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The oratorical mould in which all Latin poetry except satire and comedy is to a great extent cast, is visible from the beginning in tragedy. Weighty sentences follow one another until the moral effect is reached, or the description fully turned. The rhythm seems to have been much more often trochaic than iambic, at least than trimeter iambic, for the tetrameter is more frequently employed.
Besides the infinite variety of the lyrical strophes, which the poet invented for each occasion, they have also a measure to suit the transition in the tone of mind from the dialogue to the lyric, the anapest; and two for the dialogue itself, one of which, by far the most usual, the iambic trimeter, denoted the regular progress of the action, and the other, the trochaic tetrameter, was expressive of the impetuousness of passion.
Prayer is useless; God is unable to influence events; Lachesis the wrinkled beldame, or fate, her blind symbol, has once for all settled the inevitable nexus of cause and effect. The rhythm of these plays is extremely monotonous. The greater part of each is in the iambic trimeter; the choruses generally in anapaests, of which, however, he does not understand the structure.
But oh, mesdames, if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and tetrameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably! Sentimental and Otherwise I fear the gentleman to whom Miss Amelia's letters were addressed was rather an obdurate critic.
So far as the metre and language went, Terence seems to have followed the Greek much more closely than Plautus, as was to be expected from his smaller inventive power. Quintilian, in commending him, expresses a wish that he had confined himself to the trimeter iambic rhythm. To us this criticism is somewhat obscure.
The fact that the iambic trimeters, which predominated in the originals and were alone suitable to their moderate conversational tone, were very frequently replaced in the Latin edition by iambic or trochaic tetrameters, is to be attributed not so much to any want of skill on the part of the editors who knew well how to handle the trimeter, as to the uncultivated taste of the Roman public which was pleased with the sonorous magnificence of the long verse even where it was not appropriate.
Now, then, for my prologue. I am not going to change my caesuras and cadences for anybody; so if you do not like the heroic, or iambic trimeter brachy-catalectic, you had better not wait to hear it A Prologue? Well, of course the ladies know; I have my doubts. No matter, here we go! What is a Prologue? Let our Tutor teach: Pro means beforehand; logos stands for speech.
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.
Try, Eusebius; read off a dozen lines any where in Homer with this view, and tell me what you think of the possible short measure of Homer. It is true our measures are of the iambic character, which Horace says is the fittest for action and therefore, in the Greek, the dramatic. The trimeter iambic is a foot longer than our heroic measure.
No suitable versification for Comedy has yet been invented in Italy. The verso sciolto, it is well known, does not answer; it is not sufficiently familiar. The verse of twelve syllables, with a sdrucciolo termination selected by Ariosto, is much better, resembling the trimeter of the ancients, but is still somewhat monotonous. It has been, however, but little cultivated.
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