases (so Iouı˘s instead of Ioui). For convenience I will group the first set of examples according to a syntactic criterion, nouns followed directly by a modifier:7

3 4

5

6 7

The same analysis was forwarded for Catos instrumenti ne magni siet (Agr. 1.5) by Devine and Stephens (2006, 471). I omit adverbially used nouns like domi and foras, which Drexler puts in separate lists, as well as proper names except for oblique cases of Iuppiter. I only include pater when it scans pyrrhically before consonants; before vowels this is the normal scansion and thus cannot reliably be attributed to synchronic BB (pate¯r is very rare, cf. Ch. 2, n. 11). Iambic nouns with internal vowel-vowel sequences like deus and dies have not been included because reduced scansions could reflect synizesis rather than BB (cf. Ch. 3). I have also omitted the verses considered uncertain by Drexler except Cist. 594, Mil. 1190, 1273, Ps. 544a, and Ps. 1230, which appear to me to be unproblematic. I omit Bac. 480 because the crux so soon after the BB makes it difficult to analyze; Cur. 110, where the BB is part of an unassured emendation, Most. 241 (uncertain emendation), St. 53 (from a passage whose authenticity is controversial), and St. 555 (corrupt). Drexler has missed some, but presumably not many, cases. He omits opus and nom. sg. erus, for both of which see below. I included a section on this phenomenon in Fortson 1996a, 201 ff., but I have since abandoned the claims made there (cf. the criticism in Gerschner 2002, 58). I now believe that the instances of unambiguous s-loss in non-iambic words in Plautus do not allow us to draw any useful conclusions about the prosodic or syntactic environments in which such loss was licensed. Thus the shortening seen in such words as nimis, satis, potis, etc. before consonant patterns exactly with BB, as these words are typically unstressed particles. I omit the textually uncertain Ps. 618 (meo eri A, ero meo P). On the phrase eru˘s meus see the separate section below.

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Am. 1048 Am. 410

Nam ego uos nouisse credo iam ut sit pate˘ r meus, Quid, domu˘m uostram? :: ta enim uero. :: Quin quae dixisti modo Am. 1146 Nunc, spectatores, Iouı˘s summi caussa clare plaudite. Cap. 116 Liber captiuos auı˘s ferae consimilis est: Cap. 666 confidentem esse, suom apud eru˘m potissumum. Cas. 762 senı˘ nostro et nostro Olympioni uilico. Cist. 513 itaque me Iuno regina et Iouı˘s supremi filia Ep. 438 sene˘ x hic ubi habitat Periphanes Platenius. Men. 1128 auo˘ s noster mutauit: quod tibi nomen est, fecit mihi. Mil. 325 Tum mihi sunt manu˘s inquinatae. :: Quidum? :: Quia ludo luto. Mil. 1369 dicant te mendacem nec uerum esse, fide˘ nulla esse te, Mos. 948 Quo homin? :: Ero˘ nostro. Quaeso, quotiens dicendumst tibi? Per. 243 fide˘ data credamus. :: Noui: omnes sunt lenae leuifidae, Per. 591 Tace, tace. Nimi tu quidem hercle homo˘ stultus es pueriliter. Poen. 609a Tace. :: Quid est? :: Fore˘ s hae fecerunt magnum flagitium modo. Poen. 11029 manu˘ liberali caussa ambas adseras auı˘ sinist<e>ra, auspicio liquido atque ex sententia; Ps. 76210 St. 98 uiro˘ s nostros, quibus tu uoluisti esse nos mtres familias. Truc. 80011 Quid eo puero tua era fecit? :: Eraè meae extemplo dedit. These pattern with the malum magnum type seen above: usually the adjective is the non-given (new), contrastive, or otherwise salient piece of information. Thus at Cap. 116 “A free captive is like a wild bird,”12 ferae restricts the class of birds to which a captive is being compared and is the most salient piece of information in its phrase. Possessive pro8 Transposed to sit meus pater by Bothe and to meus sit pater by Drexler (1969a, 141). BB in the last B would violate Jachmanns Law, but the validity of this law is questionable (see Ch. 7, n. 12). See also O. Skutsch 1934, 64 – 5. 9 Hiatus after caussa. 10 Hiatus after sinist<e>ra. 11 Reading fecit with Leo, against Lindsay and the mss.; see Drexler 1932, 1:49 and 61 n. 2. 12 Better as an equivalent of the Latin would be “like a bird that is wild,” for there the emphasis is also on wild, as I claim for Latin.


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nominal adjectives do this inherently (my master, etc.: Am. 104, 410,13 Cas. 762, Men. 1128, Mos. 948, St. 98, Truc. 800; at Cap. 666 the possessive comes first because potissimum emphasizes the whole concept suom seruom at/with his very own master). At Mil. 325, there is no implied contrast between manus and some other body-part, i. e. there is no salient alternative to hands; the main point is that the hands have become sullied. Slightly different are Am. 1146 and Cist. 513: here there is no question of multiple different Joves; rather, summi and supremi are simply descriptive add-ons. In all these cases, I would submit that the prosody of the NP was such as to deemphasize the noun, allowing it to sit in enough of an acoustic dip to trigger BB. (At Ep. 438, the phrase senex hic is continued with the appositional Periphanes Platenius, where one would suppose the name received the greatest prominence in the sentence and senex hic is prosodically subordinate.) A particularly interesting case is Truc. 800. In the lines leading up to this verse, the old man Callicles is interviewing a slave-woman about what happened to his grandson after birth; she responds (799), Ad meam eram detuli, “I fetched him to my mistress.” This generates his question in 800, “And what did your mistress do with him?”, to which she responds, “Gave him to my mistress, right off, sir.” This of course confuses Callicles, who barks, Quoi, malum, erae? “What mistress, curse you?” The slavewoman in fact has two mistresses, one the referent of meam eram in 799 and the other the referent of erae meae in 800. From her point of view, erae is not a presupposed topic, but for the confusion to be as effective as possible, it must sound like one—hence Plautus has her pronounce the word with BB. Now in the discussion above I have assumed that it is possible for posthead modifiers to be emphatic or contrastive. This may appear to fly in the face of standard descriptions of Latin syntax whereby Noun– Adjective is claimed to be the unmarked order of Latin adjective phrases. In fact, the syntax of adjective phrases is far more complicated than that. For example, certain adjectives occur before their heads as a rule, whether they are emphatic or not, and others after; there is considerable variety from author to author, style to style, and period to period; and any adjective (or noun) could be moved depending on pragmatic and other factors, not all of which are clearly understood or even adequately de13 So also Lindsay 1922, 54; note additionally the context: “… or why dont I go into our house? :: What do you mean, your house?”

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scribed.14 Even if posthead modifiers were typically noncontrastive in Latin, that does not preclude the nuclear stress of a Noun–Adjective phrase falling on the adjective. I am furthermore not claiming that all the adjectives in the verses above were emphasized or focused, merely that the nouns were not. These matters become especially tricky where the modifier was a possessive pronominal adjective. I discuss this matter, especially as it relates to the problematic phrase erus meus, and attendant problems in more detail in a separate section. Returning to the remaining examples of BB in nouns, the following cases are like the ones discussed above except the noun has been separated from its modifier in hyperbaton, either by a single clitic, weakly stressed element, or verb: Bac. 234 Cap. 123 Cap. 316 Mil. 328

Sed forı˘s concrepuit nostra: quinam exit foras? Auı˘s me ferae consimilem faciam, ut praedicas. Quam tu filium tuom tam pate˘ r me meus desiderat. Sed fore˘ s concrepuerunt nostrae. :: At ego ilico opseruo fores; 15 Mil. 1273 postquam te aspexit. :: Virı˘ quoque armti idem istuc faciunt, Mos. 1062 Sed quid hoc st quod forı˘s concrepuit proxuma uicinia? Worthy of comment is Cap. 316, where me might in fact have been more strongly stressed, as it stands in contrast to filium tuom; pater me already presupposes meus, which therefore may not have received the main contrastive stress (“Just as you are longing for your son, my father is longing for me”). In one further line, the NP is distracted by a string of clitics and a semantically uninteresting verb: Aul. 812

eru˘mne ego aspicio meum? :: Videon ego hunc seruom meum?

The shortening in foris concrepuit/fores concrepuerunt at Bac. 234, Mil. 328 and Mos. 1062 is also seen in two other lines, with slight variation:

14 See now especially Ch. 5 of Devine and Stephens 2006. 15 Reading quoque a˘rmati.


Aul. 665 Mil. 154

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Attat, forı˘s crepuit. Senex eccum aurum ecfert foras. Sed forı˘s concrepuit hinc a uicino sene;

In both cases, foris is the topic. Doors are a kind of permanent topic in Plautine comedy in that they are crucial stage props that are always explicitly mentioned when they make a sound from being opened or knocked on, introducing characters onto the stage and moving the plot along. They are thus a part of the shared background information between the actors and the audience. Two discontinuous Noun–Adjective phrases remain that are a bit more challenging; they both come from the same passage in the Trinummus (674 ff.), which I quote here in full: Sed te moneo hoc etiam atque etiam ut reputes quid facere expetas. 675 Si istuc, ut conare, facis incendio16 tuom incendes genus; tum igitur tibi aquai erit cupido genu˘s qui restinguas tuom, atque si eris nactus, proinde ut corde amantes sunt cati, ne scintillam quidem relinques genu˘s qui congliscat tuom. “But I warn you again and again, consider what youre bent on doing. If you carry through that plan of yours, youll make one big bonfire of your family; and then youll be yammering for water to extinguish that family. And if you do get hold of some—displaying the canniness common in lovers— you wont leave so much as a spark to illumify the family name.” (tr. Nixon, line-divisions added) Part of the problem here is figuring out how tuom genus/genus tuom was phrased in each of its three occurrences. At 675, genus is a more important piece of new information than tuom, as the speaker (Lysiteles) avers that with a bonfire (incendio, if the emendation is correct) will be burned (incendes, less important since predictable from incendio, and perhaps for that reason raised into second-to-last position; cf. Ch. 3, nn. 64 and 77) a family (a piece of information at least as important as incendio and balancing it at the other edge of the clause) that happens to be yours (tuom; it limits genus but does not bear any focus—that family of yours). In the next line, genus is old information and has been topicalized out of the adverbial clause and around the relative adverb qui. The same is true 16 So Leo, following Nitzsch; Lindsay prints the ms. reading indicium, with daggers.

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in 678. The BB of genus in these last two cases presumably means, again, that genus was less prosodically salient than the following material with which it was phrased. The following example does not strictly belong here, because the adjective is a secondary prediction rather than an attribute adjective, but it illustrates the same basic phenomenon. Liberum is the most salient piece of information (“Its a free man Ill make you” Nixon): Mer. 152 – 3 … Liberum / capu˘t tibi faciam * paucos mensis. :: Palpo percutis. If these preliminary conclusions are warranted, then the prosody of phrases consisting of (contextually backgrounded) noun plus (focused/ contrastive) adjective was one of rising emphasis; the subordination of the noun obtained even when the phrase was rendered discontinuous, though much more data would have to be examined to see if this was always the case. The data adduced so far were grouped according to a syntactic feature for convenience; but as we saw in the previous chapter, syntactic “closeness” is not a precondition for BB. In the following lines, the nouns undergoing BB are in a variety of syntactic configurations: nunc proferatur Ioue˘ m facere histrioniam; aue˘ s adsuescunt: necesse est facere sumptum qui quaerit lucrum; As. 435 neque eo esse seruom in aedibus erı˘ qui sit pluris quam illest. As. 484 – 517 Quid, uerbero? Ain tu, furcifer? Eru˘m nosmet fugitare censes? As. 701 Perii hercle. Si uerum quidem et decorum eru˘m uehere seruom, Aul. 294 – 5 … Quid? Hic non poterat de suo / sene˘ x opsonari filiai nuptiis? Aul. 548 Tam hoc scit me habere quam egomet. Anu˘s fecit palam. Aul. 665 Attat, fori crepuit. Sene˘ x eccum aurum ecfert foras. Am. 90 As. 217

17 Strongly doubted by Lindsay ad loc., but considerations of phrasal stress make it appear quite possible to me (see below).


Aul. 780 Bac. 532 Bac. 1105 Cist. 43 Cist. 69 Cist. 594 Cur. 24418 Men. 44 Mer. 933 Mil. 362 Mil. 410 Mil. 985 Mos. 378 Mos. 952 Ps. 544a19 Rud. 23 Rud. 35 Rud. 328 Trin. 868

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mater est Eunomia. :: Noui genu˘s. Nunc quid uis? Id uolo Sed ueniam mi quam grauate pate˘ r dedit de Chrysalo! Hicquidemst pate˘ r Mnesilochi. :: Eugae, socium aerumnae et mei mali uideo. Haec quidem ecastor cottidie uiro˘ nubit, nupsitque hodie, Namque ecastor Amo˘ r et melle et felle est fecundissumus; Ego ad anu˘m recurro rusum. :: Lampadio, obsecro, Lie˘ n dierectust. :: Ambula, id lieni ptumumst. et ipsus eodem est auo˘ s uocatus nomine in Cyprum recta, quandoquidem pate˘ r mihi exsilium parat? erı˘ concubinast haec quidem! :: Mihi quoque pol ita uidetur. Sed fore˘ s uicini proxumi crepuerunt. Conticiscam. Venus me amat. :: St tace! Aperiuntur fore˘ s, concede huc clanculum. Quid ego agam? Pate˘ r iam hic me offendet miserum adueniens ebrium, Sene˘ x hic elleborosust certe. rras peruorse, pater. quasi in libro˘ quom scribuntur calamo litterae, Ioue˘ m se placare posse donis, hostiis: sene˘ x, qui huc Athenis exsul uenit, hau malus; Nunc quid mi meliust quam ilico hic opperiar eru˘m dum ueniat? Fore˘ s pultabo. :: Ad nostras aedis hicquidem habet rectam uiam.

For reasons of space I must keep my comments selective; for the lines I do not comment on, the reader is referred to the relevant passages to see the context for him- or herself. In each case the noun represents old or backgrounded information or is the topic of the sentence. In the first passage, Jupiter is already the subject of discussion, which concerns his ap-

18 With synizesis of lieni. 19 Bracketed by Leo.

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pearing on stage during a play.20 The line preceding As. 217 introduced an extended fowling metaphor; the birds are the topic and adsuescunt is the comment. At Aul. 780—a rare instance of BB at sentence-end—the family (genus) is the topic; that the speaker has heard of them is the new piece of information. If my interpretation is correct, note that this sentence indicates that BB could apply sentence-finally under the right conditions. At Bac. 1105, although the father of Mnesilochus just arrived on the scene, the emphasis within the NP pater Mnesilochi is on the genitive that limits whose father is being referred to. At Cist. 594 (“Ill run back to the old woman”), the old woman is not being introduced here for the first time; the foregrounded information is that the speaker is running back to her. The phrase uiro nubit at Cist. 43 repeats uiro dare nuptum in the preceding line; marrying a man is already a topic of the discourse, and uiro is also the most predictable (least salient) word. In Men. 44, the grandfather is a topic introduced earlier in the Prologue, and this line is a parenthetical addition mentioning his name (“and that grandfather was called by the very same name”). At Mos. 952, the whole phrase senex hic is the prosodically reduced topic (cf. on Ep. 438 above) and elleborosust the comment. Rud. 35 is part of the Prologue; this line is a bit of extra descriptive material in apposition to Daemones two lines earlier, where that character is introduced, and senex is not the primary focus of the sentence and could have been destressed. The noun opus frequently shortens in variations of the idiomatic phrase opus est there is a need; I know of the following examples from senarii and trochaic septenarii: Am. 791 Opu˘s mi est istuc exquisito. :: Iuppiter, pro Iuppiter! Cap. 162 – 4 opu˘s Panicis est, opu˘s Placentinis quoque; opu˘s Turdetanis, opust Ficedulensibus; iam maritumi omnes milites opu˘s sunt tibi. 20 I thus differ from Lindsay (1922, 54), who says Iouem received the emphasis. Lindsays approach to BB, especially as illustrated ib. 52 – 5, is curious: on the one hand, he often attributes it to destressing (especially when a word, in his opinion, is closely connected prosodically to a more heavily stressed word), but on the other hand he sometimes attributes it to emphasis, especially when the word is prosodically isolated. I cannot see how BB could be caused by (or reflect) both lack of stress and heavy stress, unless BB was a kind of all-purpose optional way of pronouncing iambic words regardless of prosodic context. The evidence as we have been examining it in this and the previous chapter speaks strongly against such a possibility, however.


