Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/419

 POETRY UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 395 stress-accent. But in the fourth century after Christ the poet NONNUS, an Egyptian Greek from PanopoHs, in his Dionysiaca, begins suddenly to reckon with accent. Dividing his hexameters into halves at the caesura, he insists that in the second half the accent shall not fall on the ante-penultimate syllable ; while in the first half before the caesura he mostly insists that it shall fall on the ante-penultimate. The accent must by his time have become a stress-accent, and the ingenious man is attempting to serve two masters, A verse like ovpavov vylrtfieSovToi; dtcTTCocrat Ai6<; eSprjV is in metre a good hexameter ; by accent it is next door to " A captain bold of Halifax, Who lived in country quarters " — that is to say, to the so-called ' politic ' verses scanned by accent, which were normal in Byzantine times, and were used by the vulgar even in the fourth century. Quintus of Smyrna, an epic poet preceding Nonnus, does not observe these rules about accent ; but Coluthus, Try- phiodorus, and Musaeus do. The Dionysiaca made an epoch. In prose there is much history and geography and sophistic literature from the age of Augustus on. Dio- dorus Siculus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Josephus the Jew are followed by the Xenophon of the decadence, Arrian ; by Appian, Dion Cassius, and Herodian. Arrian wrote an Anabasis of Alexander, like Xenophon's Anabasis of Cyrus, and devoted himself to expounding Epictetus a great deal better than Xenophon expounded Socrates ; this besides tactics and geography. Above all, Plutarch