‘Irrational Lengthening’ in Virgil

Rupert Thompson,Nicholas Zair

doi:10.1163/1568525x-12342696

Abstract

Abstract Word-final syllables consisting of a short vowel or a short vowel followed by a single consonant sometimes scan as heavy in Latin hexameter poetry, a feature known as ‘irrational lengthening’, lengthening in arsis, diastole etc. We examine the contexts in which this occurs in the poetry of Virgil. It is widely acknowledged that this phenomenon is based on a similar licence in earlier Greek and Roman models for Virgil, but it has also been argued that other, metrical or phonological, aspects may have been relevant to the use of lengthening. We examine these environments, and, where possible, carry out statistical analysis. We conclude that, while some of these are descriptively true, the position of lengthened words is primarily due to the constraints that Virgil applied to the construction of his hexameter rather than any other explanation.

Highlights

Word-final syllables consisting of a short vowel or a short vowel followed by a single consonant sometimes scan as heavy in Latin hexameter poetry, as in these examples from the Eclogues
The phenomenon of ‘irrational lengthening’ in Virgil has historically been connected with a number of metrical and phonological phenomena whose explanatory—as opposed to descriptive—status for lengthening has remained fuzzy
None of these on their own are sufficient to define the contexts in which lengthening happens; the only one which descriptively covers every instance of lengthening is the correlation with arsis

Summary

Introduction

Ennius shows quite frequent instances of lengthening, at least from the point of view of an author of the first century bc like Virgil.27 Skutsch draws a distinction between ‘lengthening’ of a final syllable containing an etymological short vowel,28 and ‘shortening’ of etymological long vowels in words like urserăt < urserāt (Ann. 217), and asserts that this ‘lengthening’ takes place only in the rise. The distribution of these long vowels in Virgil in words with a heavy penultimate syllable is almost the same as that of lengthened syllables, with 12 in the arsis and 1 in thesis (figures from Kent 1948).

Results

Conclusion