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Cap. 291 Cap. 553 Cur. 252 Ep. 288

ad rem diuinam quibus est opu˘s, Samiis uasis utitur, et eum morbum mihi esse, ut qui me opu˘s sit insputarier? quae opu˘s sunt, parasito ut sit paratum prandium nam te nolo neque opu˘s factost. :: Quid iam? :: Ne te censeat Poen. 1008 Roga nfflmquid opu˘s sit. :: Tu qui sonam non habes, Ps. 740 Quid, si opu˘s sit ut dulce promat indidem, ecquid habet? :: Rogas? St. 573 namque edepol aliud quidem illi quid amica opu˘s sit nescio: Trin. 584 De dote ut uideat quid opu˘s sit facto. :: I modo. Trin. 887 Opu˘s factost uiatico ad tuom nomen, ut tu praedicas. Truc. 903 opu˘s nutrici, lact ut habeat, ueteris uini largiter Truc. 907 numquam hoc uno die ecficiatur opu˘s quin opu˘s semper siet; The reason for the common shortening of opus is not its frequency, but its grammaticalization as part of a necessitative, which demoted the noun from being a full-stressed lexeme to one that tended to sit in an acoustic trough. In the first Captiui passage, for example, the words that are of most interest are the Panici, Placentini, and other (punning) names of the peoples needed, and it is surely these that carried the greatest prosodic prominence. In all cases either the person/thing required or the relevant form of esse immediately follows opus. What this says about the prosodic status of esse in these cases is unclear, but given the propensity of opus est to contract to opust, probably the whole phrase was destressed relative to surrounding material. Note that (as with all the other iambic nouns too) the fully iambic form opus was always available instead, just like the full forms have to, have got to are available instead of contracted hafta, (ve/ s) gotta in English. (Note that in its fuller, if still somewhat generic, meaning work, job, opus is only shortened once, in a passage treated further below.) In the following five examples, the shortened word is a parenthetical vocative (rather than a vocative used to get someones attention), and as such occupies an acoustic dip, leading to the shortening (cf. Drexler 1969a, 141 on Trin. 31621):

21 Though he thinks the shortening in Trin. 361 (sic) to be “sehr auffllig,” probably because it occurs before a major pause; but cf. on Aul. 780 above.

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Poen. 297 Sati nunc lepide ornatam credo, soro˘ r, te tibi uiderier: Poen. … Salue, insperate nobis / pate˘ r, te complecti nos 1259 – 60 sin. … St. 68 Quid agimus, soro˘ r, si offirmabit pater aduorsum nos? :: Pati Trin. 316 neu tibi aegritudinem, pate˘ r, parerem, parsi sedulo: Trin. 361 Ne opprobra, pate˘ r; multa eueniunt homini quae uolt, quae neuolt. In at least four lines the noun homo is shortened in the semantically colorless meaning guy, fellow, one: Quis me Athenis nunc magi quisquam est homo˘ quoi di sint propitii? Poen. 737 Homo˘ furti sese astringet— :: Hau dubium id quidemst. Trin. 765 Homo˘ conducatur aliquis iam, quantum potest, Trin. 848 – 9 ut hasce epistulas / dicam ab eo homine me accepisse quem ego qui sit homo˘ nescio Aul. 810

In the following pair of lines, we see shortening in the idiomatic term of abuse scelus uiri; presumably uiri bore the main phrasal stress. In the first passage, the phrase is additionally a vocative pendant: Cur. 61422 Mil. 1434

me reposcis? :: Quam ab lenone bduxti hodie, scelu˘s uiri. Verba mihi data esse uideo. Scelu˘s uiri Palaestrio,

Somewhat similar are the following two cases. In the first, manum da is a phrasal verb of sorts, while in the second we are dealing with the bland word opus (job) where mea fiducia is new information and opus old (“I was relying on myself when I contracted for this job” Nixon): Bac. 87 Bac. 752

Manu˘m da et sequere. :: Aha, minime. :: Quid ita? :: Quia istoc inlecebrosius Mea fiducia opu˘s conduxi et meo periclo rem gero.

22 If scanned without hiatus after lenone and without BB, Luchss Law is violated; cf. Mil. 1434 and Trin. 621 below.


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In the following line, the phrase homo sum was apparently subordinated to the surrounding tam ego … quam tu, which are the contrasting elements (“Im as much of a man as you are”): As. 490

Tam ego homo˘ sum quam tu. :: Scilicet. Ita res est. :: Sequere hac ergo.

So much for the relatively clear cases; as always, a residue remains that is more difficult. In the following four passages, the shortened noun occurs in a list: si ancillam seu seruom siue uxorem siue adulterum Am. 1049 – 5023 seu patrem siue auo˘ m uidebo, ptruncabo in aedibus. As. 655 – 6 custos erilis, decu˘s popli, thensaurus copiarum, salus interioris corporis amorisque imperator. Mil. 373 ibi mei maires sunt siti, pater, auo˘ s, proauos, abauos. Per. 57 pater, auo˘ s, proauos, abauos, atauos, tritauos These appear to be additional examples of an exceptional scansion inside a list (cf. Ch. 5, n. 60), but what that really means about the shortening and the way in which that reflects the delivery of such lines is not clear, and whether there is any significance to the fact that in three of the four passages the shortened noun is a form of auos. Most problematic of all are the following verses, where the rhythmic contours cannot be determined24 or where the shortened noun is new or contrasted information and thus prosodic reduction is difficult to motivate: Am. 19 As. 2–325

Iouı˘s iusso uenio: nomen Mercuriost mihi: quae quidem mihi atque uobis res uortat bene / gregı˘que huic et dominis atque conductoribus.

23 Hiatus after uidebo; it is possible also to read patrem with shortening instead of auom. Leo brackets these verses, though I will treat them as genuine. 24 That is, on independent grounds. Given all the evidence we have mustered earlier in this chapter that BB occurred in acoustic dips, it would be legitimate to hypothesize that in these verses the word undergoing BB was also in an acoustic dip, but I would prefer that that claim could be bolstered by other arguments for these particular lines. 25 For a possible alternate scansion without BB, see below, pp. 250 ff.

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asini me mordicibus scindant, boue˘ s incursent cornibus. Simulato me amare. :: Vtrum go istuc ioco˘ n adsimulem an serio? Bac. 403 – 4 … Sed eccos uideo incedere / patre˘ m sodalis et magistrum. … Cas. 35 Sene˘ x hic maritus habitat; ei est filius. Cas. 76426 sene˘ x in culina clamat, hortatur coquos: Cur. 17 caruitne febrı˘s te heri uel nudiustertius Cur. … Ille ebibit, / capu˘t deponit, condormiscit. … 359 – 60 Ep. 234 Canı˘ quoque etiam ademptumst nomen. :: Qui? :: Vocant Laconicum. Men. 94127 At ego te sacram coronam surrupuisse Iouı˘s <scio>, Mer. 208 – 9 … post autem mihi / scelu˘s uidetur me parenti proloqui mendacium. Mil. 1190 ut eat, ut properet, ne sit matri moraè. :: Multimodis sapis. Mil. 1191 Ego illi dicam, ut me adiutorem, qui onu˘s feram ad portum, roget. Per. 192 Scelu˘s tu pueri es atque ob istanc rem ego aliqui te peculiabo. Poen. 890 Sed hoc tu tecum tacitum habeto. :: Fide˘ non melius creditur. Ps. 812 boue˘ s qui conuiuas faciunt herbasque oggerunt, Ps. 860 manu˘m si protollet, pariter proferto manum: Rud. 50628 Scelu˘s te et sceleste parta quae uexit bona. Rud. 685 – 6 … miserae quom uenit in mentem / mihi mortis, metu˘s membra occupat. … Rud. 1361 Tuone est? :: Rogitas? Si quidem hercle Iouı˘s fuit, meus est tamen. St. 563 Sene˘ x quidem uoluit, si posset, indipisci de cibo; Aul. 234 Bac. 75

26 Senex is the topic, and mentioned two lines earlier; the reason I am not putting it with the topicalized cases is that its clause is part of a scene-setting passage where each item is really a piece of new information. I am thus not sure that we would expect the word to be destressed. 27 The restoration of scio at the end of the line is certain; the next three lines have parallel structure and all end with scio as well. O. Skutsch (1934, 66) prefers to read Ioui s, since the person from whom something is taken is normally in the dative in Plautus. 28 Also possible with BB in scele˘ ste instead.


St. 683 Trin. 374 Truc. 901

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Agite ite foras: ferte pompam. Cado˘ te praeficio, Stiche. Soro˘ r illi est adulta uirgo grandis: eam cupio, pater, Manu˘s uetat priu quam penes sese habeat quicquam credere.

I have included some lines here that are borderline cases: one can imagine manum at Ps. 860 being “vorwrtsweisend” to the following si protollet (if he offers you his hand); the same, mutatis mutandis, applies to Bac. 404 (phrasal stress on magistrum?) and Mil. 1191. But other arguments might lead to the opposite conclusion: manum might have been fronted for emphasis, for example. Boues incursent cornibus (Aul. 234), caput deponit (Cur. 359 – 60), and metus membra occupat (Rud. 686) are phrases in asyndeton, but the prosodic significance of that fact is obscure. Boues at Ps. 812 is the object complement in a double-accusative construction; the prosodic articulation of such syntagms has never been investigated. Also of unclear relevance at this point is the fact that twelve, or slightly under half, of the shortened nouns above are followed by a monosyllabic or disyllabic function word. Plain and simply, the reason for BB in these lines is not clear. Ideally an explanation can be found without sweeping them under the rug of poetic license. At least it is clear from the foregoing that none of these forms is a pure invention on Plautuss part, created simply to fit the meter; at most, “poetic license” here would mean the extension of the use of an already-existing variant in an environment in which it normally did not occur, perhaps for metrical convenience, perhaps for humorous effect.29 Important to keep in mind, however, is that these problematic instances are strongly in the minority, representing between a fifth and a quarter (23.4 %) of the total (twentynine, including the four examples of BB in lists, out of 124). It is unlikely that they vitiate the essential correctness of our conclusions about BB in nouns (and hopefully all full-content lexemes). One feature of this last data set deserves a final comment. Counting conservatively, in at least eight cases (Am. 19, Cas. 35, 764, Cur. 360, Rud. 686, 1361, St. 563, Truc. 901) the word-order of the clause in which the shortened word occurs is neutral. In the modern Romance languages, as a rule the last full lexical item in an intonational phrase receives the 29 This might be true of morae at Mil. 1190, which is sentence-final before changeof-speaker—a highly anomalous position for a full-lexical item to show BB. A useful discussion distinguishing the different phenomena subsumed under the term “poetic license” is Hale 1999, 144 – 6.

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phrases nuclear (main) stress in neutral sentences having broad-scope focus (Zubizarreta 1998; Winkler and Gçbbel 2002, 1186 – 7; Hualde 2003; Gçbbel 2003). If their ancestor Latin behaved similarly, this would mean that earlier items in a sentence received, on average, less prosodic prominence than later items. I imagine this was basically true of Latin, though we must remember that the prosodic flow of the prevailingly SVO word-order of the Romance languages cannot be automatically back-projected onto the SOV order of Latin, particularly since, as we have previously seen and will discuss in the next chapter, verbs could be less prosodically prominent than neighboring material. Be that as it may, the lower prosodic prominence of words early in a clause could be reflected, in a general way, in at least some of the problematic sentences above.30 To round out this discussion we shall treat the phrase erus meus my master and variants, which normally scans with BB of the noun. The special problems that attend this phrase will also necessitate an examination of the pragmatics of NPs containing possessive pronominal adjectives. These are the subjects of the next section. Eru(s) meus and meus erus revisited Drexler (1932, 1:68 – 78) forwarded the following account of the two word-orders meus erus and erus meus (and variants with other possessives). The former he claimed was the neutral order, used “[w]enn ein Sklave von seinem Herrn redet als von einer Person, die in seinem Bewußtsein mit Selbsverstndlichkeit gegenwrtig ist” (68). The reverse order erus meus occurs “wenn der Begriff erus neu ins Bewußtsein

30 In this whole subchapter, I have been assuming that the permutations in Latin word-order for indicating focus, contrast, and so forth were coupled with phonetic emphasis. It is true that in some languages (as in the Romance languages just discussed), the focused element does not necessarily receive the main stress in its phrase or clause. If this was true of Latin, the presence of BB in the twenty-nine exceptional cases above (aside from Mil. 1190) would not be problematic after all: the nuclear stress would have fallen at the end of the clause, and any preceding words would have had relatively less emphasis, regardless of their pragmatic salience (which was shown purely by syntactic means). However, I believe that this explanation is unsatisfying. For one, it predicts that essentially any iambic word or sequence that is not clause-final could undergo shortening no matter what the circumstances; but the various limitations on BB that we have seen make that unlikely. Cf. n. 20 above.


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tritt” (69) or is introduced as a new person (72) or when erus is contrasted with another person (70). If this analysis is correct, it suggests that the ordering of noun and possessive modifier depends not (or not solely) on the pragmatic status of each of these words relative to each other, but on the pragmatic status of the whole phrase relative to other constituents in the sentence. General understanding of the factors influencing the order of heads and their modifiers would not lead one to expect such a result, however. Two standard accounts of this topic, K hner and Stegmann 1955, 2:608 – 9 and Szantyr 1972, 408, agree that possessive modifiers typically come after their heads except when some special emphasis31 or contrast is placed on the modifier, in which case it precedes its head. K hner and Stegmann note that there are plenty of exceptions to this, some of them categorizable, such as the fact that an unemphatic possessive tends to precede kinship terms, especially in vocatives; “[a]ber auch sonst wird das Possessiv nicht selten ohne besondere Betonung vorangestellt, manchmal selbst da, wo es gerade zu entbehrlich wre” (609). As a rule, Latin does not require the use of personal pronouns or possessive pronominal adjectives to as great an extent as a language like English, meaning that the use of such a form is already somewhat marked; hence we regularly see possessive-initial order in phrases like mea sententia, mea causa, suo nomine, and so forth, because of the inherent contrast (K hner and Stegmann 1:595 – 6). When a possessive is used for disambiguation, it typically appears after the head (pater meus). In colloquial speech, however, personal pronouns and their possessive adjectives were considerably more common, so in Plautuss dialogue meters we must reckon with more unemphatic instances than in the Classical prose on which the standard grammars have based their descriptions, not to mention the possibility of diachronic change between Plautuss day and later.32 The traditional description makes contradictory predictions: on the one hand, it predicts that meus erus would be the neutral order if erus is a quasi-kinship term; on the other it predicts that erus meus would be the neutral order if meus is simply being used for disambiguation. 31 For convenience, in this discussion I will continue to use the terms emphasis and emphatic, in spite of their well-known inadequacy in numerous individual cases. 32 Devine and Stephens (2006, Ch. 5 passim) note many word-order phenomena in NPs that change diachronically from Cato (contemporary with Plautus) to Columella, and this could well be true of NPs containing pronominal adjectives (which they do not discuss).

