No More Learning

The recent researches of Sievers[16] and others into the
earliest metrical forms tend to shew that this metre is an
'Indo-European' heritage, and that it must be judged in the light of its
Eastern and Germanic cognates.

3. The best opinion, therefore, in recent years has been strongly on the
side of the view which makes the principle of the Saturnian metre purely
accentual. At the moment this view may, in fact, be said to hold the
field. Unhappily those who agree in regarding the metre as purely
accentual agree in little else. We may distinguish two schools:

(a) There is, first, what I may perhaps be allowed to call the
Queen-and-Parlour school. 'There cannot be a more perfect Saturnian
line', says Macaulay, 'than one which is sung in every English nursery--

The queen was in her parlour eating bread and honey'.

Place beside this English line the Latin line which has come to be
regarded as the typical Saturnian--

dabunt malum Metelli Naeuio poetae.

If we accent these five words as Naevius and the Metelli would in
ordinary speech have accented them, we shall have to place our accents
thus:--

dábunt málum Metélli Naéuio poétae;

since by what is known as the Law of the Penultimate the accent in Latin
always falls on the penultimate syllable save in those words of three
(or more) syllables which have a short penultimate and take the accent
consequently on the ante-penultimate syllable. But those who accommodate
the Latin saturnian to the rhythm of 'The queen was in her parlour . . . '
have to postulate an anomalous accentuation:--

dabúnt malúm Metélli | Naéuió poétae.

The Saturnian line is, they hold, a verse falling into two cola, each
colon containing three accented (and an undefined number of unaccented)
syllables--word-accent and verse-accent (i. e.
metrical _ictus_)
corresponding necessarily only at the last accented syllable in each
colon (as Metélli . . . poétae above).

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_.