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Rh depends the rhythmical forms of poetry. This science has been, from the earliest ages of criticism, divided into a study of the general principles upon which all these forms are builded, and upon the special types into which they have gradually developed.

In considering ancient versification, it is necessary to give attention to Latin as well as to Greek metre, because although the Roman poets were in the main dependent upon the earlier tradition, there were several points at which they broke away, and were almost entirely independent. Roman verse, though essentially the same as Greek verse, was modified by the national development of Italian forms of poetry, by a simplified imitation of Greek measures, and by a varied intensity in the creation of new types of the old Greek artistic forms (Volkmann). In later times there was a tendency to consider the laws of metre as superior to, and almost independent of, the native impulse of the poet; and this is where the study of the old poetry itself is most salutary, as checking us in our tendency to bow too slavishly to the rules of the grammarians. No doubt, in the archaic times, theory and practice went hand in hand. The poet, held in constant check by the exigencies of music, was obliged to recognize the existence of certain rules, the necessity of which was confirmed by the delicacy of his ear. These he would pass down to his disciples, with any further discoveries which he might himself have made. For instance, what we are somewhat vaguely told of the influence of a poet like Archilochus, to whom the very invention of trochaic and iambic metre is, perhaps fabulously, attributed, points to the probability that in Archilochus the Ionian race produced a poet of extraordinary daring and delicacy of ear, who gathered the wandering rhythms that had existed, and had doubtless been used in ah uncertain way before his time, into a system which could be depended upon, and not in his hands only, to produce certain effects of welcome variety. His system would engage the attention of theorists, and we learn that by the time of Plato schools of oral metrical education Were already in existence, where the science of sounds and syllables was already beginning to be recognized, as may be seen in the Cratylus. Before long, the teachings in these peripatetic schools would be preserved, for safety's sake, in writing, and the theoretic literature of versification would begin. In fact, we read in Suidas of a certain Lasus of Hermione who wrote an Art of Poetry, and the age of this, the earliest of recorded authorities on the formal laws of verse, is fixed for us by the fact that he is spoken of as having been the master of Pindar. Of the writings of Lasus and his followers, however, nothing remains, and the character of their teaching is problematical. In the 3rd century B.C., however, we come upon a figure which preserves a definite character; this is Aristoxenus, the disciple of Aristotle, who gave his undivided attention to rhythm, and who lives, unfortunately only in fragments, as the most eminent musical critic of antiquity. The brief fragments of his Elements of Rhythm (ρυθμικά στοιχεία) originally written in three books, are of unsurpassed value to us as illustrating the attitude of classical Greece to the interrelation of verse and music. The third book of Aristoxenus dealt specifically with λέξις, or the application of rhythm to artistically composed and written verse.

It is certain that, after the time of Alexander the Great, the theories of verse tended somewhat rapidly to release themselves from the theories of music, and when, in the successive ages of Greek criticism, much attention was given to the laws of versification, less and less was said about harmony and more and more about metre. Rules, often of a highly arbitrary nature, were drawn up by grammarians, who founded their laws on a scholiastic study of the ancient poets. The majority of the works in which these rules were collected are lost, but an enchiridion of Greek metres, by Hephaestion, a scholiast of the 2nd century, has been preserved. First printed in 1526, editions and translations of Hephaestion's manual have not been infrequent.

The metrical theory of the Byzantine grammarians was entirely in unison with the old tradition of the Alexandrian schools, and depended on the authority of Hephaestion. Michael Psellus, in the 9th century, wrote abundantly on the subject, and towards the close of the Empire the verse-handbooks of Isaac Tzetzes (d. 1138) and of his brother Joannes were in general use. A large number of other Byzantine scholiasts and theorists are mentioned in this connexion by Gleditsch. "Very little attention was paid to metrical science in medieval and even Renaissance days. It is much to the honour of English scholarship that the earliest modern writer who made a rational study of ancient metre was Richard Bentley, in his Schediasma de metris Tereniianis, printed at Cambridge in 1726. He was soon followed by the Germans, in particular by Hermann, Boeckh and J. A. Apel. To this day, German scholarship easily leads in the rational and accurate study of classical versification.

The chief principle in ancient verse was quantity, that is, the amount of time involved in the effort to express a syllable. Accordingly, the two basal types which lie at the foundation of classical metre are "longs" and "shorts." The convention was that a long syllable was equal to two short ones: accordingly there was a real truth in calling the succession of such "feet" metre, for the length, or weight, of the syllables forming them could be, and was, measured. What has to be realized in speaking of ancient metre is that the value of these feet was defined with exactitude, not left uncertain, as it is in modern European verse, when accent is almost always made the guiding principle. In Greek verse, there might be an ictus (stress), which fell upon the long syllable, but it could only be a regulating element, and accent was always a secondary element in the construction of Greek metre, The "feet" recognized and described by the ancient grammarians were various, and in their apparent diversity sometimes difficult to follow, but the comprehension of them is simplified if the student realizes that the names given to them are often superfluous. The main distinction between feet consists in the diversity of the relation between the strong and the weak syllables. There are naturally only two movements, the quick and the slow. Thus we have the anapaest ( ‿ ‿ —, short-short-long) and the dactyl ( — ‿ ‿ , long-short-short), which are equal, and differ only as regards the position of their parts. To these follow two feet which must be considered as in their essence non^metrical, as it is only in combination with others that they can become metrical. These are the spondee ( — —, long-long) and the pyrrhic ( ‿ ‿ , short-short). Of more essential character are the two descriptions of slow feet, the iamb ( ‿ —, short-long) and the trochee ( — ‿ , long-short). Besides these definite types, the ingenuity of formalists has invented an