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The BB seen in eru meus would indicate that meus was at least prosodically more prominent, suggesting that meus was also pragmatically emphasized at some level (and disambiguation should by rights fit that bill). It is not clear if Drexlers account predicts stress on erus or meus in either word-order, but if erus meus really was the marked order with (let us say) erus contrastively focused, we would not expect the noun to be easily destressed, posing a potentially serious problem to our account of BB in such phrases. The two standard reference works above make no reference to Drexlers study, and a fresh look at this material is needed. Drexler devoted eleven full pages to the attestations of this phrase in Plautus, with brief commentary on many passages; instead of a superficial look at every example, I will examine one extended passage in detail where the phrase is frequent, Act IV (lines 817 – 922)33 of the Poenulus. Before proceeding, we must always keep in mind that the relative orders of the words could be influenced by metrical considerations or errors in the transmission. But unless there is strong reason to suspect the contrary, we will assume that the attested orders are as Plautus wrote them. As for metrical considerations, we cannot suppose that Plautus would have composed grammatically or pragmatically ill-formed word-orders; we must therefore assume that the orders are normal, and try to account for them linguistically. In this passage, two slaves, Milphio and Syncerastus, are talking to each other about their respective masters. Under Drexlers view, to repeat, the word-order erus meus/tuos should occur when the relevant master is first brought to mind or when contrasted with someone else, while the opposite order indicates the master is already present in the minds of the interlocutors. Even a very casual look shows the situation must be more complicated. Milphios master is referred to (in order, with the noun underlined) as meum erum, meo ero, ero meo, erus tuos, erus tuos, erus meus, eroque meo, tuost ero, meum erum, and Syncerastuss master is referred to as erus meus, erum meum, tuom erum, meum erum, erum tuom, tuo ero, erus meus, meum erum. The word-orders constantly switch back and forth. Drexler is quite aware that not all these orders are expected under his theory; we will treat each one below. Before proceeding, I should clear away some other factors that one could imagine playing a role. There are no correlations between the speaker and the word-order used, and there is no evidence that a slave 33 Omitting lines 923 – 9, bracketed by Leo.


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consistently uses one order for his own master and the other for the other slaves master. Another factor that could influence word-order is empathy, the emotional closeness to (or distance from) the topic on the part of the speaker. There are a scattering of instances where this might be relevant, but in general empathy does not appear to play a role in these data. No prosodic factors that might have required one or the other element to flip position with the other can be ascertained, either. We are therefore left with the somewhat crude but basically useful terminology of focus, emphasis, and contrast. Let us now examine the passage in detail by comparing and contrasting Drexlers and the traditional account. Milphio first mentions his own master at 818 as meum erum miserum my wretched master, which Drexler (68) categorizes with those instances where the master is “mit Selbstverstndlichkeit gegenwrtig” in the slaves consciousness. Drexler must claim this since this is the first occasion on which the master is mentioned; but we would, under his theory, normally expect erum meum. The traditional approach would interpret the limiting meum as at least somewhat emphatic: that wretched master of mine. It is unclear which approach is most accurate, for it depends on subtle matters of interpretation, but the traditional approach is perfectly coherent without an extra ad hoc assumption of the kind that Drexler must make. When Syncerastus first uses the phrase at 826, he says erus meus, in spite of the fact that he has just referred indirectly to the same person two lines earlier: Satis spectatum est, deos atque homines eius neglegere gratiam, quoi homini erus est consimilis uelut ego habeo hunc huius modi. Neque periurior neque peior alter usquam est gentium, 825 quam erus meus est, … “Its evident enough that gods and men have no regard for a chap with a master thats the sort of man my master is. A worse liar or worse rascal than that master of mine cant be found on earth, …”34 Drexler (71) includes this as one of the examples where erus is contrasted with other persons. The traditional explanation, however, would view erus meus as the unmarked word-order, and would see no difficulty in using that when it is the whole concept my master, rather than my or master, that is being contrasted. 34 This and the other translations of parts of this passage below are Nixons.

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When one of the masters is next referred to, it is several dozen lines later (857 ff.): … Saluos sis, Synceraste. :: O Milphio, di omnes deaeque ament— :: Quemnam hominem? :: Nec te nec me, Milphio, neque erum meum adeo. … “Greetings, Syncerastus.” “Oh, Milphio! May all the gods and goddesses bless—” “Well, whom?” “Not you, nor me, Milphio—no, nor my master either.” Here analysis is rendered difficult because Plautus is playing on sacral formulaic language; for nec te nec me neque erum meum as the list of people not to be blessed, compare mihi domo familiaeque meae, from the suouitaurilia prayer preserved in Cato (Agr. 141), as the list of entities to be blessed. Recall also Per. 328 (discussed in Ch. 5, pp. 109 ff.) Quae res bene uortat mihi et tibi et uentro meo. The addition of the possessive to the last member of these triads is an instance of Behaghels law of increasing members, where the last member is given some extra pizzazz; the formulaic usage may have dictated that the possessive follow the noun in order to form a nice closing parenthesis balancing the opening first-person pronoun. In other words, the positioning of meum in our passage may not be due solely to a synchronic rule. The order is, however, consistent with Drexlers hypothesis that erus meus is used when contrasting the master with someone else, as well as consistent with the traditional account that sees no difficulty in using the unmarked order when the whole phrase is being contrasted. The next two instances of the phrase evince Possessive–Noun order (863 ff.; Milphio speaks first): Di te et tuom erum perduint. :: Me non perdent; illum ut perdant facere possum, si uelim, meum erum ut perdant, … 865 “May the gods blast you and your master!” “They wont blast me. But I can make em blast him, if I liked, yes, blast that master of mine …” Drexlers hypothesis leads to contradictory predictions for the first phrase: it predicts erum tuom if the phrase contrasts with te (which it may or may not do), or it predicts the attested order since the master has already become part of the discourse and is present in the speakers


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mind. Syncerastuss subsequent meum erum expands and explains illum, and also echoes Milphios tuom erum; the order is consistent with Drexlers hypothesis because the master is already present in the speakers minds. The traditional account would claim that both tuom erum and meum erum have some emphasis or contrast on the possessive: that master of yours, that master of mine; this seems more probable in the second instance than in the first, though it is possible for both. After some bantering, both masters are brought up anew: Scin tu erum tuom meo ero esse inimicum capitalem? “You know your masters my masters deadly enemy?” (879, Milphio). This question introduces a new subject of the discourse, the fact that the two masters are each others enemies. The difference in the two phrases word-orders can be accounted for in at least two ways. One is artistic: Plautus may have wished to highlight the opposition between the two masters by bringing the possessives into contrastive juxtaposition (…tuom meo…), creating a chiastic arrangement Noun–Possessive–Possessive–Noun. But Devine and Stephens (2006, 242 – 9 et passim) have shown that chiasmus is not a “pragmatically vacuous device” (244), but arises when, in grammatically parallel sequences, an element in one sequene is contrastive while the corresponding element in the other sequence receives focus. This is clearly applicable here. Drexlers account works for erum tuom only if we assume that meo ero, the speakers master, is more immediate or generally present in the speakers consciousness than his interlocutors master (tuom erum). The Drexlerian approach would require a different take on the next passage, where again both masters are mentioned in the same sentence. After a bit of bantering, at 881 – 2 Milphio asks, Quid ergo dubitas quin lubenter tuo ero meus quid possiet / facere faciat male, eius merito? “Then why doubt my masters hankering to do yours any harm he could, and serve him right?” Unfortunately the second erus is gapped, but Milphio uses the word-order Possessive–Noun for his interlocutors master, unlike in the preceding passage. Drexlers theory is broad enough to cover this anyway, though, since that master is already part of the discourse; but as we are starting to see, this broadness makes his theory difficult to falsify because of the number of available alternative explanations it allows. The traditional account would, without further ado, see in tuo ero contrastive order; the advantage of this over Drexlers approach is that the same explanation works for this line as for 879. The next relevant passage (884 ff.) is as follows:

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Quid est quod metuas? :: Dum ero insidias paritem, ne me perduim. Si erus meus me esse elocutum quoiquam mortali sciat, 885 continuo is me ex Syncerasto Crurifragium fecerit. “What is it youre scared?” “Of setting traps for master and having it settle me. Why, if master knows Ive blabbed to any living soul, the next second hed change me from Syncerastus to Splintershanks.” The possessive seems unnecessary here, given that in the preceding line he refers to his master as just ero. Drexler (76) claims that the order erus meus, which is of course not expected at this point under his theory, reflects Syncerastuss fear that his master might discover this plan; “[i]nsofern tritt ihm dieser [scil., sein Herr, BWF] mit neuer Eindringlichkeit vor die Augen.” I think Drexler is on the right track but I would not explain it quite the same way; what he is ultimately sensing is that the protasis of this conditional is an environment in which the subject can be thought of as new information, because the protasis is portraying a new (imaginable) situation and the full phrase erus meus lends the conditional a hint of being a general truth (even though grammatically it is not). Certainly, pace Drexler, his master is no more vividly in Syncerastuss thoughts in this line than in the previous one, where he also talks about his fear. Under the traditional approach, erus meus is simply the neutral order with meus serving a disambiguating role. Milphio responds (887 – 8), Numquam edepol mortalis quisquam fiet e me certior, / nisi ero meo uni indicasso “Never, by gad, will any living soul be the wiser for me, with the one exception of my master.” Drexler explains the order as due to contrast between my master and no one; but really the emphasis is on uni (more literally “excepting I tell it to my master alone”) and ero meo is again the neutral order of the traditional account. Four lines later (892), Syncerastus says, Erus si tuos uolt facere frugem, meum erum perdet “If your master wants to show the right stuff, hell be the ruin of my master.” Drexler comments (70) that the (for him) neutral order is used by Syncerastus of his own master, though he notes that this is not the case at Rud. 345 erum meum erus uoster, where both pronouns stand in antithesis to one another “trotzdem [sie] nachgestellt sind” (71). Both erum and erus in the Rudens passage scan as pyrrhics; the BB is fully expected under my analysis if meus and uoster are the more strongly stressed members of each pair, and the word order is not expected to be chiastic if both phrases are pragmatically parallel. This is in fact the case: the full passage reads (344 – 5), Certe huc Labrax ad


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prandium uocauit Plesidippum / erum meum erus uoster. Nixon translates, “Surely your master, Labrax, invited my master, Plesidippus, to lunch here,” but more faithful to the Latin would be “Surely Labrax, your master, invited Plesidippus, my master, to lunch here,” since erum meum and erus uoster are simply explanatory add-ons to the masters names and do not stand in any contrast with one another.35 This passage is thus not comparable with the verse from the Poenulus, where the chiastic arrangement erus tuos meum erum has the same explanation as in 879 discussed above: the clause-initial hyperbaton erus si tuos shows clearly that erus has been topicalized, and meum is in emphatic position for the contrast (we might say, “… hell be the ruin of mine”). At 894, Syncerastus says, Quia Adelphasium, quam erus deamat tuos, ingenuast “Well, that Adelphasium your masters crazy about is a freeborn girl”. The order erus tuos is not neutral according to Drexlers framework, but in the context there is no contrast or emphasis on your master, and in the traditional account erus tuos would be the unmarked order, with tuos acting as an unstressed “tail” around which deamat has been moved (compare Ch. 3, nn. 64 and 77, and Devine and Stephens 2006, 605). Likewise the next two occurrences (901 ff., Milphio): Nam erus meus Agorastocles ibidem gnatust, inde surptus fere sexennis, postibi qui eum surrupuit huc deuexit meoque ero eum hic uendidit. “Why, my master Agorastocles was born there too, and kidnapped when he was about six, and afterwards the man that kidnapped him brought him here and sold him to my master.” (tr. Nixon) Erus meus of 901 has the marked order according to Drexler, who attributes it to the comparison of the master with kidnapped girls mentioned immediately before; under the traditional account, erus meus is the neutral order. Meo ero in 903 refers not to the same person, but to Agorastocless adoptive father, Milphios (the speakers) former master. This contrast may be reflected in the different word-orders, though it is not

35 To be sure, there is a larger chiastic arrangement of Nom.–Acc.–Acc.–Nom. (Labrax Plesidippum erum meum erus uoster). The reason for this was probably metrical, as erus uoster erum meum would have necessitated splitting a resolution across two NPs (…-ter er-).

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clear quite how;36 at any rate, Drexlers theory does not account for meo ero here, though it is appropriate for focused erus meus two lines earlier. After a few intervening lines of mutual assurances, Milphio wishes Syncerastus good luck, to which the latter replies (912), Pol istuc tibi et tuost ero in manu “Oh Lord! That rests with you and your master.” The order here is the same as in te et tuom erum above in 863. Under Drexlers account, both these passages contain the unmarked order, but the traditional account considers it to be emphatic. I am uncertain how the order is best accounted for because it is unclear how much (if any) contrast or emphasis is present. After Syncerastus departs, Milphio says (917 – 8), Di immortales meum erum seruatum uolunt / et hunc disperditum lenonem “The immortal gods do want my master rescued and this pimp destroyed!” There is a double contrast between meum erum and hunc lenonem on the one hand, and the participles seruatum and disperditum on the other. Meum erum stands in contrast to the implied erum tuom that is the same person as hunc lenonem, and that may account for the wordorder that under the traditional view is emphatic. Drexlers theory works insofar as the referent of meum erum is not new to the discourse, but does not account for the use of this order in a contrastive setting, for which he elsewhere claims the opposite order is preferred. The last mention in this passage comes at 920, Ibo intro, haec ut meo ero memorem “Ill go inside to report this to my master.” In Drexlers account, this phrase is neutral, while under the traditional account the order is marked; Drexlers account makes better sense here, for I see no reason why meo would be highlighted. Before Milphio breaks in on Syncerastuss monologue earlier in this act, Syncerastus is bemoaning the kind of master he has (842 – 3): Haec quom hic uideo fieri, crucior: pretiis emptos maxumis apud nos expeculiatos seruos fieri suis eris. “It tortures me to see what goes on here—high-priced slaves going back to their masters, all denestegged at our house!” The phrase suis eris is potentially instructive, referring to masters that are otherwise not in the discourse; if Drexlers approach is right, their being “mit Selbstverstndlichkeit gegenwrtig” is another way of saying that 36 In a similar passage from the Captiui, the slave Tyndarus refers to the younger master as erus (707) and the older one as erus maior meus (709), where maior serves to disambiguate.


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they are predictable from the context. Suis is indeed colorless and expected from the discourse; this appears to be another counterexample to the traditional account. In the preceding analysis, we have seen that Drexlers account is plausible in some cases, but fails in others where the traditional account makes better predictions. On the other hand, the traditional account is not perfect either. Neither account is particularly well-equipped to explain the BB that so frequently shortens the noun in the order erus meus: Drexlers account would have erus be emphatic, which is not compatible with my and others explanation of BB as triggered by destressing, while the traditional account would see in posthead meus a neutral rather than a contrastive modifier. Still, the traditional account leaves more room than Drexlers for the nuclear stress of the phrase to be on the modifier because it does not explicitly claim any emphasis on the noun. Ultimately the understanding of erus meus and meus erus must be embedded in a general account of the relative order of possessive adjectives and their heads. From the same play I investigated all the phrases containing personal pronominal adjectives through Act IV (lines 1 – 929). Broadly, prehead possessive adjectives are about one and a half times more common than posthead possessives. One should not be misled by this to the conclusion that the order Possessive–Noun is the neutral and unmarked order simply because it is more common; see already Ullmans (1919, 410) remarks to this effect in response to Walker 1918, who had discussed the greater frequency of prehead possessives in Caesar and Cicero. But by the same coin, though prehead possessives are typically more emphatic than posthead possessives, this is not exceptionlessly so. In the Poenulus passages that I examined, the correlation of prehead possessives with emphasis is strongest when the phrase is rendered discontinuous in hyperbaton. Observe the following examples where the possessive comes last in hyperbaton: typically it is predictable from the context, modifying an inalienably possessed body-part, kinship term, or quasi-kinship term (such as seruos), or the head noun itself is topicalized for emphasis or contrast: 111

Ita docte atque astu filias quaerit suas. “In this shrewd and ingenious way he seeks his daughters.”

191 – 2

Oculos uolo / meos delectare munditiis meretriciis. “I wish to gladden my eyes with the sweet costumes of the courtesans.”

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355 – 6

Iam hercle tu periisti, nisi illam mihi tam tranquillam facis quam mare olimst quom ibi alcedo pullos educit suos. “Now, by heaven, youre a dead man, unless you make her tranquil for me as the sea, at times when there the halcyon doth hatch her young!”

413

… Maiorem partem in ore habitas meo. “Because you spend most of your time about my jaws.”

472 – 3

quom sexaginta milia hominum uno die uolaticorum manibus occidi meis. “…when on one day I slew with these two hands sixty thousand flying men.”

561 – 2

Ubi is detulerit, tu eo seruom quaesitum aduentes tuom cum pecunia. “And when he has taken it, youll arrive in search of your slave with your money.”

