The Nature and Perception of Attic Prose Rhythm

Greek literature is divided, like many literatures, into poetry and prose; but in the earlier Roman Empire, 31 BC to AD 300, much Greek (and Latin) prose was written in one organized rhythmic system. Whether most, or hardly any, Greek prose adopted this patterning has been entirely unclear; this book for the first time adequately establishes an answer. It then seeks to get deeper into the nature of prose-rhythm through one of the greatest Imperial works, Plutarch’s Lives. All its phrases, almost 100,000, have been scanned rhythmically. Prose-rhythm is revealed as a means of expression, which draws attention to words and word-groups. (Online readings are offered too.) Some passages in the Lives pack rhythms together more closely than others; the book looks especially at rhythmically dense passages. These do not occur randomly; they attract attention to themselves, and are marked out as climactic in the narrative, or as in other ways of highlighted significance. Comparison emerges as crucial to the Lives on many levels. Much of the book closely discusses particular dense moments, in commentary form, to show how much rhythm contributes to understanding, and is to be integrated with other sorts of criticism. These remarkable passages make apparent the greatness of Plutarch as a prose-writer: a side not greatly considered amid the huge resurgence of work on him. The book also analyses closely rhythmic and unrhythmic passages from three Greek novelists. Rhythm illuminates both a supreme Greek writer, Plutarch, and three prolific centuries of Greek literary history.

Cursus in Dante Alighieri’s prose books De vulgari eloquentia, De Monarchia and Convivio

Studia Metrica et Poetica ◽

10.12697/smp.2016.3.1.04 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

pp. 105-120

Author(s):

Annika Mikkel

Keyword(s):

Statistical Analysis ◽

Medieval Latin ◽

Word Stress ◽

Comparative Statistical Analysis ◽

Prose Rhythm ◽

De Vulgari Eloquentia

This paper examines the prose rhythm in Dante’s Latin and Italian prose. The samples of Dante’s Latin books De vulgari eloquentia and De Monarchia and the Italian book Convivio are analysed with the purpose of finding the incidence and patterns of prose rhythm. The method used in this paper is comparative-statistical analysis. The rhythm of classic prose was based on the quantity of syllables, while the medieval Latin prose rhythm was based on word stress and called cursus. Although the use of cursus was more popular in Latin prose, it can also be found elsewhere, including Italian prose. The analysis reveals that rhythmical sentences endings have a role in Dante’s prose and that the cursus appear in his Latin works, as well as in his works in vernacular.

Appendix: Prose rhythm

Cicero De Natvra Deorvm Liber I ◽

10.1017/cbo9780511803628.005 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 204-205

Author(s):

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Keyword(s):

Prose Rhythm

Quintilian on Effective Language

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198713784.013.8 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 141-161

Author(s):

Jeanne Fahnestock

Keyword(s):

Word Order ◽

Final Section ◽

Word Choice ◽

Rhetorical Style ◽

Figures Of Speech ◽

Passage Level ◽

The Third ◽

Prose Rhythm ◽

Definition Of ◽

Major Division

Books 8 and 9 of the Institutio take up the third major division of rhetoric, elocutio or effective rhetorical style. Here Quintilian offers an encyclopaedic review of choices and devices at the word, sentence, and passage level, providing examples of their functions and potential abuses. Book 8 covers three of the four virtues of style: correctness, clarity, and ornatus or force. Quintilian favours everyday usage in word choice and warns against the faults of monotony, excess, and offensiveness. He praises visualizing language (enargeia), demurs on sententiae or pithy expressions, and reviews amplifying tactics, such as placing an item in, at the top, or even beyond a rising series, leading to speechlessness. The final section reviews twelve tropes, with special attention to how metaphors are invented. Book 9 opens with a definition of figures of speech as departures from normal usage, and discusses how the form of an expression contributes to its function. It then covers the ‘figures of thought’ such as prosopopoeia and irony, and the syntactic figures or schemes including figures of repetition. The last part treats compositio, involving word order, sound, and rhythm. Using the metrical vocabulary of poetry, Quintilian analyses prosody in terms of the proportion of long to short syllables, creating the pace of a passage, and then discusses prose rhythm in terms of the comma, colon, and period. Overall, Quintilian’s rich and complex treatment of rhetorical style should fuel continuing investigations.

