Early Dactylic Prose in the History of Greek Prose Rhythm

2019 ◽  
pp. 175-196
Keyword(s):  
1956 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 145-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Catherine Dunn

“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.


1931 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
W.H. Shewring

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.


1939 ◽  
Vol 33 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 194-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. H. Sandbach
Keyword(s):  

The first study of Plutarch's prose-rhythm was made by Dr. A. W. de Groot, whose results were published in certain preliminary articles and in his Handbook of Greek Prose Rhythm, a work which is one of the landmarks in the history of its subject. In it he insisted that to discover which forms of clausula were favoured or avoided by any author it was not sufficient to make a count and discover which were frequent, which infrequent; for a form may be frequent not because an author feels it suitable for the end of a sentence, but because he likes it at any point in his sentence, or even because we should find it frequent if we picked out words by chance from the dictionary. To discover which rhythms are specially sought or avoided at the end of a sentence we must compare the ends with the sentence as a whole. This Dr. de Groot did for a number of texts, included in which were selections from Plutarch's Lives.


Author(s):  
Michael Winterbottom

M. Weissenberger’ s Sopatri Quaestionum divisio—Sopatros: Streitfälle. Gliederung und Ausarbeitung kontroverser Reden (2010) is the first modern edition of a text important for the history of declamation in antiquity. It employs the material amassed in D. C. Innes and M. Winterbottom, Sopatros the Rhetor (1988) to produce a revised text that enormously improves on that of Walz in Rhetores Graeci 8 (1835), and includes a German translation and full notes. This review commends this achievement, but notes that the book is not much more easy to use than Innes and Winterbottom, the inconvenience of which Weissenberger deplores. The reviewer remarks on Weissenberger’s neglect of Sopatros’ prose rhythm, lists a number of passages where the text is still in doubt, and offers some new emendations. He ends: ‘Readers of Weissenberger’s…monumental book will need to be pretty knowledgeable…but they will be richly rewarded.’


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