563

Ille negabit: Milphionem quaeri censebit tuom; “Hell deny it, think its your Milphio youre seeking…”

814

Domos abeamus nostras, sultis, nunciam, “Come on now, lets go home…”

872 – 3

Nolito edepol deuellisse: iam his duobus mensibus uolucres tibi erunt tuae hirquinae. “Gad! Stop plucking em, and in the next two months you can fly; your wings will be strong as a goat.”

904

Is in diuitias homo adoptauit hunc quom diem obiit suom. “He adopted him and left him all his money when his time came.”

In the following two further examples, the possessive is at least necessary for disambiguation but is not otherwise emphatic or contrastive: 181

Rogato seruos ueneritne ad eum tuos. “Then you ask him if your slave is at his house.”


761 – 2

243

… Seruom esse audiui meum / apud te. “I have heard that my slave is at your house.”

Only in the following case does the possessive appear to be inherently contrastive (compare such fixed phrases as mea sententia, suo nomine): 15

Bonum factum †esse†, edicta ut seruetis mea. “So good of you to observe my edicts!

Now let us examine prehead possessives in hyperbaton. The following examples are the clearest, where the emphasis/contrast is often conveyed in English by my own, your own, etc.: 57

locus argumentost suom sibi proscaenium, “the office at which to submit a Return on Argument is its own stage”

96 – 7

Earum hic adulescens alteram ecflictim perit, suam sibi cognatam inprudens, “One of these girls our young gentleman dotes on to distraction—unaware that she is a relative of his—”

296

Enim uero, ere, meo me lacessis ludo et delicias facis. “Well, well, here you are, sir, challenging me at my own game and cracking jokes.”

354

… Namque istaec magi meast curatio? “Is that my job or yours, to trouble about her?”37

810

nostro seruire nos sibi censet cibo. “…counts on our serving him at our own expense!”

The following contrasts prehead tuom with the preceding posthead meis, producing chiasmus: 424 – 6

I, adduce testis tecum; ego intus interim iam et ornamentis meis et sycophantiis tuom exornabo uilicum.

37 Mea could also be predicative here.

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“Go, bring along some witnesses with you. Meantime now Ill be inside equipping your bailiff with my own equipment and stratagems.” In the next examples, the possessive is not contrastive, but the recipient of at least some emphasis; English often uses for this that X of mine/yours etc.: 170

Tuo Collybiscus nunc in urbest uilicus; “Your bailiff Collybiscus is in the city now…”

497 – 8

… Tum tu igitur die bono, Aphrodisiis, addice tuam mihi meretricem minusculam. “Well then, on this happy Aphrodisia day make over to me that wench of yours, the littler one.”

631 – 2

si bene dicetis, uostra ripa uos sequar, si male dicetis, uostro gradiar limite. “If you are affable, I shall follow your bank; if you are abusive, I shall keep to your course.” (i. e., “its your bank Ill follow … its your course I shall keep to”)

643

Credo hercle uobeis: ita uostra est benignitas. “By gad, I believe you: such is your benevolence.”

The same is true in 503, 503

In hunc diem iam tuo sum mercennarius.

where a paraphrase would be, “For the present day I am yours, in the capacity of a mercenary.” (Nixon simply translates, “For the present day I am your mercenary.”) But a good half-dozen examples are not so clear-cut, where inalienably possessed body parts and the nouns seruos and domus are preceded by a possessive without the possessive apparently having much emphasis, or at least where it is making such a claim would involve some special pleading: 153

Amo immodeste. :: Meae istuc scapulae sentiunt. “Im in love, beyond all self-control!” “My shoulder blades surmise as much.”


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494

Colaphis quidem hercle tuom iam dilidam caput, “By the Lord, Ill debatter your brains to bits this instant…”

540

Tua caussa nemo nostrorumst suos rupturus ramites. “No one of us intends to burst the blood-vessels of his lungs because of you.”

724

Eum uos meum esse seruom scitis? “You knowing the man to be my slave?”

773 – 4

eum adlegarunt suom qui seruom diceret eum auro esse apud me; “… theyve instigated him to say his slaves at my house with money”

838

ita uinariorum habemus nostrae dilectum domi. “… why, its a wine merchants muster-roll we have at our house.”

The same tendencies are observable in the much more numerous possessive phrases without hyperbaton, though with greater overlap. Sometimes the order vacillates for variety or perhaps metrical necessity, as is obviously the case in the following passage: 392 – 4

Opsecro hercle te, uoluptas huiius atque odium meum, huiius amica mammeata, mea inimica et maleuola, oculus huiius, lippitudo mea, mel huiius, fel meum, “Oh I do, do implore you, his joy—and my abomination—his breastiful friend—my cantankerous foe—light of his eyes—my eyesore—his honey—my henbane—”

Here meus contrasts with huiius in each phrase, but its position simply echoes that of huiius, which fluctuates. This passage clearly shows that both prehead and posthead positions were available for emphasis or contrast, although at least in the Poenulus, emphatic posthead modifiers are much rarer than nonemphatic prehead modifiers. The following is the only clear example: 801

… Apscedas, sumas ornatum tuom. “Be off, get into your own outfit.”

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Presenting and discussing the dozens of other examples of possessives not in hyperbaton would swell this already lengthy section beyond reason; I will provide only summary information. Clearly emphatic uses include tuae blanditiae all this blarney youre giving me 136, erili et nostro quaestu for masters income and our own 285, nostro negotio our own affairs 402, ne meamet culpa meo amori obiexim moram not to block the course of my own love and have myself to blame 446, meo amori my [own] desires 509, uostra opera your help 547, uostra ripa your bank 631 (see above), nostri diuites those plutocrats of ours 811, suo festo die on her own festal day 848, tuos amicus a friend of yours 852, and suas popularis his own fellow-citiziens 906. Prehead possessives are also found in a variety of fixed expressions where this order is standard: nostra gratia 9, meis uerbeis 407, tua caussa 540, tuam rem 659, 675, 679, meam rem 750, di uostram fidem 830, 900, and meo periclo 878. They are also frequent in vocatives, including a long list of twelve in a row in 365 ff. plus several others scattered about. Not obviously emphatic or contrastive, and often predictable from the context, are the prehead possessives in the following residue: tuom officium your duty 12, suas filias his daughters 124, hunc sui fratris filium this nephew 125, tuam libertam your freedwoman 164, meum erum my master 204, meo amori my desires, tuos seruos your slave 712, meus seruos my slave 731, 797, and meae alae my wings 871. A passage similar to 392 ff. discussed above, where the order fluctuates in a list of grammatically and pragmatically identical phrases, is 417 – 20 Nunc opsecro te, Milphio, hanc per dexteram / perque hanc sororem laeuam perque oculos tuos / perq meos amores perque Adelphasium meam 38 / perque tuam leibertatem “Now I beseech you, Milphio, by this right hand and by its sister left and by these eyes of yours and by my love and by my Adelphasium and by your freedom.” To return then to erus meus, the most problematic passages—the ones where neither Drexlers nor the traditional accounts worked well, or where Drexlers account was superior to the traditional account, were 843 (suis eris), 859 (erum meum), 863 (tuom erum), possibly 865 (meum erum), possibly 901 (erus meus), 912 (tuost in manu), and 920 (meo ero). Not surprisingly in light of what we have seen, in most of these phrases the possessive precedes its head—the order that more freely admits of either emphatic or nonemphatic interpretation. The use of that order was apparently less restricted than that of Noun–Possessive. The basic point is already in Szantyr (1972, 408), who noted that in the collo38 This line bracketed by Leo.


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quial language prenominal position had already become stereotyped, yielding ultimately the standard order in Romance. This description is of course not fully accurate, since if prenominal position had become truly stereotyped in Plautuss day (if by “stereotyped” is meant that the productive rule for the placement of possessive adjective was before the head noun), we would expect to see much more massive evidence of it than we do. The foregoing discussion has not covered all aspects of this question by any means. In particular, one must remember that identical linear orders of constituents can reflect different underlying orders. It is generally agreed that Latin is a discourse-configurational language, that is, one in which syntactic tree structure (and consequently word-order) is determined not by grammatical categories (subject, object, etc.) but by discourse and pragmatic categories (topic and focus). This means that any constituent syntactic phrase (noun phrase, verb phrase, etc.) contains within it landing sites for both locally topicalized and locally focused elements.39 A surface string erus meus, for example, can reflect the unchanged underlying order, or it can result from topicalization or focusing of the noun to a higher position in the syntactic tree, with erus either remaining in situ or moved along with the noun. Thus not all the examples of “prehead possessive” and “posthead possessive” may in the end be subsumable under the same rubric; more refined investigation will hopefully tease these different structures apart. If the traditional account is correct, as seems to be the case, erus meus was the pragmatically neutral order, without special emphasis or contrast on the possessive. BB can only have been licensed if phrasal stress fell on the possessive.40 Drexler (1969a, 126) averred that the BB was due to the “nomen tritum sermone servorum”; it is beyond question that the BB faithfully reflects a real colloquial feature, though it is not necessary to claim that it reflects a “worn-down” pronunciation resulting from frequent use. Note that most examples of the order erus meus, as well as the scansion with BB, are in the nominative (which, in the sample exam39 For a more detailed account with regards specifically to Latin, see Devine and Stephens 2006, 25 – 9 and 377 – 91, where several possible structural analyses are discussed. 40 Lucio Ceccarelli (p.c.) says that one could scan meus in erus(-)meus with synizesis, and that otherwise erfflsmeus scanning f – [ [ would violate the law of Hermann-Lachmann (Questa 1967, 129 ff.). Synizesis is doubtless possible, though disyllabic meus would still not violate Hermann-Lachmann because, as discussed in Ch. 3, it would not have formed a single word with the preceding noun.

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ined, is invariably erus meus and never meus erus), while the opposite order is much more typical of accusative and oblique cases (ten out of fourteen instances). This allowed elision in the oblique cases (me(o) ero, me(um) erum, etc.), but that cannot be the full story: why would Plautus have been particularly interested in eliding one of the members of this phrase in a non-nominative case? Rather, the answer must again lie in the pragmatics. Topics tend to be subjects, and, other things being equal, one expects neutral order in a whole phrase that is topicalized. The correlation of the marked orders meum erum, tuo ero, etc. with (typically) other thematic roles might reflect the fact that focus or contrast tends to fall on one (or both) members of non-topics. Shortening before clitics As a final case-study in iambic-shortening, we turn to a phenomenon that is actually of somewhat broader scope, namely the supposed shortening that can occur before clitics. The scansions nimique, priuquam, minuque, magique, the truncated and lexicalized satı˘n, uide˘ n, abı˘n, etc. < *satisne, uide¯sne, abı¯sne, the scansion quibucum, and the shortening of certain words before quidem (sı˘quidem, tu˘quidem, etc.; see Ch. 3) have led many researchers to claim that clitics caused shortening of preceding syllables (“K rzung durch Tonanschluss” in the German literature).41 The first point to be made is that we must distinguish shortening of magis, minus, nimis, prius, quibus, and satis before clitics from shortening of all other iambic words before clitics. The reason for this is simple: magis, minus, etc. normally scan without the -s anyway before a consonant in Plautus (Lindsay 1922, 204 – 5, 207 – 8, and 211; Questa 1967, 19).42 Nimique etc. are thus simply lexicalized sandhi variants followed by -que; compare the first person singular pronoun, which normally scans as ego˘ with lexicalized iambic shortening, but occasionally as ego¯ with its original long.43 The same is surely true of shortened ibı˘dem (alongside less com41 E.g. Lindsay 1922, 73; Leumann 1977, 110 – 1; Sommer-Pfister 106. For useful general discussion see Questa (1967, 42 and 71 ff.), who also lists many examples and correctly leaves out the instances before -que; see below. On quandoquidem and other combinations with quando, see Baker 1903. 42 Cf. now the general remarks in Probert 2002, 197. I do not follow Wallaces (1984) claim that s-loss first began in such common phrases as priu(s) quam and subsequently spread to other lexemes by diffusion, but a discussion of the issues involved would take us too far afield. 43 See now also Gratwick 1999, 226 and Gratwick 2000, 331.


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mon ibı¯dem) and ubı˘cumque. Ibı˘dem has taken over the -dem from the pronoun ¯ıdem. As for ubı˘cumque, the univerbation of (-)cumque with a preceding wh-word is recent, comparable to English what(…)soever; shortened ubı˘ was already in existence before the univerbation took place. The contrasting pair ubı¯que everywhere ~ ubı˘que and where is also best accounted for in this way, for ubı˘que simply represents the newer, shortened form productively cliticized by -que, while ubı¯que is a much older word with nonproductive “generalizing” -que and lexically preserved long vowel.44 Aside from the -quidem cases, which do not concern us at the moment, the data we are left with after eliminating the forms above is quite limited:45 Mil. 55846 Mil. 663 Mil. 664 Per. 371 Poen. 309 Trin. 1017

Ratu˘sne istic me hominem esse omnium minimi preti, Opu˘sne erit tibi aduocato tristi, iracundo? Ecce me; Opu˘sne leni? Leniorem dices quam mutum est mare Malu˘sne ego sum? … Pote˘ sne mi auscultare? … Quid, homo nihili, non pudet te? Tribu˘sne te poteriis

Mil. 746

hospes, non qui mi imperarent quibu˘sue ego essem obnoxius

As. 3 Trin. 109

gregı˘que huic et dominis atque conductoribus. uide˘ tque ipse ad paupertatem protractum esse se

Most of these have shortening before -ne. The paucity of examples before -ue is not surprising, given the relative rarity of this conjunction. What is genuinely striking, however, is the nearly complete absence of shortening before -que, an extremely common enclitic. 44 Quibucum might seem to be a problem for this analysis, since usually the forms with clitic -cum are thought to be old lexicalizations. I argue in Fortson to appear that this is not necessarily the case. There is no reason to assume that every one of these forms was lexicalized; it would have been easy to generalize a rule (“postpose cum when its object is a pronoun”) from a few of them and generate the rest with the rule. Additionally, quibuscum must be a renewal of *quı¯scum anyway, with the older abl. pl. Quibucum results simply from the application of this rule using the s-less preconsonantal sandhi variant. 45 I omit those where apparently the manuscripts may have restored full forms for contracted ones. I also omit Rud. 1052 and 1362, where tuosne could scan with synizesis. 46 So A, but me istic P, which would require no shortening.

