Rhythm and Style

The study of Greek prose rhythm was popular in the early part of the twentieth century, but has received only sporadic attention since; in recent years, however, there are signs that it is again attracting interest (cf. the important article of Hutchinson 2015). This paper aims to clarify the relationship between Hellenistic (sometimes called ‘Asianist’) prose rhythm and that of Imperial Greek sophistic writers.

This paper concerns the parodos of Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus”. It argues that the metrical aspects of the song contribute to the overall meaning of the dramatic interaction. On these grounds, the paper defends the non-corresponding form of the transmitted text.

I will argue that an examination of dactylic hexameters across the comic corpus reveals a consistent relationship between comic poets as a group and epic. Revermann and Silk, however, have argued that Aristophanes is the exception to comedy’s relationship with epic, basing this assessment of epic’s influence on the titles of lost plays by other playwrights. Instead of considering epic characters in titles, I will use the meter of epic to assess how comedy interacts with the genre.

When P. T. Stevens coined the term ‘tragic koine’ for the linguistic stock-in-trade of Greek tragedy from the later fifth century on, he immediately acknowledged the limits of our evidence: ‘... if the rest of Attic tragedy had survived we might find that the style of Sophocles was more distinct from the tragic koine than that of Euripides ... and that a good deal of what now appears to be Euripidean would be seen as common at any rate to a group of dramatists’ (Stevens 1965: 270; cf. Fries 2014: 29-30).

The Uniqueness of Homer, Reconsidered