Ego Emphatic and Unemphatic

Abstract

I will make my reply to Professor Phillimore's article of last October as brief as I can. He asks me to answer the question, Why is hunc shortened in Terence's ego hunc vidi, and why is the first syllable of istanc shortened in ego istanc ? adding The fact is (that these shortenings were used by Terence), page 312. But this statement begs the whole question; the only thing that is really unquestionable is that Terence uses a dissyllabic rise or fall of which the first syllable is short and the second long according to the ordinary rules of prosody. All else is theorizing. Havet, Lindsay, and all the other believers in the theory of iambic or breves breviantes assume that the syllables in question must have been short, and then attempt to explain how the shortening came about. I have ventured, in opposition to all this authority, to raise the previous question, Were they really short? I see no reason why we should assume that the purity of the Greek dissyllabic rises and falls was necessarily maintained in the Latin adaptations of Greek meters which the dramatists of the Republican period introduced. They may have been content sometimes to resolve a long syllable into two syllables of which only the first was short, provided that there was in the foot to demarcate the rise from the fall. This something was generally the accent, e.g., in ego hunc vidi, where the sequence _ might be called a semiquantitative anapaest with accexitual indication of the rise; or in ego istanc vidi, where the sequence _forms a semiquantitative dissyllabic equivalent to, but not identical with, Greek rises of the form __. An explanation of how such rises may have read themselves, owing to the fact that the first syllable of this sequence (-) was too short to form a rise by itself, so that the reader was inevitably driven to take in the second syllable as belonging to the rise, is offered in my article written twelve years ago.' There is