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The two passages As. 3 and Trin. 109 are not good evidence for a shortening rule before -que. 47 Regarding the first of these, there has been some feeling among scholars that the line is problematic. Lindsay notes in his edition that the scansion gregı˘que is “suspectum,” but he later cites it as sure in 1922, 35.48 We saw earlier in this chapter that this line belongs to those cases of BB that are difficult to motivate; it begins a series of right-extraposed datives that as a group were moved by heavy-NP shift.49 I believe that doubts can indeed be raised about it: first, it occurs in a prologue that is not guaranteed to be Plautine;50 and second, a case can be made that ac is to be preferred here over atque, in which case gregı¯8 would scan normally (as an iamb). Ordinarily, ac is used before consonants, atque before vowels and h; but this picture is complicated by two facts. First, at least in Classical times (especially with Cicero,51 but not, for example, Livy), ac was avoided before c or qu 52 (Neue-Wagener 2.955), though it was not a hard and fast rule, as 47 Two other examples are known to me as well, but they are found in anapests, and are thus also not entirely secure: prospere˘ que Ps. 574 and fero˘ que Rud. 957a. Moribunduque est at Bac. 193 is doubtful, and was emended to moribundus est by Camerarius, followed by Bentley and A. S. Gratwick (p.c.); however, Questa (1967, 21) does not object to it, considering it an example of enclisis of -que to an already s-less form. 48 His suggestion in his edition that et is perhaps to be deleted seems unlikely to me. 49 See the full clause quoted earlier; it means (with the right-extraposed material in italics), “which [i.e., your attention] I heartily hope will result in benefit to me and to you, and to this company and its managers, and to those who hire them” (tr. Nixon, adapted; my italics). 50 Some of the prologues to Plautuss comedies are post-Plautine, but scholarship has not been in agreement concerning the genuineness of the prologue to the Asinaria. Apparently, most think it postdates Plautus, but Leo (1912, 200) disagreed, as did Abel (1955, 13). Goldberg (1998, 18 – 9), in his important discussion of how the prologues provide evidence of the physical setup of stages and audiences in Plautuss day, makes no mention of this prologue perhaps being unecht. Bertini (1968) does not discuss line 3. Even if the prologue did not flow from Plautuss own pen, shortened gregı˘que would of course still demand an analysis. 51 In Cicero it depends on whether atque is inside a clausula or outside one. Outside clausulae, atque is vastly more frequently used before a consonant than inside clausulae, according to Wolff 1901, 638. Wolff unfortunately does not give specific statistics on the use of atque before c or qu (see immediately below in main text). 52 And h, but this does not count, since h- was a silent letter by the Classical period (see Ch. 2, n. 3). Sommer-Pfister 214 do not limit the restriction to c and qu, but


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Neue-Wageners data amply show.53 Second, while ac indeed never occurs before vowels in Plautus, atque is not limited to prevocalic occurrence, appearing before consonants between 100 and 110 times out of a total 1200 or so occurrences of the word (see the data in Lodge s.v. atque, and Richmond 1965, 81). Of these consonants, atque occurs most especially before m (25 ), s (14 ), p (12 ), c (9 ), and d and t (each 8 or 9 ).54 Ac occurs only twice before c, plus twice where the mss. have atque but some editors read ac. But the lower frequency of ac before c is unlikely to be significant, as this form of the conjunction is less than a tenth as common as atque in Plautus. The manuscripts do not often mix up ac and atque, but at least a dozen times they in fact replaced correct ac (as proven by the meter) with the commoner atque (Lodge s.v. ac). It is therefore on balance entirely thinkable, if not assured, that the atque in As. 3 is such a replacement, perhaps by someone who thought that ac before c should be replaced with atque. The advantage of this reading for our purposes is that it relieves us of the scansion gregı˘que: gregque huic t domins ac cnductribffls. Again, this emendation is not unequivocally demanded by the evidence at hand,55 but merely plausible; even if it is incorrect, gregı˘que is not strong evidence of a rule of shortening before -que, as previously discussed. The second example, Trin. 109, cannot be contested textually. Since it would again be strange if there were a rule of shortening before -que that only showed up here, another explanation should be sought for the scansion. In my opinion, it is best explained as ordinary BB somewhat like that seen in uolu˘pta¯s mea. Consider the context:

claim ac was avoided before all gutturals; similarly TLL s.v. atque (col. 1048). The data collected in Neue-Wagener do not confirm this, however (but note that g is a much less frequent a word-initial sound in Latin than c). 53 See also the figures from Golden and Silver Age poetry in Axelson 1945, 83 ff. 54 Most of these are very common word-initial consonants in Latin to begin with, so the frequency of atque before them may be epiphenomenal. 55 Its one drawback, though a not unparalleled one, is the lack of a caesura (unless one ascribes it to the rare type with caesura after the sixth position instead of the much commoner fifth or seventh; see Questa 1967, 170). As so often, we are faced with a choice between one irregularity (iambically shortened gregique) and another.

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Nam postquam hic eiius rem confregit filius uidetque ipse ad paupertatem protractum esse se “For after this son of his had destroyed his estate and he himself sees that he has been dragged down into poverty” Ipse here indicates that the referent has changed from hic filius to Charmides, the referent of eiius (for his part he sees). The effect is difficult to render in English, which puts the emphasis rather on himself, the subject of the dependent infinitival clause; but it seems reasonable to assume that in Latin, ipse, the new subject contrasting with filius, was given some measure of emphasis and uidetque was prosodically subordinate to it,56 yielding a phrase-initial weakly stressed string to which BB could apply.57 While none of these arguments proves that these two purported cases of shortening before -que are illusory, I maintain that had there been such a process in Latin speech, we would see more evidence of it, given how frequent -que is.58 There is little if any inscriptional evidence for it, either. I only know of one potential example, sueq (= suı¯sque, abl. pl.) at CIL I2 62 (saec. iii B.C.), cited in Joseph and Wallace 1992, 106. Comparisons with forms missing final -s (e. g. plebe [ple¯be¯s] I2 2659 [300 B.C.], pl. Pisaurese [Pisaure¯nse¯s] I2 378 [saec. ii B.C.]; Joseph and Wallace ib.) may or may not be valid, as the -s in sveq need not count as final. But since graphic omission of final -s is likely to reflect real phonetic reduction, as Vine (1993, 222) points out (examples of it are restricted to regions where final consonants were lost in general), it seems easiest to assume that sueq represents simply -que added to already s-less sue(i). Vines comparison, op. cit. p. 237, with ede CIL I2 62 (= esdem I2 2675c, nom. pl.), “with the expected treatment of -sd-,” does not appear to me to be

56 The emphasis is in any case not on uidet. 57 If this is the correct analysis, it might be applicable also to As. 3 (though in not as obvious a way) and would be useful in showing that placement of -que by prosodic flip preceded the shortening of gregi8 and uidet8 in the synchronic derivation. 58 I am of course aware of the difficulties with this argumentation; recall Ch. 1. Here I think the argument carries more weight, however, than e. g. in a case like re¯st (Ch. 6, n. 4), since the combination of iambic word plus -que is much commoner than re¯s + est.


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phonologically apposite. The form at any rate cannot be used as evidence either of s-loss or of BB conditioned by -que. 59 Note that of the six examples of shortening before -ne listed earlier, only three (Mil. 664, Poen. 309, Trin. 1017) assuredly contain the full form -ne; the rest occur before a vowel and could be contractions of the potin-type but with the clitic simply written out in full (thus e. g. ratusne istic at Mil. 558 might really have been ratun istic). Schrader (1885, 27) remarks (ad Mil. 664), “pusne lni scribitur, quanquam certo pune lni audiebatur”, “pusne lni is written, even though surely pune lni is what was heard”; before a vowel (as at Mil. 663, opusne erit) this would have been opun. To the examples of shortening before -ne may be added one not ending in -s: Aul. 812

eru˘mne ego aspicio meum? …

This is another example of an ordinary case of BB, and treated above with the other cases where BB affected a noun that arguably sat in an acoustic trough. But the other words occurring before -ne are not all so easy to dismiss, being in some cases focused for emphasis. For example, the full sentence containing tribusne at Trin. 1017 is Tribusne te poteriis memoriam esse oblitum? which may be roughly rendered as, “You mean to say youve lost your memory after only three drinks?” The data above become more tantalizing when one factors in the interrogative forms uide˘ n abı˘n potı˘n etc. To explain uide˘ n, usually the starting point *uide¯´sne is posited, on the assumption that the verb-plus-enclitic combination was accented as a single phonological word; later, there was apocope to *uide´¯ sn and word-internal s-loss to *uide´¯ n, which became *ude¯n with accent retraction after lexicalization (this is necessary to explain the shortening, as Lindsay 1922, 34 already noted), finally undergoing BB to become uide˘ n. 60 But the other -ne data above show that shortening of the syllable before the clitic could happen, however it is to be explained. If we combine these second singulars with the other -ne data above, and with the fact that at some point in its history *uide¯n had to have been accented on the initial syllable (at least underlyingly, even if 59 Even if sueq represents loss of -s before -que, comparison with the Plautine forms is not necessarily straightforward, since the sibilant is not preceded by a short vowel. (On loss of -s after long vowels, see Bernardi Perini 1974, 113 ff.) 60 For whatever reason, accent retraction did not happen in illı¯ć < illı¯će.

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in ordinary speech the accent did not come strongly to the fore), then the picture that is formed is that of a clitic -ne that did not attract the accent forward. This suggests a different scenario for uide˘ n from the traditional one: *ude¯sne > *ude¯sn > *ude¯n > uide˘ n. (Cf. Schrader 1884, 27 – 8, who posits the same development.)61 The only other possibility is to posit loss of the -s before n in a clitic group even after a stressed syllable, for which there is no other evidence to my knowledge.62 The immediate problem with this approach is the well-known set of statements by the Roman grammarians that the clitics -que, -ne and -ue caused the stress to shift to the penult in all words, even those where the resulting penult is light (the liminque and Musque rule). This purported rule has been called into question a number of times (as by Tucker 1965); in particular, an example like Musque looks suspiciously like Greek Lou˘ s\ te (Allen 1978, 87 f.), and we know of numerous instances where Roman grammarians grafted Greek grammatical descriptions onto Latin that were simply not accurate for the latter language. But Probert (2002), in a welcome new investigation of this problem, notes that the 61 I notice that Soubiran (1988, 323) says that uide˘ n and the like disagree with the claim that -ne threw the accent forward; and already Lindsay (1922, 34) stated, “For vide˘ n is inconsistent with an accentuation vidn and postulates rather vden.” Apparently this view has never made it into the standard scholarly consciousness. 62 Schrader (1885, 23, 27) determined that verb forms in -Vs + clitic -ne nearly always become -Vn, while nouns of the same shape normally appear as -Vsne (always so if the vowel is long). Since it cannot be the case that verb forms underwent the change while nouns did not (sound change is not morphologically conditioned), this curious fact demands an explanation. Presumably what has happened here is that such verb forms are second singulars, which are rather common for opening a question (“Do you/Did you/Will you…?”) and thus for serving as the host of the interrogative particle -ne. There was therefore ample opportunity for the sound change (*)-Vsn(e) > -Vn to be lexicalized in these forms, yielding a special “interrogative” 2nd sing. (The few cases where the uncontracted version is seen are simply like uncontracted Eng. do not used alongside contracted dont.) By contrast, most nominal forms ending in -Vs were accusative plurals—not forms one would expect to occur particularly ˘ s would have commonly as the first word in a question; but forms ending in -V been commoner in this position (nom. sing. in -us, especially), which led to lex˘ n for such forms. icalized -V It is conceivable that uiden is just such an example of the spread of an “interrogative” 2nd singular in -Vn, and that all the cogitations in the paragraph above in the main text are moot. However, uiden, because it is so common, should be one of the forms from which this “interrogative” ending was generalized, rather than being the recipient of it.


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Roman grammarians central claim of a shift in the accent is not paralleled in Greek (p. 194), and adduces other well-reasoned arguments in support of the grammarians description.63 If Probert is right, there is nonetheless no guarantee that the Musque rule is relevant for the Plautine data; it was first noted by Roman grammarians centuries after Plautus.64 If, however, it was a fact of Plautuss speech, then these data are like mode˘ stus mole˘ stus etc. in the preceding chapter in showing shortening of an ostensibly stressed penult of a trisyllable. We noted that the majority of those examples were followed by an unstressed word; this is also true of almost all the examples of shortening before clitic listed above: ratune istic, opune erit, malune ego, potene mi, tribune te, quibuue ego, uide˘ tque ipse, eru˘mne ego. The only exception is opune leni (Mil. 664), as well as gregı˘que huic if my previous analysis is correct that the phrasal stress was on huic rather than the noun. But it remains unclear how these unstressed words might have induced shortening. We are thus left with shortening before -quidem and isolated (and controversial)65 instances of shortening before -quis (as in ecquis, siquis) as the sole examples of true shortening before clitics, however the shortening is to be explained.66 63 There might be at least one Greek source indicating a shift in accent, though: Lindsay (1891, 376) adduces the scholion to Il. 14.396, which cites the two conflicting views of Aristarchus and Tyrannion on the accentuation of tossor ce. Aristarchus retains the barytone accent while Tyrannion says the accent shifts to the second syllable, toss|r ce. Tyrannion was Varros teacher, and there is some possibility that the later Roman grammarians got the Musque rule from Varro (see the arguments by Schçll apud Probert 2002, 186 n. 5). In Lindsays view, if the Musque rule does go back to Varro, it probably is an adaptation of Tyrannions teaching. I have no independent view on this matter, but the leap from toss|r ce to Musque, liminque etc. is not necessarily small. 64 Aside from the possibility (see the previous note) that Varro is the ultimte source of the Musque rule; but as Tucker (1965, 451 n. 9) says, there is no direct evidence that this is the case. 65 Their existence is disputed by Lindsay (1922, 73 – 4, 172 – 3) but Questa (1967, 75 – 8) upholds them at least in a few cases, though the scansion ne˘ quid at St. 576 is very doubtful. 66 It would take us too far afield to speculate on the causes here, about which scholars have expressed little more than puzzlement (“oscuro” Questa 1967, 71). Since -quidem is disyllabic, by contrast with the other clitics we have discussed, Lindsay suggested a comparison with the shortening in English holiday; but there is no general process of initial-syllable shortening in Latin trisyllables (on hodie, see Meiser 1998, 78). Note also that -cumque, -piam, and -libet do

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Conclusion Drexlers vague terminology regarding the structural position of shortened words (“vorwrtsweisend”) has been rightly criticized;67 nevertheless, it captures the essential “feel” of the phenomenon, which I have tried to formulate in more specific terms above and shall now recapitulate. BB was an optional phonological rule that affected only words or sequences of syllables in acoustic dips. The underlying position of the lexical accent is not an actual cause of BB, contrary to most generally accepted views; however, it is implicated in how these unstressed sequences were realized in speech (as the first syllable was not shortened). Close syntactic connection of an iambic word to what followed was not a necessary precondition for shortening; it is not even clear if prosodic univerbation with following material was necessary because, as I discussed above, parentheticals (an important class of shortened lexemes) are prosodically separate from preceding and following material. On the other hand, the fact that BB happens only extremely rarely before a caesura or diaeresis (Questa 1973, 499) suggests that any prosodic break following the iambic sequence would have had to be quite weak for BB to be licensed. The lack of a strong accent, potentially also a lower pitch (this of course cannot be proved), together with a tight connection between the two syllables making up the iambic sequence, seem to be the only absolutely necessary preconditions for the shortening. Soubiran (1988, 317) points out that we never see scansions such as *ad u˘rbem tuam, *pare˘ nte¯s meı¯, suggesting that postposed possessives did not normally form accentual unities with preceding heads. Assuming Soubiran had in mind disyllabic scansions of the possessive, this fact falls out automatically from the observation we made in Ch. 3 that possessives were not clitics when they had their full iambic pronunciation, and even when scanning with synizesis they were not automatically clitic, either. But this creates a potential problem for accounting for the shortening in uolu˘pta¯s mea my darling. According to the traditional explanation,68 not induce shortening, though they too are disyllabic. At least one instance of shortening might be illusory, if Lindsay (1922, 73) and Questa (1967, 74) are right that hı˘cquidem is really *he quidem without the particle -c(e), like illequidem alongside illic. See also Lindsay 1900a ad loc. on Cap. 823. I hope to return to these matters in another study. 67 E.g. by Halporn (1968, 377), who also faulted Drexler for never clearly defining “word-group”. 68 See the references and resume in Bettini 1990, 361 – 2.


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the presence of BB here means that the word was not accented uolfflpta¯s as ordinarily, but uolupta¯´s; and this accentuation could only have come about if the word had formed an accentual unity with the following mea, which in turn implies univerbation after clisis. However, I believe this is a pseudo-problem. Voluptas mea is a fixed vocative idiom, a fact which gains us two avenues of approach. First, Latin presents us with other vocative phrases that became fossilized and univerbated; most famous among these is the name of the deity Iuppiter father Jove. Second, forms of address are, as is well-known, notoriously prone to reduction (e. g. English missus, miz < mistress, Russian honorific particle -s < sudar sir), which could be a factor in the univerbation as well. In the case of uoluptas mea, an original phrase uolfflptas ma was univerbated as an idiomatic compound with reaccentuation according to the wordstress rule to uolupts-mea, which fed BB. We saw the exact same process—minus BB—in our discussion of malm-crucem, p. 45.69 Of uncertain importance for conditioning BB is the presence of a stress on the syllable following the iambic sequence. Such a stress is broadly indicated in several of the groups examined above: the types ut ˘ın seruitute, sed o˘ cculto, uenu˘statem, uolu˘ptas mea all show shortening in prosodically deficient sequences that preceded the primary word or phrasal stress, either directly or, in the case of ut in seruitfflte, at some distance. This explanation is possible also, though difficult to motivate, in the type dolo˘ res mi. If this line of thinking is correct, it could explain why the univerbated phrase malam-crucem discussed in Ch. 3 was not pronounced mala˘m crucem with shortening.70 The answer cannot simply be that the penultimate syllable was short (BB affected a number of heavy stressed syllables before a short, see the examples listed earlier); rather, malam received the greater emphasis in the phrase, and this carried over into the univerbation and is reflected in the lack of shortening. An observant reader may have noticed that eru meus with shortening alongside meus erus without is superficially parallel to uolu˘ptas mea with

69 This avoids the stumbling-block for Bettini 1990, 363, who considers the BB in uoluptas mea still unexplained because, in his view, enclitics did not cause the accent to shift forward. As we have seen, enclisis (at least of the usual productive sort) is not involved. 70 There is one disputed example of the phrase scanning this way (Rud. 1162); see Jachmann (1912) and O. Skutsch (1934, 67 – 8) for opposing views on it. I find it suspect and leave it out of discussion.

