To me, it seems ridiculous that there would be a stronger break after memorem than after superum, since vī superum and saevae.īram are the two different phrases, and the ablative seems more closely connected with the verb than the causal prepositional phrase. When I wrote that I was probably working on the assumption that caesura simply refers to the strongest sense break in the line. I haven't looked at scholarship on the matter in Latin metre, but I suspect it will be equally convoluted. In Homeric metre at any rate there is a controversy over quite what the relationship is between sense breaks, metrical breaks, and actual phonetic pauses. Grammatically, it would logical come after passus, but I think you can also a case for a (main) caesura after bello (because it would emphasise the theme of the second half of the Aeneid). In a line like multa quoque et bello passus dum conderet urbem I think it's not 100% clear. In insignem pietate virum tot adire labores it makes the most sense to put it in the 4th because the 3rd foot can't even have a masculine caesura. In arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris it makes the most sense to put it in the third foot. How do you find out where the caesura is? You look at the 3rd and 4th foot and try to see where the caesura would make the most sense.
how do you find out whether a foot is a dactyle or a spondee? You look at the lengths of the syllables. In hexameters, you can replace any dactyle with a spondee. In lyrical metres, the place of the caesura is rather fixed within the metre, but there is also little variation regarding the syllables/lengths of individual feet. I'd say the flexibility of the caesura corresponds to the flexibility of the metre. What are you looking for? Some kind of mathmatical equation? If know what the lines mean (or if I manage to grasp it immediately), I try to align them with the sense of the sentence – although as I said, that's not always super clear, either. That approach disregards the meaning of the sentences a bit. If by that approach, I take the caesura in the 3rd, I read the first 3 ictus and pause there, and then go on to read the rest, if it's in the 4th I read to the first secondary caesura, pause, read to the 4th foot caesura, pause and then read the rest. So what I usually do is to quickly look at the 3rd foot to see if it can have a caesura, and if it doesn't, I look at the 4th foot to see if it has one, and if it doesn't, then usually there is a feminine one in the 3rd (so essentially what I described above). Over here, people usually read hexameters rhythmically, so you actually need the caesura, especially when you try to read out an unknown text. and that caesurae in Latin are usually masculine - but I think that's actually something that I found out on my own.
The only wisdom I've been given was that it usually falls in the 3rd foot and sometimes in the 4th (often with a secondary one in the 2nd). I also can't really remember reading anything much about it. which is a pity because the caesura can be of importance, e.g. I'd more or less call it 'the most sensible point to make a short pause' – with that in mind, there are probably some cases that are debatable and where the main caesura is not really clear.Ĭaesurae were never much of a topic and most university teachers and even professors I know don't care too much about metre. I also give a bit of lee way to the term 'sense break' because it sometimes doesn't really coincide. However, I never assume the main caesura to be in the 2nd foot (I haven't heard of that practice before). If there is no masculine caesura in both the 3rd and the 4th foot, I usually take the feminine caesura in the 3rd, but that happens rather rarely in Latin. Caesurae in the 4th foot are usually accompanied by a secondary caesura (mostly in the 2nd, sometimes in the 3rd I suppose), so I put in a secondary one in brackets there. the way I usually do it (in Latin, I have no idea about Greek) is to look for a sense break in the 3rd and assume a masculine caesura there, and if there is none, then I look for a sense break in the 4th. I actually never put the main caesura in the second foot.
0 kommentar(er)
