to play its own music at the suggestion and under the spell of the poetry. The runover word sometimes completes the syntax, and so relieves us of the slight effort required to do it ourselves. It repeats a name or a common noun which a slight exertion of the memory would have enabled us to supply from a preceding line-but Homer spares us this slight exertion. As participle or adjective, it fills out the picture or gives it the third dimension (Homer had what in plastic art Rodin called 'the feeling for depth'), and so makes the scene real and full of life. But far more than this, the runover word is used in an equally characteristic feature of Homeric style for which we can find no better word than continuity.50 The interlacing of Homer's ideas is so nearly perfect, and at the same time so unobtrusive, that no part of the reader's attention is lost by the effort required to bridge even a slight chasm of thought. The epic has been compared to a great river: no matter how different are the scenes through which it flows, or how varying the speed of the current, the narrative flows, and flows continuously. The runover word assists in producing this fluidity. The runover verb interprets what has just been implied; the runover participle expands the idea of the preceding verb. Thus the runover word keeps the thought in motion over the end of the verse. But this is only a small part of its conjunctive force. In at least two-thirds of the instances it serves as a stepping-stone by which our attention is led on to a new picture or a new detail. This is especially true of runover adjective, participle, and adverb. These, and other runover words, often owe their position to a contrasting idea which immediately follows. The noun or pronoun is often placed thus to make obvious the antecedent of the following relative pronoun, or to indicate the person or circumstance to which the following words have reference. The most striking impression that is given by studying all the runover words in 50 In Harv. Stud. xxx1, 52 f., is a list of many ways in which this continuity has been noticed. Homer is of their function as mediaries between the thought already given to the reader and the new idea to which he is to be introduced. The runover almost never jars the attention by its newness. It is either implied in some way by what has gone before, or, if it adds a new idea, it does so unobtrusively, so that no concentration of attention is required. But there are no few cases where the position of the runover cannot be explained by reference to lucidity or continuitynot to speak of emphasis. Then we are forced to fall back upon our second rubric, variety. The demand for variation of literary form is hard to appreciate to-day, when the moulds into which thought may be poured are innumerable. If modern men of letters were limited to a single pattern of speech, they would stand aghast at the threatened monotony of effect. The Greek mind found a way to beauty of form, even though it was confined within the limits of the genre tranché. Unlimited variation of a few simple forms is the Greek response to the challenge of plasmatic beauty, whether in the Doric temple, the statue, the vase, or the literary type. Homer led the way in this. In his time the union of artistic speech and music had not been dissolved. All literary expression was still, to some extent at least, fettered to song, and more than that, to one song, with a single movement. Moreover the urge of tradition was towards moulding the units of thought so as to fit perfectly within the limits of this one six-bar measure. It is one of the miracles of the Greek genius that within this narrow prison of form Homer's thought is still unfettered, and finds expression in a beauty of order, translucency, fancy, and emotional power which is unsurpassed, yet at the same time entirely avoids monotony. The variety of Homer's language in its plasmatic aspect, without regard to the melody of its sounds or to its ideas, is seen in four relations: 1) of the words themselves: this has to do first with the length of the words; there are verses in which the words are chiefly monosyllables, and others (more than 400, cf. Class. Phil. xiv, 217) which are made up of three or four polysyllabic words, and the groups of short and of long words are united in a great variety of ways. Secondly, the placing of the words so as to agree or to conflict with the metrical foot shows the greatest freedom: there are remarkably few limitations in the use of metrical caesurae and diaereses. 2) of the meter: all, or perhaps all but one, of the 32 possible combinations of dactyls and spondees are employed. 3) of the rhythm as adjusted to the units of thought. A clause begins, or is interrupted sufficiently to require a pause, in 12 out of the possible 17 places in the verse.51 The clause is furthermore of such varying length that it can end at 10 of the possible 17 places, either in the same or in the following verse. 4) of the rhythm itself, as marked by the pauses in sense. The ancients noticed that the rhythmic unit following the penthemimeral pause was the same as the final dimeter of an anapaestic system. The pauses help to give to the hexameter something of the freedom of lyric poetry. It can be seen without resorting to a mathematical formula that the possible variations in form in the Homeric verse reach astounding proportions. Yet all the while the Greek respect for the pattern causes a due moderation in the use of variations which most blur this pattern and which are therefore less agreeable to the ear. To this variety the runover word contributes. It alters the rhythm of its own verse, especially by changing the movement from dactylic to anapaestic. It permits a commonly occurring thought to be expressed in similar but not identical words, and to be arranged in a different position with reference to the verse unit, an arrangement which is the more pleasing because it avoids the expected pause at the end of the verse. 51 Aside from the recognized pauses at Tr, P, T, H, B and the verse-end, a clause begins in the middle of the first foot, after the first trochee, after the first foot, after the fifth trochee, and in the middle of the fifth foot, and a pause in sense, usually before a vocative, after the second trochee and at the end of the second foot. Its frequent occurrence, at least once in 10 or 11 verses, shows that it was thoroughly recognized in the developed technique of the Homeric verse. How early the pause at the end of the verse began to be neglected can never be known; it seems to have lost its claim to unvarying recognition through the discovery of the value of the rhythmic pause which we call the bucolic diaeresis. But whenever and however the neglect of the pause at the end of the verse came about, the value of this neglect was very great. Eliminate all the possible instances of enjambement, and rework all the others so as to avoid it, and the amazing suppleness of Homer's verse is gone. Flexibility within the confines of an inflexible form sufficiently accounts for the runover word. Its use in transferring the poet's thought to the hearer without loss, because of its transparent lucidity, and without demanding an effort of conscious attention, because of its continuity, is a better justification than the desire for emphasis. Civilité is only another aspect of the recognized objectivity of Homer, the complete forgetfulness of himself by the poet. In so far as poetic language should give a purely aesthetic pleasure, the union of civilité with variety of expression, always with due subordination to the basic form, vindicates the universal admiration for Homeric style from the days when men first began to study the form of spoken thought till now. And the runover word is one of the many illustrations of the reason for this admiration. IX.--The Ovidian Authorship of the Lygdamus Elegies ROBERT SOMERVILLE RADFORD KENYON COLLEGE PART I The present study consists of two distinct parts. The first part treats the history of criticism as applied to the Lygdamus elegies from the time of the early humanists, while the second part is entirely devoted to a minute study of the language of the elegies. Several important sections of Part I are omitted here on account of the length of the present paper, but are published in the October number of Classical Philology.1 In the omitted sections it is shown in much detail that Gruppe published his Römische Elegie, in which he reaches positive conclusions and identifies Lygdamus with Ovid (Leipzig, 1838), in the most destructive and negative period of German criticism and in an age which set little value upon constructive work, but was almost entirely given up to the pernicious principles of Lachmann and F. A. Wolf, who sought most wantonly to mutilate and to destroy both the works of Homer and the corpus of Ovid. The negative conclusions reached by the Wolfian school are so obviously open to question today that it is clearly necessary to re-examine the chief problems involved in a more painstaking, more conscientious, and more constructive manner than was possible to the overhasty and overconfident sceptics who dominated the German criticism of the early nineteenth century. ** THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BIOGRAPHICAL Data The elegies themselves give the following positive characteristics as attaching to their author: 1 The missing sections may also be partly supplied from the brief historical summary contained in my "Juvenile Works of Ovid," T. A. P. A. LI (1920), 153-157. |