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shortening alongside mea uoluptas without. In spite of this similarity, I do not believe the two cases of shortening are comparable. A univerbated erus-meus (parallel to the univerbated uoluptas-mea that I claimed above) should have been stressed on the penult, most likely resisting shortening; and even if the argument were made that eru meus represented a univerbation with lexicalized shortening, the shortening in the pre-univerbated phrase would still need explanation. Since expressions for someones master occur in all possible combinations of noun (masculine erus and feminine era) and possessive (meus, tuos, suos, etc.), evince both word-orders, show up both shortened by BB and unshortened, and occur as continuous as well as discontinuous strings, the strong impression is that all these phrases are productively generated. With uolu˘ptas mea, there is no such variety; where uoluptas means darling it occurs only in this phrase, in its reverse without shortening (clearly productively produced in the normal way), once as uolu˘ptas tua (Cas. 454) echoing uolu˘ptas mea in the preceding line, once in suam uoluptatem with full scansion (Rud. 437), and once as uoluptas huiius again with full scansion (Poen. 392). Instructive is uoluptas ea this gratification at Am. 994; if BB were simply mechanically applied by the poet to a string like uoluptas mea, we would expect it here too, but the noun is not shortened—another indication that idiomatic uoluptas mea was lexicalized with shortening. As a final point, recall our examination in Ch. 6 of the role that syntax plays in the lack or near-lack of aphaeresis within Noun–Possessive phrases (*erust meus); there we held fronting responsible for the inability of est to cliticize to the noun. Another possibility may now be considered. As just noted, the order erus meus could indeed have arisen by fronting of the noun, but it also could be the base-generated unmarked order. BB of erus in fact suggests the latter, for a constituent fronted for emphasis might have projected its own prosodic domain and been prosodically prominent, making BB unlikely to have affected it. Since the prosody of erus meus was such as to trigger BB under normal conditions, it may be that erus was prosodically too weak to host the clitic.

Chapter Nine Towards a Reconstruction of the Prosody of Plautine Latin Speech The syllable I have offered a number of observations about the prosody of syllables. On the basis of first-measure violations of Meyers Law that were obviated by following clitics, we hypothesized that stressing a heavy syllable in a word that was phrase-final increased the syllables duration to such an extent that the syllable was incompatible with filling a C position, since light C positions are favored and iambic rhythm was a general structural concern. We noted, however, that this was limited to the first C of the line, since we also determined that Meyers Law behaves completely differently with respect to second Cs: while monosyllables that followed firstmeasure violations of Meyer were usually left-leaning, those that followed second-measure violations usually were not. This is surely related to the propensity of second-measure violations to be followed by relatively “autonomous” measures filled by a single four- or five-syllable word. While the poet apparently strove not to fill the C in the first measure with an overly heavy syllable, it is difficult to claim the same for the second C; whatever the ultimate account for Plautuss practice here is, the traditional descriptions of the law should be modified to include the distinction. Intervocalic consonants word-internally have always been known to syllabify as onsets; I claimed that the licensed exceptions to the law of the split resolution, together with the distribution of word-final consonants, provide evidence that single coda consonants resyllabified as onsets before a vowel within clitic groups and perhaps even (or sometimes) in larger phrases.1 Some data indicates, though not conclusively, that final -VC made position if it ended a word that was at the end of its prosodic domain. The phenomenon of breuis in longo in loci Jacobsohniani was attributed either to this, or to clause-final lengthening of a sort known from 1

Compare the behavior the English indefinite article an, where resyllabification of the n has become lexicalized in some words (newt, nickname, [a whole] nother, etc.).

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Chapter Nine: Towards a Reconstruction of the Prosody

many languages. Based on a sample from the Menaechmi, we also saw a handful of examples of resyllabification applying within a minor phonological phrase (the next higher level after a clitic group), but nearly all the examples before significant syntactic breaks (assumed to correspond to phonological phrase boundaries) occurred in metrical positions that are quantitatively ambiguous. Iambic shortening that affects the beginning of polysyllables was attributed in the case of sT- clusters to resyllabification. The literature on this subject that I consulted, both in favor of and against this hypothesis, suffers from the implicit incorrect assumption that claiming tautosyllabicity for -sT- meant that the cluster had to be tautosyllabic in all of its wordinternal occurrences. I claimed that the syllabification varied according to the position of the stress: tautosyllabicity occurred pretonically, heterosyllabicity post-tonically or after an atonic syllable. It is not clear to how many additional clusters this claim can be extended, and in the case of a word like mode˘ stus, where tautosyllabicity is seen posttonically, recourse must be made to phrasal stress patterns, as others have already proposed. Phonological word and clitic group We noted that one of the major problems in analyzing prosodic domain–construction in Plautine Latin and in evaluating the previous scholarship on the interaction of meter and language is coming to terms with what formed a phonological “word” and what did not. In previous literature, a large variety of phrases have been stipulated to form what have vaguely been called “single words” or “single units” or “word-groups”. We can document a few of these: nullo pacto in no way paulo prius a little earlier (i in) malam crucem (go to) hell malam rem a bad thing = hell labes populi disgrace of the people

minae uiginti 20 minas dies noctesque days and nights magna cum cura with great worry si quem uidet if (s)he sees anyone non tu taces wont you shut up?

These are taken from a list in Soubiran 1988, 318, and it could easily be extended. In this book, I have only been able to deal with some of these in any depth; the rest will provide material for future study. Traditional Plautine philology has only rarely stepped back to try to figure out what sorts of phrases actually did form true phonological words and


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which did not, and few of the claims concerning single-word status have been based on explicit accounts of what a single “word” is. As I have indicated passim, I consider a phonological word to be a unitary accent domain that was stressed according to the Latin penultimate stress rule; the difficulty of determining what word-groups formed single accentual domains is of course complicated by the fact that we cannot rely on the placement of the metrical ictus, and must gather independent evidence from other metrical phenomena and information outside of poetry. Luchss Law was argued to provide exactly that information for malam crucem, and here the ictus malm crucm agrees with the hypothesized stress malm-crucm. 2 This is in fact the only phrase in the list above that I feel confident formed a single phonological word in the strictest sense.3 I argued against single-word status for labes populi, magna cum cura, and ordinary Adjective–Noun phrases, to which class surely belong minae uiginti and, in spite of its stereotyped usage, nullo pacto. I have endeavored to keep “phonological word” and “clitic group” distinct in my investigations. A clitic group consists descriptively of a stressed full-content lexeme and one or more prosodically dependent words; the clitics might or might not unite with their host to form a single phonological word. The terminology can be confusing since the term “clitic” can refer to any of a number of disparate elements, and my usage of the term “phonological word” may differ from some other peoples. For example, Zwicky (1985, 286) defines a phonological word as a sequence consisting of a clitic (or series of clitics) and a word, whereas a word plus a word (e. g. preposition plus word) forms a phonological phrase. Further research, both in theoretical phonology as well as in Latin, will be needed to determine whether any of the phrases that I have called “clitic groups” displayed prosodic behaviors identical to those of phonological words or minor phrases; I have mostly left this question open. Phonological words could also be formed by compounding; two examples of this, malam crucem and uoluptas mea, were examined. To explain the accentuation, I posited a rule, similar to that found in Macedo2

3

This assumes (a) that there was a secondary stress on the final syllable, and (b) that the second ictus actually represents that secondary stress. Both claims have been the subject of considerable debate; for my views, see further below. The synonymous idiom malam rem might be expected to have been a single word, too, although, as I stated elsewhere, the prosodic status of the noun res presents a number of problems, since it is both a full-content noun as well as one that has become semantically bleached in some of its uses.

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nian for some lexicalized idiomatic compounds, of reaccentuation associated with lexicalization. Apparently when these phrases were perceived by learners of the language to be single words (due to idiomatization of their semantics, presumably), default rules went into effect to assign stress to the sequence; the default rules were simply the Latin word-stress rules. The same thing happened with Iuppiter and other univerbations of its kind, which ceased to be stressed as a phrase and underwent accent retraction according to the penultimate rule, resulting eventually in weakening of the penult from (*)-pater. The metrical phenomena we have investigated display a sensitivity to a variety of prosodic domains. Luchss Law is the only one that appears to be sensitive to the domain of the phonological word: I have hypothesized that the only reason malam crucem was allowed in place of a measure-filling quadrisyllable is that it was, in fact, a measure-filling quadrisyllable. While I do not yet fully understand why a word-initial iambic sequence set as a B in the last measure had to be part of a measure-filling word (see Ch. 3 for an attempt at an explanation), the metrical sensitivity to the prosodic difference between single word and clitic group (or minor phrase) is clear. Luchss Law, in being so strict, allows us to see that various word-groups that have loosely been referred to as forming single “words” are not true phonological words, such as prepositional phrases. With regard to the other “laws”, Plautuss poetry is sensitive to the next-larger prosodic domain, namely the clitic group. Violations of Meyers Law are obviated by a clitic group straddling the end of the first and the beginning of the second measure. The prosodic break associated with line-end was too great to allow clitic groups to straddle it in nearly all cases, but not too great to block separation of a modifier from its head noun (i. e., a minor phrase). Resolutions are not considered “split” if the word-boundary is within a clitic group. The fourth-paeon sequences that obviated a violation of Luchs (dd a B) are either single words or clitic groups. Iambic shortening applied within words and within an iambic sequence forming the left edge of a clitic group. Still other phenomena are sensitive to the next-higher level, the minor phrase: violations of Meyers Law in the second measure are followed by either measure-filling words, clitic-groups filling the last measure, or minor phrases (short NPs, for example).


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The prosodic status of verbs As is well-known, the comparative evidence of Vedic Sanskrit, Greek, and Germanic suggests that main-clause verbs in Indo-European could be prosodically deficient. In Vedic, main-clause finite verbs that are not first in their clause or pa¯da lack accent-marks; this has been variously interpreted to mean atonicity or lower pitch, or both. The recessive accentuation of Greek finite verbs and its similarity to the accentuation of clitic chains have been taken since Wackernagel 1877 to mean that in the prehistory of the language the verbs were atonic. Wackernagel (1892) added Germanic to this picture by connecting the verb-second (V2) syntax of Germanic main clauses with his law of second-position clitic placement in Indo-European on the one hand and with the non-accentuation of main-clause verbs in Vedic on the other. This finding was extended in Kuhns (1933) investigation of the placement and alliterative behavior of verbs in older Germanic heroic verse; he claimed that all finite verbs in main clauses patterned with sentential clitics. This claim has been modified by subsequent scholarship (on which a bit more further below), but without significant alteration to the central notion of lower prosodic prominence of finite verbs under certain conditions. The prosody of the Latin verb has to my knowledge not received much attention in the light of these facts,4 and for good reason: there is no overt indication that Latin finite verbs in general were atonic or prosodically deficient. However, we have seen evidence in the preceding chapters for weak prosodic status of at least some verb forms. A more thorough investigation must remain a task for the future, but it will be useful to draw together the various pieces of the puzzle examined so far, and to come to some preliminary conclusions. The evidence that monosyllabic verbs did or could behave as enclitics is fairly strong. We know of one verb in Latin that unambiguously could become a bound clitic, namely certain forms of esse when they underwent aphaeresis. Second, we saw in Ch. 4, following Gratwick 1981, that violations of Meyers Law in the first measure are usually obviated by monosyllables, including monosyllabic verbs; while the data are not entirely unambiguous, I support the view that these monosyllables cliticized to preceding words and formed clitic groups, if not unitary accentual domains (phonological words). Third, in Ch. 5 we saw that the one class of verbs that almost never enjamb are monosyllables. 4

Aside from Wackernagels (1892, 428 – 9) discussion of est.

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We saw evidence that the ability of esse to contract with a preceding noun was constrained if that noun had been rendered discontinuous from a modifier. It remains to be investigated if anything comparable is true of other monosyllabic verb forms, too. (I say “comparable” since they do not orthographically reduce or contract the way that aphaeretized est does, and whether they could unite to form a phonological word with a preceding noun is still unclear). If it is, then more general rules can be stated concerning the constraints on cliticization imposed by movement. The sort of investigation that needs to be undertaken is to see if a form like fit, for instance, has a greater propensity to follow a metrical break (such as the caesura) in the same environments in which aphaeresis was not licensed.5 We saw in Ch. 5 four examples of enjambed monosyllables that were not clause-final, of which two appeared to be right-leaning and two were uncertain. One of the uncertain cases was: Cist. 561

und tibi talenta magna uiginti pater / det dotis;

It is suggestive that pater det is rendering the phrase talenta magna uiginti dotis discontinuous, and the fact that the order is for all intents and purposes OSV, a marked order in Latin, means that the object may have been raised from out of its normal position in front of the verb, leaving a trace between pater and det that blocked the ability of these two words to unite in a single prosodic domain. As with all speculations of this kind, however, much more research is necessary to determine what kinds of syntactic movement were present in the language.6 The prosodic behavior of verbs of more than one syllable is a bit more difficult to determine. In Ch. 3 we saw that pyrrhic-shaped verbs whose ultimas elide with the following word pattern with pyrrhic-shaped proclitics (conjunctions, prepositions, etc.) in a class of exceptions to Luchss Law, whereby a pyrrhic verb eliding with a following anapest behaves like a fourth-paeon word. But it is also clear from the fact that polysyllabic clause-final verbs could freely enjamb (Ch. 5) that verbs of more than one syllable could also project their own prosodic domain, which is only

5 6

An investigation of the caesura should have results comparable to the findings in Ch. 5, but the caesura is not as strong a prosodic break as line-end. Many of the syntactic processes are covered now in Devine and Stephens 2006, but the prosodic effects of these processes are not their focus.


