No More Learning

Now here there are at least four serious difficulties:

1. While the principle of the verse is accentual half the words in any
given line may be accented as they were never accented anywhere else.

2. Sometimes verse-accent and word-accent do not correspond even at the
last accent in a colon. There is, for example, no better authenticated
Saturnian than

Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus:

and it is incredible that at any period in the history of the Latin
language the word-accent ever fell on the middle syllable of
_Lucius_[17].

3. The incidence of word-accent is left unfixed save so far as the
incidence of verse-accent enables us to fix it. But the incidence of the
verse-accent is itself hopelessly uncertain. In a very large percentage
of saturnian lines we abandon the natural word-accent and have at the
same time no possible means of determining upon what syllable of what
word we are to put the verse-accent.

dabúnt malúm Metélli Naéuió poétae

is simple enough: but when we come to

sin illos deserant fortissimos uiros
magnum stuprum populo fieri per gentes

or

dedet Tempestatibus aide meretod

we come, to speak frankly, to chaos.

4. A large number of well-attested saturnians yield only two accents in
the second _colon_.

(b) Beside the 'Queen-and-Parlour' theory there is what I may call the
Normal Accent Theory. It originated with two papers by W. M.
Lindsay in
the _American Journal of Philology_ vol. xiv--papers which furnish a
more thorough and penetrating treatment of the whole subject than is to
be found anywhere else. Lindsay's view is in substance this:

1. The saturnian line falls into two _cola_ of which the first (_a_)
contains _three_, the second (_b_) _two_ accented syllables.

2. _a_ contains seven syllables in all, _b_ contains six (occasionally
five), save when ᵕᵕ takes the place of one accented syllable.

3. The accent is always the normal Latin accent, according to the Law of
the Penultimate.

(A tetrasyllabic word has two accents when it stands at the beginning of
a line, and a pentasyllabic word always. )

4. Each line begins with an accented syllable.

These are the essential rules. In addition Lindsay has been at pains to
determine carefully the accentuation of 'word-groups'. Each word in a
Latin sentence has not necessarily an accent of its own. Thus _apud uos_
is accented _apúd-uos_; so again _in-grémium_, _quei-númquam_, _ís
hic-sítus_. No part of Lindsay's papers throws so much light on the
scansion of the saturnian verses as that which deals with these
word-groups: but it is impossible here to deal with the subject in
detail.