AUTOMATED ANALYSIS OF RHYTHMIC CHARACTERISTICS OF RUSSIAN- LITERARY PROSAIC TEXT AS A METHOD FOR DETERMINING THE TEXT AFFILIATION TO A LITERARY PERIOD

Cherepovets State University Bulletin ◽

10.23859/1994-0637-2020-6-99-6 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 6 (99) ◽

pp. 73-85

Author(s):

ELENA I. BOYCHUK ◽

ELENA V. MISHENKINA

Keyword(s):

Statistical Methods ◽

Russian Literature ◽

Automated Analysis ◽

Russian Language ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Russian Literary ◽

Prose Rhythm ◽

Literary Period ◽

Rhythmic Structures

The article analyses the rhythmic characteristics of Russian-language literary texts using the automated PRD (Prose Rhythm Detector) application. The authors consider the main approaches to the periodization of Russian literature of the XIX-XXI centuries in order to determine the affiliation of works to a particular epoch based on the specifics of the text rhythmic structures. The quantitative and statistical methods of the analysis are used.

Early Dactylic Prose in the History of Greek Prose Rhythm

The Paths of Greek ◽

10.1515/9783110621747-009 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 175-196

Keyword(s):

History Of ◽

Prose Rhythm

Almost-Poetics: Prose Rhythm in George Berkeley’s Siris

Philosophy and Literature ◽

10.1353/phl.2019.0025 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 43 (2) ◽

pp. 336-349

Author(s):

Chris Townsend

Keyword(s):

Prose Rhythm

Lipsius and the Art of Letter-Writing

Studies in the Renaissance ◽

10.2307/2857105 ◽

1956 ◽

Vol 3 ◽

pp. 145-156 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

E. Catherine Dunn

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

Literary History ◽

Ben Jonson ◽

Letter Writing ◽

Prose Style ◽

History Of ◽

Prose Rhythm ◽

Relationship Of ◽

The Relationship ◽

Precise Role

“The whole history of the ‘epistle,’ as a literary genre, is full of interest and invites investigation.” — W. Rhys Roberts.One of Professor Morris Croll's earliest essays on prose style was an article on Justus Lipsius, the sixteenth-century Belgian scholar and rhetorician whose name has become identified with the “anti-Ciceronian” school of prose. Croll later studied him as the leader of a triumvirate (Lipsius, Montaigne, and Bacon), and thus clarified somewhat the relationship of English prose style to continental experiments. The indebtedness of certain English writers, like John Hoskyns and Ben Jonson, to the epistolary theory of Lipsius is now well known, but the precise role played by his Epistolica institutio in literary history has never been clearly presented. Because Professor Croll's interests were centered in prose rhythm, he analyzed the Institutio only for the light it shed upon the development of “Attic” prose structure in the Renaissance.

Prose-Rhythm and the Comparative Method

The Classical Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0009838800021418 ◽

1931 ◽

Vol 25 (1) ◽

pp. 12-22 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

W.H. Shewring

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Theoretical Calculation ◽

Comparative Method ◽

Previous Article ◽

Greek Language ◽

Theoretical Frequency ◽

Normal Frequency ◽

History Of ◽

Prose Rhythm ◽

The Difference

The theory of the comparative method has been discussed in a previous article. I pass on to the results obtained—the actual history of prose-rhythm in the practice of particular authors. I give below the figures of normal frequency on which my statements are based. For Greek prose, as I have already said, Thucydides may be considered a practically unmetrical author, since nearly all his clausulae occur with about the same frequency as might be expected from the natural proportion of long and short syllables in the Greek language, and since there is little difference between his sentence-metre and his clausula-metre. (A slight difference between the two is natural, because there are some words, such as the article, which can scarcely be used to close a sentence.) Thus the theoretical frequency of — ∪ — is 14·19 per cent.; its frequency in Thucydides' clausula-metre is 14·2, in his sentence-metre 14·4. But there are two cases where the difference in these proportions seems too great to be due altogether to chance. Compared with the theoretical calculation and with the sentence-metre, —∪∪—— occurs in the clausula considerably more frequently (6·1 per cent, as against 2·6 per cent.) and —∪—∪ considerably less (3·7 per cent, as against 5·1 per cent.). The first form seems to be sought by Thucydides; the second seems to be avoided (doubtless as suggesting an iambic trimeter ending). For these two forms, therefore, I have considered as normal the average percentages of 2,000 cases in the sentence-metre of Thucydides and Xenophon (1,000 each), for the rest the percentages of 2,000 cases in the clausula-metre of Thucydides. For normal frequency in Latin metrical prose I have used de Groot's figures, based on 2,000 cases from nineteenth-century Latin translations of Gregory and Athanasius.