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natural for a full-content lexeme.7 The frequency of enjambed polysyllabic verbs is also consistent with the fact that a sequence of iambic word followed by iambic verb (the type pater petit) barely ever fills a measure of Plautine verse, as discussed in Ch. 3, which indicates rather strongly that such a sequence was not prosodically equivalent to a four-syllable word of the same metrical shape, and that therefore the verb did not cliticize to the preceding word. Another piece of evidence that bears on the prosodic status of verbs comes from iambic shortening or BB. As discussed in Chs. 7 and 8, BB does not so often affect full lexical items. I examined all the line-internal instances of iambic nouns and verbs collected in Drexler 1969a, and found that BB affects 133 nouns and does not affect 493, for an overall rate of 21.25 %. With verbs, the figures are dramatically different: in the data set investigated, 229 iambic-shaped verbs are shortened by BB and only 81 are left unshortened, for an overall rate of 73.87 %.8 The pro-

7

8

One is reminded of Vedic Sanskrit, where main-clause finite verbs, normally unaccented, are accented pa¯da-initially; but the prosodic properties of line-initial position in Plautus are rather difficult to determine, so the two cases are not necessarily comparable. In particular, the frequency of BB line-initially shows that line-beginnings were not necessarily a position of prominence (recall that there are good reasons to believe that BB here was not a metrical license). In Vedic, it is clear that a main-clause finite verb became accented after a prosodic break (though unaccented finite verbs can still occur after the caesura, in contrast to clitics, as M. Hale points out to me); we could potentially say the same for Latin if the presence of the break can be motivated, but this still does not account for the ability of the verbs to follow that break to begin with. These figures do not include more than 230 additional instances of common nouns that Drexler gives no or incomplete citations for (homo, senex, phrases of the shape pater meus without shortening, uia after a preposition, forum, manus, oblique cases of uir, and nom. sg. erus); most of these are not shortened, but some of them are elided and therefore useless (Drexler simply gives the number of occurrences without indicating how many are elided). Thus the discrepancy between nouns and verbs is likely to be even greater than the figures I have given. My source of verb data was Drexlers list of “Aussagestze” (pp. 40 – 61), which includes only third person forms. I included verbs with internal neighboring vowels (e. g. fuit, eat), except shortened ait. I should note that my figures based on Drexlers lists are different from the ones given in the table in Leppermann 1890, 78. This is due to several reasons. Leppermann, as noted in Ch. 7 n. 1, does not include forms whose last syllable is made long by position. His tables for “Declinationis Formae” include, along with the nouns, possessives undergoing synizesis, and his tables for “Coniugationis Formae” include forms like caue and scio that have become lexicalized as parti-

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sodic conclusions to be drawn are obvious; but again further work must be done to uncover the details. Ch. 8 was a partial advance in subjecting iambically shortened nouns to investigation; there we uncovered evidence that nouns that were pragmatically deemphasized were also acoustically less salient, and that this could trigger BB. It remains a task for the future to see if anything comparable is the case for verbs, or if, as in Vedic, their destressing is an automatic result of particular syntactic positions. An additional complication to these data is that the shortening seen in consonant-final verb forms varies according to the consonant: there is much clearer evidence of BB affecting verbs in final -t than in any other final consonant (Ceccarelli 1999, esp. 188 ff.). Ceccarelli concludes that these are not in fact the result of BB, but evidence that the sound change whereby long vowels were shortened before final -t had already largely run its course by Plautuss day. A detailed examination of these data is not possible here, but since there are no short scansions of final -Vt in polysyllabic verbs9 (i. e., in verb forms where BB could not have occurred), and since the sound change in question affected words of any number of syllables,10 I find it unlikely that pyrrhic uidet etc. resulted from some process other than BB. Based on the evidence at our disposal, we cannot demonstrate that verbs were sentence-enclitic, as they have sometimes been described (e. g. in Gratwick 1981), except for monosyllabic forms and light disyllables. For heavier verbs, we can only say that they were frequently prosodically deficient in some way—perhaps even unaccented, to judge by the BB facts, and therefore likely to enter the prosodic domain of neighboring fully stressed words. It should also be emphasized that for the other Indo-European languages, even if verbs were atonic or lower in pitch, there is no evidence that they were clitics except for special instances, and, as in Latin, the strongest evidence of cliticization and/or weaker accentuation comes from mono- and disyllabic forms. In Greek, the only truly enclitic verbs are monosyllabic and disyllabic forms of eQl_ and vgl_. In Germanic, a large body of research, some of it dating to before Wackernagel, has shown that monosyllabic and light disyllabic verbs, incles. If one removes these extraneous cases, shortening is twice as frequent proportionally among verbs as among nouns. 9 Ceccarelli (1999, 195 – 7) tries to cast doubt on these by noting that seventeen of the supposed instances of polysyllabic verbs ending in -Vt are uncertain in one way or another, but that still leaves fifty-two that are not, according to his figures. 10 Recall the remarks on this point in Ch. 7, n. 4.


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cluding especially the category of auxiliaries identified by Harkness (1991) and the “grammatical” verbs of Getty 1997 (auxiliaries, modals, and copular verbs), evince greater prosodic deficiency than heavier and full-content lexical verbs.11 In a more recent work, Getty (2002, 321 ff.) has noted that monosyllabic and light disyllabic finite verbs in Beowulf outnumber heavier disyllabic and polysyllabic verbs when appearing in verb-second position. He attributes this distribution to rhythmic preferences of the meter; but as we have seen from Plautus, metrical distributions are typically grounded in the prosodic behavior of the living language, and—though I have not done my own investigation of the Germanic material—I would be surprised if this were not the case there too. Finally, in Tocharian metrical texts, finite verbs (as well as nonfinite forms with gapped auxiliary) are placed adjacent to colon boundaries except for monosyllabic verbs, which are in a weaker colon-internal position (Watkins 1999). As Watkins observes, there is every reason to think the Tocharian meters are native and not borrowed, in spite of the Sanskritderived names that they generally sport; the metrical distribution of the verb-forms must be due to a linguistic feature of Tocharian, and one likely to be inherited. Syntactic movement and prosodic domain construction I argued that certain kinds of movement blocked certain phonological rules from applying. The data from Ch. 5 allowed us to adduce examples of syntactic movement inducing a prosodic break. The first comprised inversion of subject and verb at the end of a clause, either through heavy NP shift or another movement process; such subjects were seen to occur freely after a line-boundary. The second were magna cum laude constructions, where it was argued that magna had been fronted around the preposition and potentially separated prosodically from it. Another piece of evidence that syntactic movement blocked the application of certain prosodic rules was the failure of est to cliticize to nouns that were separated from their modifiers, as argued in Ch. 6. In that discussion, we noted that the movement processes are not entirely clear, and in particular, further research needs to be done to integrate the (non-)aphaeresis data with the suggestion made in Ch. 3 that phrases like diem obiit suom showed low prosodic prominence and close cohesion of the first two elements. 11 For a brief but useful overview of the scholarship on this issue and some further linguistic analysis, see Suzuki 2005.

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A still somewhat mysterious prosodic effect was mooted in Chs. 4 and 7 whereby a noun preceding a prosodically deficient word (though not necessarily an enclitic) was seen to undergo some manner of phonological reduction: some data from the discussion of Meyers Law suggested that the heavy stressed penult of such words could be reduced to some degree (the details are not recoverable), and a significant number of trisyllabic words with short initial and heavy stressed penult undergo BB of the stressed syllable in the same environment. At present, I can do little more than point these facts out and connect them with each other, alerting future researchers to the possibility that additional phenomena of this kind may yet turn up that will lead to a satisfying account. Conclusion The studies in this book do not come close to exhausting the available material. We are fortunate in having in Plautuss plays such a rich source of information about the Latin of the late third and early second centuries B.C., regardless of how problematic and difficult that source can be. All too often it is said or implied that poetry is an artificial medium, where “rules”, if they exist, are bent and broken at will. While there are modern poetic works that could well leave such an impression, the suggestion that poetic language is not rule-governed and that linguistic examinations of it are futile is groundless. A prodigious number of poetic features obviously reflect prosodic rules known from elsewhere in the language (e. g., from Plautus, the lack of prepositions at line-end representing close cohesion between preposition and object); it falls to those esprits ngatifs to show that the remaining features of poetry do not reflect the operation of fully regular linguistic rules. We will never be able to recover all the details of the prosody of a dead language (it is difficult enough with living languages), but I hope to have shown how much an analysis of metrical phenomena informed by a combination of Classical philology and modern linguistics can tell us about both the language and the poetics. If the conclusions of these studies are borne out, they have expanded our knowledge of prosodic domain–construction in Latin; allowed some Latin syntactic movement processes and specific effects of syntax on prosody to be deduced; improved our understanding of the linguistic basis of a host of metrical phenomena in Plautus; partly elucidated the prosodic behavior of finite verbs and set it in a broader Indo-European context; provided data that bears on the theoretical debate over whether to posit a prosodic domain of the clitic group intermediate between the


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word and minor phrase; and provided evidence for the effect of pragmatics on the phonological organization of phrases. I also hope to have shown that if progress is to continue to be made along the lines pursued in this book, it is essential that we combine the knowledge and methods of several disciplines in equal measure: Classical philology, Classical linguistics, Indo-European linguistics, and generative syntax and phonology. The vastness of the literature on Plautus belies a serious gap: works combining any one of the above disciplines with more than a superficial nod to another are almost entirely lacking. Most neglected has been generative linguistic theory, and not merely because it is the most recent addition to the intellectual scene: it is also a field that has had difficulty winning adherents among Classical scholars. The studies in this book should have made clear that even some fairly basic findings of that science are enormously useful not only for comprehending long-standing mysteries of Plautine metrics, but also for shaping the direction for lines of inquiry to take. The question that formed the entire basis of Ch. 6—under what syntactic, or combination of syntactic and prosodic, conditions was aphaeresis licensed and not licensed—is one of the first questions that would come to any generative grammarians mind; yet, as we saw, one looks in vain for a posing of this question, let alone an answer to it, in any of the traditional literature. Phenomena that have come to syntacticians and phonologists attention from language after language, such as the effect of branching or syntactic movement on cliticization and prosody, then immediately become available as the bases for hypotheses to guide ones investigation. The reverse is also true: generative grammarians need insights from metrics and the hundreds of years of collective knowledge and experience reaped by Classical philology in order to evaluate any theories they apply to Latin and other ancient languages. These languages pose special challenges that generative linguistics cannot always cope with on its own, that is, without careful consideration of metrical (non-linguistic) causes of particular phenomena. The metrical literature has tended to bristle with so much forbidding intricacy that non-specialists have normally shied away from it; similarly, complicated tree-diagrams and the “hard-science” look of many a work in generative linguistics can make that field seem equally forbidding. The result is that neither metrics and philology on the one hand, nor linguistics on the other, have been as mutually infused with insights from one another as they could be. But the high degree of rigor and exactitude common to all these fields means they have much to gain from collaborative efforts, of the kind that has been extremely

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fruitful for the reconstruction of Greek prosody, for the elucidation of the historical and synchronic grammar of Vedic Sanskrit, for the reconstruction of Classical Latin phonology and syntax, and for understanding the metrics and linguistics of early Germanic verse. It is now Plautuss turn.

Bibliography Critical editions of Plautus (not exhaustive) Bothe, Fridericus Henricus. 1809 – 11. M. Atti Plauti comoediarum tomus primus (–quartus). Berlin: Kuhn. Brix, Julius. 1873 – 9. Ausgewhlte Komçdien des T. Maccius Plautus. Leipzig: Teubner. Camerarius, Ioachim. [1552.] M. Accii Plauti comoediae viginti. Basle: Hervagius. Ernout, Alfred. 1932 – 8. Plaute: Comdies. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Fleckeisen, Alfred. 1850 – 1. T. Macci Plauti comoediae. Leipzig: Teubner. Gruterus, Janus. 1621. M. AccI Plauti comoediae. [Wittenberg]: Schurer. Guietus, Franciscus. 1658. Plauti comoediae in quatuor tomos digestae. With French translation by Michel de Marolles. Paris: Amy. Leo, Fridericus. 1895 – 6. Plauti comoediae. Berlin: Weidmann. Lindsay, Wallace M. 1904 – 5. T. Macci Plauti comoediae. Oxford: Clarendon. Loewe, Gustavus, Goetz, Georgius, and Fridericus Schoell. 1878 – 94. T. Macci Plauti comoediae, rec. instrum. critico et prolegom. auxit Fr. Ritschl. Leipzig: Teubner. [“Large Teubner”.] Goetz, Georgius, and Fridericus Schoell. 1893 – 6. T. Macci Plauti comoediae. Leipzig: Teubner. [“Small Teubner”.] Pylades [Giovanni Francesco Boccardo]. 1506. Comoediae uiginti plautinae ex quibus Pylades Buccardus duodeuinginti solerti diligentia correxit. Brescia: Britannico. Ritschelius, Fridericus [Friedrich Ritschl]. 1848– . T. Macci Plauti comoediae. Bonn: Koenig. [Revised and continued as Loewe, Goetz and Schoell 1878 – 94, above.] Weise, Carolus. 1837 – 8. M. Acci Plauti comoediae quae supersunt. Quedlinburg and Leipzig: Bassius.

Other references Abel, Karlhans. 1955. Die Plautusprologe. Mlheim (Ruhr) Saarn: Fabri. Adams, J. N. 1971. “A type of hyperbaton in Latin prose.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 17:1 – 16. —. 1994. Wackernagels Law and the Placement of the Copula esse in Classical Latin. Cambridge: Cambridge Philosophical Society. —. 1996. “Interpuncts as evidence for the enclitic character of personal pronouns in Latin.” Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 111:208 – 10. Adiego Lajara, Ignacio J. 1999. “Sobre la correptio iambica del drama latino arcaico.” In Jesffls Luque Moreno and Pedro Rafael Daz y Daz (eds.), Estudios de mtrica latina (Granada: Universidad de Granada), 1:55 – 67.

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Index Locorum* Amphitruo Am. 9 79 Am. 19 229, 231 Am. 41 7 Am. 42 71 Am. 46 48 Am. 60 71 Am. 72 15 Am. 80 159 Am. 90 224 Am. 91–2 120 Am. 94 79, 87 Am. 97 119 Am. 100 71, 147, 169 Am. 102 79 Am. 103 72 Am. 104 47, 220, 221 Am. 137 48, 63 Am. 149 55 Am. 188 37 Am. 244 111, 116–7 Am. 293 159 Am. 321 82 Am. 345 82 Am. 362 146, 148, 149 Am. 363 147 Am. 379 151 Am. 381 146, 149 Am. 391 208 Am. 401 82 Am. 410 220, 221 Am. 438 82, 87 Am. 442 166, 167, 168, 170, 173 Am. 443 166, 167, 173 Am. 481 58, 59 Am. 490 71 Am. 533 147 Am. 537 167, 170 *

Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Am.

538 167 545 38 601 166, 167, 173 610 156, 157 652–3 164 653 154, 164–5 721 191, 218 761 210 778 119 791 226 793 201, 202 816 197 825 119, 123 856 157 882 79, 87 889 58 914 43, 79 978 107, 108 980 121 983 37 994 258 1013 132 1049–50 229 1058 52 1078 158 1146 220, 221

Asinaria As. 2–3 229 As. 3 249, 250–1 As. 16 123, 125 As. 85 79, 87 As. 100 55 As. 106 63 As. 110 79, 87 As. 111 107 As. 184 82, 87 As. 217 208, 210, 224, 226

Page references for ranges of lines (e.g. Aul. 294–5) are placed before page references for single lines contained within that range (e.g. Aul. 294).

290 As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As. As.

Index Locorum

228 106 250 82, 87, 89 339 123 345 129, 130 360 123 394 158 410 143, 151 433 121, 208 435 224 484–5 224 490 229 492 208 495 148 564 121 585 117 619 147 646 151 655–6 229 701 224 704 173, 174 775 79 800 68 817 196 818 196 912 148 920 123, 124

Aulularia Aul. 20 38, 41 Aul. 21 192, 197 Aul. 28 55 Aul. 32 199 Aul. 35 71, 153 Aul. 40 76 Aul. 55 55 Aul. 95 71 Aul. 165 195 Aul. 185 210 Aul. 196 151, 152 Aul. 234 230, 231 Aul. 258 197 Aul. 288 123, 124 Aul. 294–5 224 Aul. 294 123 Aul. 297 79 Aul. 310 198 Aul. 322 192 Aul. 324 167, 168, 173

Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul. Aul.

372 375 378 389 395 402 403 412 421 448 456 461 478 479 482 483 489 498 513 517 523 531 534 541 548 557 564 576 599 610 649 654 658 665 667 672 714 765 779 780 790 810 812 813

55 72, 73 79 144, 145 210 146 192 138 163–4 163, 171 197 209 121 107, 123 199, 209 193 121 123 204 119 69 43 197 107, 108 224 71 159, 160 71 210 123 121 165 82 223, 224 129 15 8–9 128 22 225, 226 159 228 222, 253 160

Bacchides Bac. 6 166, 167 Bac. 66 197

291

Index Locorum

Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac.

75 230 85 147 87 228 120 148 150 58, 59 151 154 152 71 172 63, 123 188 197 193 250 194 160 195 160 205 193 220 38 224 55 226 192 234 222 245 67 246 72, 74 272 210 277 71 279 123 300 71 301 71 308 146 329 192 336 159 401 85–6 403–4 230 403 119 404 231 406 123 413 119 422 8–9 440 169 462 151 480 219 508 49 532 225 540 132 543 160 546 190 557 148, 149 581 144, 158 583 71 592 210 599 71 622 160

Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac. Bac.

669 56–7 752 228 774 145 777 121 853 56 856 69 872 156 879 122 885 193 887 192 913 147 932 52 937 145 946 145 947 145, 204 997 130 1044 156 1077 112 1084a–5 125 1105 225, 226 1146 156, 157 1159 139 1163 132 1184 128 1198 155

Captiui Cap. 11 Cap. 12 Cap. 24 Cap. 37 Cap. 49 Cap. 64 Cap. 71 Cap. 80 Cap. 83 Cap. 86 Cap. 93 Cap. 98 Cap. 110 Cap. 111 Cap. 116 Cap. 118 Cap. 119 Cap. 123 Cap. 124 Cap. 133 Cap. 135

80, 87 148 68 56 115, 192, 197 107, 108 199 201, 202 199 57 68 123 55 58, 59 169, 220 67, 68 132 222 192 193 70

292 Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap. Cap.

