Thursday, November 15, 2018

 

Free Verse

J.N. Adams, "The Poets of Bu Njem: Language, Culture and the Centurionate," Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999) 109-134 (at 113, footnote omitted, on a Latin inscription first published by R. Rebuffat, "Le centurion M. Porcius Iasucthan à Bu Njem (Notes et documents XI)," Libya Antiqua NS 1 (1995) 79-123):
On the face of it this must be one of the most incompetent hexameter poems ever written, in that of the twenty-seven lines (the poem proper seems to begin at l. 7, though the acrostich, which spells Porcius Iasucthan cent.leg. f.c. mac, begins at l. 6) not a single one scans. It is though manifestly intended, first as a poem, and secondly as a hexameter poem. Its claim to poetic status is obvious from the fact that it is an acrostich. Most of the lines have between fourteen and seventeen syllables, and that is virtually the standard variation possible in a hexameter line.
Id. (at 129):
Of note is an inept hexameter epitaph set up at Rome by a certain Iul. Valens for his son (CIL VI.3608 = ILS 475)....As in Iasucthan's effort, so here scarcely a single line scans correctly as a hexameter (1 is an exception), though several come close and other lines have sequences of dactyls and spondees (e.g. 7, 8) without achieving the right number of feet or complete correctness.
On Iasucthan's verses see also James Clackson and Geoffrey Horrocks, The Blackwell History of the Latin Language (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 258-262.



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