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If this is not enough, they see written on the stone itself Terminus: if one takes this as the last word, that will make an iambic dimeter acatalectic, Concedo nulli Terminus; if one begins with this word, it will be a trochaic dimeter acatalectic, Terminus concedo nulli.
The synaphea peculiar to this metre is neglected by him, and the rule that each system should close with a paroemiac or dimeter catalectic is constantly violated. With regard to the Octavia, it has been thought to be a product of some mediaeval imitator; but this is hardly likely. It cannot be Seneca's, since it alludes to the death of Nero.
But as Greek art progressed it grew out of this crude symbolism... What the artists of Babylonia and Egypt express in the character of the gods by added attribute or symbol, swiftness by wings, control of storms by the thunderbolt, traits of character by animal heads, the artists of Greece work more and more fully into the scultptural type; modifying the human subject by the constant addition of something which is above the ordinary levels of humanity, until we reach the Zeus of Pheidias or the Dimeter of Cnidus.
It might of course be easy to pick out anticipations in part of this combination of iambic dimeter, trochaic, and anapæstic; but it never had taken thorough form before. And how it seized on the imagination of those who heard it is best shown by the well-known anecdote of Scott, who, merely hearing a little of it recited, at once developed it and established it in The Lay of the Last Minstrel.
Aulus Gellius has preserved a translation of one of Plato's epigrams, which he calls ouk amousos, by a contemporary author, whose name he does not give. It is written in dimeter iambics, an easier measure than the hexameter, and therefore more within the reduced capacity of the time.
For the iambic dimeter, freely altered by the licences of equivalence, anacrusis, and catalexis, though not recently practised in English when Christabel and the Lay set the example, is an inevitable result of the clash between accented, alliterative, asyllabic rhythm and quantitative, exactly syllabic metre, which accompanied the transformation of Anglo-Saxon into English.
When Greek patterns of versification were introduced, the Saturnian rhythm seems to have received a different explanation. It was considered as a compound of the iambic and trochaic systems. It might be described as an iambic hepthemimer followed by a trochaic dimeter brachycatalectic. The latter portion was preserved with something like regularity, but the former admitted many variations.
There are in both three series of iambuses the dimeter, the cataleptic trimeter, and the acataleptic. This observation applies to the physical and physiological conditions of the phenomenon, since primitive men could not speak without rhythmic modulation of words.
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