page_title: Metres of Roman comedy
section_title: Verse ictus and accent
hierarchical_section_title: Metres of Roman comedy / Prosody of Plautus and Terence / Verse ictus and accent
caption_attribution_description: English: Mosaics from Pompeii in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples (
context_page_description: Roman comedy is represented by two Latin playwrights, Plautus and Terence. The works of other playwrights such as Livius Andronicus, Naevius and Ennius are now lost except for a few lines quoted in other authors. 20 plays of Plautus survive complete, and 6 of Terence.
  Various metres are used in the plays. As far as is known, the iambic senarii were spoken without music; trochaic septenarii were chanted or recited to the sound of a pair of pipes known as tībiae, played by a tībīcen; and other metres were sung, possibly in an operatic style, to the same tībiae. In Plautus about 37% of lines are unaccompanied iambic senarii, but in Terence more than half of the verses are senarii. Plautus's plays therefore had a greater amount of musical accompaniment than Terence's. Another difference between the playwrights was that polymetric songs are frequent in Plautus, but hardly used at all by Terence.
  The different metres lend themselves to different moods: calm, energetic, comic, mocking, high-flown, grandiose, humorous, and so on.
context_section_description: There is some controversy among scholars over whether Greek and Latin verse had a regular "beat" (ictus) like modern western music. On one side, supporting the idea of ictus, are scholars such as W. Sidney Allen, Lionel Pearson, and from an earlier generation E.H. Sturtevant and Wallace Lindsay. Sturtevant writes: "It is scarcely possible any longer to doubt that accent was an important feature of early dramatic verse; the quantitative nature of the measures was carefully preserved, but at the same time accent was constantly taken into account."
  However, many scholars, such as Paul Maas, Cesare Questa, and Wolfgang de Melo argue that there was no beat or "ictus"; in their view, rhythm is "simply the regulated sequence of short and long syllables". Similarly, Benjamin Fortson writes: "The theory that there was a verse-ictus, never universally accepted, has by now been thoroughly discredited." Gratwick, in his edition of the Menaechmi, takes an intermediate position, rejecting "both the Anglo-German view that the lines are isochronous with a regular metrical beat attached to every longum, and the Franco-Italian view that there is no ictus at all in such verses".
  One fact which is generally agreed on is that in iambic and trochaic metres, there was usually a fairly strong agreement between where the ictus is assumed to be and the accent of the words. Thus in iambics a word-accent is generally heard on the 2nd, 4th, 6th and 8th elements of the line:
  nē quis mīrētur quī sim, paucīs ēloquar.
  | – – – – | – – – – | – – u – |
  "In case anyone is wondering who I am, let me explain briefly."
  Whereas in trochaics, the accent is usually heard on the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th elements:
  vīvō fīt quod numquam quisquam mortuō faciēt mihī.
  | – – – – | – – – – || – u – uu | – u – |
  "It's happening to me alive what no one will ever do to me when I am dead!"
  Thus even though both lines begin with a series of long syllables, it is immediately obvious on reading them that the first is iambic and second trochaic. Those who argue that there is no ictus say that, given that there is generally a word-break (caesura) after the 5th element of the iambic senarius, the word accents tend to fall naturally on the second and fourth elements rather than on the anceps elements. In the final metron, there is often a clash between ictus and accent. Gratwick's view is that so far from attempting to make the word accent match the ictus, Roman writers often deliberately tried to avoid such coincidence, especially at the beginning and end of the line, to avoid monotony.
  Another question is whether, if there was a perceptible beat, it was heard at regular intervals as in modern western music, or irregularly. Gratwick argues that the ictus was not isochronous, but that the timing depended on whether the anceps syllables were long or short. Not all scholars agree with this, however; Pearson, in his edition of Aristoxenus's treatise on rhythm, argues that it was possible or likely that in an iambic line the length of the syllables was adjusted to make the bars of equal length.
  Another point of interest is whether, if there was a beat, there was one beat per foot or one every metron (group of two feet); and if it was one per metron, on which of the two long elements was it heard? As far as Ancient Greek poetry was concerned, "Ancient discussions of the trochaic tetrameter and similar metres repeatedly refer to one percussiō per metron" (Moore). Whether this also applied to Latin, where for example Horace describes the senarius as having six beats per line (sēnōs ictūs), is unclear. Should the following trochaic septenarius be read with eight beats, for example?
  nōnn(e) hāc noctū nostra nāvis hūc ex portu Persicō
  Or is it better to read it with four beats, as follows?
  nōnn(e) hāc noctū nostra navis hūc ex portū Persicō
  After examining the evidence Moore comes to the conclusion that in Roman comedy, the pipe-player (tībīcen) "provided some emphasis to all strong elements, maintaining the sense of feet, but that the "beats" on the odd-numbered feet were stronger." Similarly
caption: Trio of musicians playing tībiae, cymbala, and tympanum (mosaic from Pompeii)
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