Index Locorum

143 79 159 80, 123 162–4 226, 227 175 55 291 159, 227 316 222 335 153 362 80 373 80 377 48 380 131 431 209 432 48 441 197 463 143 518 167, 168, 173 553 227 569 107 571 201, 202 572 201, 202 574 147 604 119 623 174 666 220, 221 698 192, 209 707 240 709 240 823 256 884 129, 130 888 147 953 117 973 82 974 153 987 49 990 159 994 149, 155, 157 1012 48 1015 154

Casina Cas. 35 230, 231 Cas. 59 68 Cas. 134 80, 87 Cas. 136 213 Cas. 230 49 Cas. 387 38 Cas. 427 80, 87 Cas. 453–4 213

Cas. Cas. Cas. Cas. Cas. Cas. Cas. Cas. Cas. Cas. Cas. Cas. Cas. Cas. Cas. Cas.

453 454 506 530 547 641 762 764 791 825 839 847 849 903 965 992

198, 213 258 56 197 129 44 220, 221 230, 231 72, 74 191, 218 147 147 192 139 201, 202 123

Cistellaria Cist. 43 225, 226 Cist. 63 82, 87 Cist. 69 225 Cist. 104 129, 130 Cist. 148 38 Cist. 162 55 Cist. 177 123 Cist. 297 55, 214 Cist. 312 22 Cist. 456 214 Cist. 513 220, 221 Cist. 539 193 Cist. 561 131, 264 Cist. 565 55 Cist. 594 219, 225, 226 Cist. 596 43 Cist. 602 159 Cist. 615 55 Cist. 634 197 Cist. 651 123 Cist. 690 161 Cist. 720 148 Cist. 767 193 Curculio Cur. 15–16 80 Cur. 15 80 Cur. 17 230 Cur. 27 80 Cur. 46 79

293

Index Locorum

Cur. 66 42–3 Cur. 86 38, 146 Cur. 110 219 Cur. 115 161 Cur. 184 146 Cur. 219 67 Cur. 244 225 Cur. 252 227 Cur. 275 68 Cur. 277 194 Cur. 308 89 Cur. 311 195 Cur. 318 209 Cur. 345 119, 210 Cur. 354 197 Cur. 359–60 230, 231 Cur. 360 231 Cur. 374 55 Cur. 407 162–3 Cur. 414 145 Cur. 420 123 Cur. 438 80, 87 Cur. 499 147, 149 Cur. 572 209 Cur. 595 209 Cur. 602 82, 87, 89 Cur. 614 228 Cur. 649 69 Cur. 692 107 Epidicus Ep. 45 38, 40 Ep. 47 55 Ep. 49 145 Ep. 60 154 Ep. 102 169 Ep. 168 139 Ep. 202 123 Ep. 214 39, 77 Ep. 234 230 Ep. 237 201, 202 Ep. 288 227 Ep. 338 209 Ep. 349 48 Ep. 400 68 Ep. 406 131 Ep. 411 151 Ep. 438 220, 221

Ep. Ep. Ep. Ep. Ep. Ep. Ep. Ep. Ep. Ep. Ep. Ep.

446 471 477 498 511 597 601 626 643 653 671 722

68 79, 80 67 80, 85 199 123 38 209 151 39, 82, 87 143 201, 202

Menaechmi Men. 22 196 Men. 44 225, 226 Men. 56 112 Men. 72 147 Men. 96 131 Men. 133 48 Men. 211 76, 77, 82, 87 Men. 237 131 Men. 294 72, 73 Men. 300 35, 48 Men. 308 67 Men. 312 151 Men. 320 201, 202 Men. 327 80 Men. 336 196 Men. 344 199 Men. 359 55, 56 Men. 384 125 Men. 399–400 39 Men. 399 39 Men. 471 63 Men. 499 69 Men. 506 80, 87 Men. 530 192 Men. 535 68 Men. 550 38 Men. 565 193 Men. 601 89 Men. 608 169 Men. 630 73 Men. 640 43 Men. 651 146 Men. 681 74 Men. 689 210

294 Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men. Men.

Index Locorum

719 55 724 147 732 192 747 48 750 35, 47 777 169 827 210 841 77, 87, 89 849 44 873a 73, 74 877 77 887 80, 87 900 82, 89 921 82, 87, 89 941 230 973 48 1051 107 1063 166, 168, 173 1070–1 52 1070 148 1076 211 1087 152 1128 220, 221

Mercator Mer. 10 73, 74 Mer. 95 73 Mer. 97 159 Mer. 100–1 120 Mer. 100 120 Mer. 152–3 224 Mer. 169 159 Mer. 202 43, 82 Mer. 208–9 230 Mer. 245 214 Mer. 262 124 Mer. 312 55 Mer. 317 63 Mer. 327 211 Mer. 377 202 Mer. 394 39 Mer. 412 89 Mer. 448 211 Mer. 451 167–8, 173 Mer. 502 174 Mer. 513 155 Mer. 514 166 Mer. 598 160

Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer. Mer.

605 160 611 82, 87 614 159 619 82, 89 620–1 190, 191 623 120 672 163, 171 683 200 693 80 706 80, 87 720 157 726 199, 200 728 57 730 55 738 211 751 199, 200 786 111 804 209 812 194 816 157 833 143, 169 841 211 859 39 867 130 933 225 941 201, 202 945 146 951 151 988 211 1005 167, 168, 173 1007 129 1008 82, 87

Miles gloriosus Mil. 9 122 Mil. 27 80 Mil. 29 68, 69 Mil. 31 73 Mil. 39 43 Mil. 69 210, 211, 214, 215 Mil. 88 145 Mil. 140 120 Mil. 145 147 Mil. 154 223 Mil. 182 120 Mil. 185a 211 Mil. 204 52, 122 Mil. 240 165

295

Index Locorum

Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil.

254 288 290 325 328 348 362 373 387 410 451 473 481 483 502 542 547 554 558 618 623 659 663 664 665 727 738 746 768 804 805 822 827 848 875 881 901 915 927 985 986 987 997 1009 1043 1062 1095 1104

106 195 211 220, 221 222 151 225 229 122 225 82, 87, 148 122 77, 87 158 69 201, 202 58 67 249, 253 83, 87 197 122 249, 253 249, 253, 255 148 83, 87 111 249 117 39 139, 154 192 73, 74 80, 87 107 139 146 152 129 225 152, 153 152 164, 171 131 151 167 73, 74 39

Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil. Mil.

1106 1118 1125 1132 1135 1142 1152 1190 1191 1193 1218 1227 1238 1268 1273 1307 1314 1338 1346 1357 1369 1425 1434

131 209 68, 69, 122 118, 119 69 43 120 219, 230, 231, 232 230, 231 211 148 151 7 48 219, 222 72 83 83 213 39 220 83, 89 228

Mostellaria Mos. 3 69 Mos. 49–50 48 Mos. 57 38 Mos. 159 129 Mos. 217 211 Mos. 241 219 Mos. 249 213 Mos. 256 78, 83 Mos. 283 211 Mos. 294 213 Mos. 352 107 Mos. 378 225 Mos. 402 83 Mos. 444 192 Mos. 445 157, 161 Mos. 468 120 Mos. 478 209 Mos. 484 120 Mos. 489 67 Mos. 497 71 Mos. 501 211 Mos. 504 211 Mos. 523 39, 40

296 Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos. Mos.

Index Locorum

529 595 605 610 636 657 670 823 905 910 948 952 970 975 980 983 988 995 999 1008 1031 1062 1086 1090 1100 1118 1124 1157 1169 1174

106 69 55 193 120 148 46 41 78 131 220, 221 225, 226 153 125, 131 146 147 158 132 80, 87 132 128 222 195 39 78, 87 83 214 155 209 209

Persa Per. 7 48 Per. 14 146, 169 Per. 57 229 Per. 68 58, 59 Per. 80 143 Per. 85 58 Per. 105 123–4 Per. 120 147, 161 Per. 129 199 Per. 140 55 Per. 159 198 Per. 186 83 Per. 192 230 Per. 201 167, 168, 173 Per. 243 220 Per. 244 147, 149

Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per. Per.

277 148 328–35 109 328 236 330 107, 109 332 71 355 169 359 48 371 249 372 57 380 192 398 80, 87 408 73, 74 433 80, 87 460 193 465 67 466 63 512 48 543 120 552 78, 87 591 220 606 107 609 112 645 190, 191 706 73 733 39 734 209 741 155 835 89

Poenulus Poen. 1 204 Poen. 2 71 Poen. 9 246 Poen. 12 246 Poen. 15 243 Poen. 27 38 Poen. 52 159 Poen. 53 67, 68 Poen. 57 243 Poen. 85 80, 87 Poen. 93 80 Poen. 96–7 243 Poen. 106 111 Poen. 111 241 Poen. 124 246 Poen. 125 246 Poen. 136 246 Poen. 153 244

297

Index Locorum

Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen.

164 246 165 122 170 244 181 242 190 69 191–2 241 191 125 200 152 202 56 204 246 230 160 265 125 285 246 290 44 296 243 297 228 298 132 301 190 309 249, 253 331 112 348 174 354 243 355–6 242 364 82 365ff. 246 365 83, 85, 87 370 48 392–4 245 392 258 402 246 407 246 413 242 417–20 246 419 211 424–6 243 446 246 447 52 472–3 242 494 245 497–8 244 500 43 503 244 509 246 540 245, 246 547 246 561–2 242 563 242 609a 220

Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen.

619 192 620 193 622–2a 118, 119 628 80, 87 631–2 244 631 246 637 69 643 244 659 246 664 196 672 156 675 246 679 246 681 58 712 246 724 245 731 246 733 199 737 228 741 148 750 246 761–2 243 773-4 245 797 246 801 245 810 243 811 246 814 242 818 235 824 147 826 156, 235 827 197 830 246 838 245 842–3 240 843 49 848 246 852 246 859 236 861 143 863–5 236 871 246 872–3 242 875 209 878 246 879 237 881 237 885 237

298 Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen. Poen.

Index Locorum

888 238 890 230 892 238 894 239 900 246 901–3 239 901 83, 239 903 83, 239 904 39, 41, 242 906 246 907 212 912 240 915 40, 41 917–8 240 920 240 922–3 163 951 56 957a 250 975 166 980 55 991 58 1008 227 1052 80, 87 1058 73 1071 58 1078 201, 202 1102 220 1108 79 1133 166 1165 209 1171 192 1173 59 1206 212 1227 148 1259–60 228 1260 122 1295 89 1319 73, 74 1335 72 1336 117 1384 69

Pseudolus Ps. 58 122 Ps. 59 81, 87 Ps. 61 57 Ps. 100 79, 81 Ps. 140 129

Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps.

142 190 180 209 182 159 246 161 261 161 266 107 272 151 294 160 346 83, 89 355 83, 89 381 156 396 81, 87 400 115, 192, 197 418 158 434 107 445 156, 157, 192 482 125 486 69 498 209 521 155 524 40 533 107 541 129, 130 544 56, 71 544a 219, 225 555 69 563 81 574 250 585 40 618 219 636 148 645 78 648 147 649 122 660 83 688 120 727 147 729 107 740 227 762 220 776 73 782 148 783 56 800 44 810 43 812 230, 231 835–36 118 835 118

Index Locorum

Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps. Ps.

849 860 877 930 937 954 995 996 1001 1003 1009 1038 1039 1055 1073 1096 1124 1136 1185 1193 1216 1230 1240 1246 1256

Rudens Rud. 11 Rud. 23 Rud. 35 Rud. 58 Rud. 59 Rud. 70 Rud. 77 Rud. 87 Rud. 88 Rud. 111 Rud. 256 Rud. 257 Rud. 278 Rud. 316 Rud. 328 Rud. 334 Rud. 345 Rud. 359 Rud. 364 Rud. 372 Rud. 373

125 230, 231 51 160 151 134, 161–2 212 156 145 81 156 71 56 199 209 57 156 197 83 146 145 219 128 132 129 67 225 225, 226 120 128 81 40 199, 200 208 55 151 161 149 122 225 120 48, 238–9 160 169 122 166

Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud. Rud.

403 120 437 258 439 213 476 120 491 156, 157, 195 499 117 506 230 518 44–5 656 191, 218 679 161 685–6 230 686 231 714 212 736 212 761 165–6 775 47 895 199 901 57 963 152, 172 994 160 1002 84 1021 152, 172 1052 147, 249 1054 146, 155, 156 1057 155, 156 1061 131 1071 151 1073 155 1091 152 1094 153 1156 144, 146, 149–50 1158 158 1162 257 1169–70 118 1169 118, 119 1195 73 1208 207 1235 125 1247 38 1268 169 1317 153 1358 156 1360 156 1361 156, 230, 231 1362 249

Stichus St. 50 152, 153–5

299

300 St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St. St.

53 68 74 81 86 95 97 97 98 99 99 100 127 134 140 165 167 179 204 209 217 256 290 330 344 374 418 458 474 498 507 513 520 532 555 563 573 574 576 599 615 643 655 660 663 665 683 685

Index Locorum

219 228 167, 171, 173 154 209 154 154 212 220, 221 191 218 209 197 146 166 212, 214 125 199 63 81, 87 160 212 151 161 89 89 199 148 209 158 209 195 212 204 219 230, 231 227 84, 87 255 195 84 55 147 77, 87 71 148 231 112

St. St. St. St. St. St. St.

692 715 716 723 726 758 765

212 209 78 209 191 107 167, 168, 173

Trinummus Trin. 3 57 Trin. 55 169 Trin. 58 196 Trin. 95 63 Trin. 109 249, 250, 251 Trin. 120 118 Trin. 127 212 Trin. 130 139 Trin. 132 202 Trin. 139 70 Trin. 146 58 Trin. 186 111 Trin. 311 43 Trin. 316 228 Trin. 324 120 Trin. 361 227, 228 Trin. 368 147 Trin. 374 231 Trin. 397 56 Trin. 421 193 Trin. 425 77 Trin. 426a 70 Trin. 432 147 Trin. 442 107 Trin. 458 56 Trin. 482 197 Trin. 527 73 Trin. 533 52–3 Trin. 536 153 Trin. 538 79 Trin. 541 134 Trin. 559 196 Trin. 575 57 Trin. 584 227 Trin. 595 192 Trin. 674–8 223 Trin. 675 223 Trin. 679 167, 173 Trin. 712 146

301

Index Locorum

Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin. Trin.

714 84 725 213 745 120 765 228 823 111 828 167 843 40 848–9 228 868 225 878 40 887 227 897 40 906 84, 87 964 201, 202 971 84, 87 983 213 1006 192 1017 249, 253 1027 146 1046 84 1055 156, 157 1093 192 1133 197 1145–6 165

Truculentus Truc. 6 79 Truc. 10 71 Truc. 28 129, 130, 131 Truc. 31 146 Truc. 33 81 Truc. 46 214 Truc. 49 43, 79 Truc. 66 59 Truc. 78a 166 Truc. 82 202 Truc. 116 161 Truc. 122 161 Truc. 170 166, 167, 168, 170, 173 Truc. 173 151, 152 Truc. 216 146, 151 Truc. 224 191 Truc. 241 169 Truc. 246 169 Truc. 272 201, 202 Truc. 297 107, 108

Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc. Truc.

297 84, 87 333 81 355–6 151 391 122 425 81, 87 426 213 429 191, 218 433 67 470 147 489 166 502 43 504 209 505 166, 167, 168, 173 507 156, 166, 167, 173 514 202 526 38 540 213 546 213 586 46 593 78, 87 595 151 661 125 662 58 672 68 676 223 678 224 725 161 757 82, 89 775 156 800 220, 221 817 209 819 169 858 174, 209 860 213 891 160 901 231 903 227 907 202, 227 927 48 960 143

Vidularia Vid. 17a 166 Vid. 24 81, 87 Vid. 25 115, 192, 197 Vid. 87 81

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