Form and Structure in Aeolic Lyric Meter

Of all the meters that we encounter in our poetic texts and metrical handbooks, lyric would sit high up the taxonomic pyramid for its complexity and terminological richness. However, an economy can be found to underlie all that wealth.

As we are all taught, Aeolic lyric verse is built from strophes that consist of twenty-one related line types (West 1982; Itsumi 2009), not counting numerous further variants. The core subset comprises types with medial choriamb, which is initial or final in other subsets. West 1973 on Indo-European meter spells out the Greek-internal relationships in greater detail. The various types are iteratively derived from each other by acephaly, catalexis, or both. Snell 1982 sets up a system with the glyconic, pherecratean, and hipponactean as the basic forms from which the others are derived by the same operations; the formal diversity and combination of forms are simply due to unrestrained poetic invention. Raven 1968 takes a compositional approach, assembling line types by prepending or appending to the choriamb; theoretical linguists (Golston and Riad 2005) take a similarly compositional approach. In her 1968 study of dramatic-lyric meter, Dale calls attention to co-occurrences and responsions of the glyconic with its anaclastic variants as suggestive of underlying relationship. She goes further and notes the affinity between iambic and choriambic (cf. Wilamowitz, Griechische Verskunst).

In this paper, I show that the structure of Aeolic lyric meter is not flat and merely concatenative. Morphosyntactic boundaries in over 1,400 lines of archaic lyric (excluding epinician), many of which are identifiable as instances of the meters named or known in our handbooks, suggest that lyric meters are hierarchical structures. The glyconic (gl) ○○–ᴗᴗ–ᴗ× can be decomposed into base + choriamb + iamb [○○][–ᴗᴗ–][ᴗ×]. From such a glyconic can be derived one of its anaclastic variants ¨gl [–ᴗᴗ–][○○][ᴗ×] through transposition of the choriamb and the base. If we conceive of the choriamb as longum + breve + iamb [–[ᴗ[ᴗ–]]], we can get the other variant gl¨ [○○][–[[ᴗ–]ᴗ]][ᴗ×] through anaclasis within the choriamb’s anapest. This parse is in line with the metron name’s etymology, from χορεῖος (= τροχαῖος/τρίβραχυς [Frisk s.v. χορός]) + ἴαμβος (LSJ s.v. χορῐαμβ-ικός). The longer hipponactean [○○][–ᴗᴗ–][ᴗ–]× is an augmented glyconic. The shorter types (pherecratean, telesillean, etc.) fall straightforwardly out of the glyconic through truncation at either extremity ([○○][–ᴗᴗ–][–^], [^○][–ᴗᴗ–][ᴗ×], etc.). The co-occurrences of anacrusis, anaclasis, and suppression yield the rest of the inventory. This more complex view permits an unexpectedly different description of internal expansion: what we are taught as dactylic expansion, e.g., gl^d ○○–ᴗᴗ‹–ᴗᴗ›–ᴗ×, can be more aptly characterized as anapestic expansion gl^a [○○][–‹ᴗᴗ–›ᴗᴗ–][ᴗ×] (cf. epiploke in Cole 1988). Lastly, the underlying structural unity among the glyconic/hipponactean, the so-called anaclastic ionic ᴗᴗ–ᴗ–ᴗ–× (= ^¨hi [^ᴗᴗ–][ᴗ–][ᴗ–]×), and trochaic (lk –ᴗ–ᴗ–ᴗ× = gl¨^ [–ᴗ][–ᴗ–ᴗ][×^]) series becomes more apparent. This generative approach promises a path towards the unification of Aeolic with epinician dactylo-epitrite and choral dochmiacs.