Attic of drama

Attic and Ionic form one of the four main dialect groups of Archaic and Classical Greek.^[1]

The iambic trimeter was the metre of the early Ionian iambographers, Archilochus and Semonides of Amorgos. At Athens it was the metre of Solon. It then became the normal metre of dialogue in drama.^[2] Well over nine-tenths of the spoken verse in surviving tragedy is in trimeters.^[3]

The dialect of iambus was Ionic. It seems to admit much more of everyday speech than epic does. Its later poets (Ananius, Hipponax, Solon, Anacreon) belong to Ionic or Attic areas.^[4] Solon was an Athenian, yet he writes the general Ionic of the elegists, with only a few Attic features. Not all of these features are guaranteed by the metre.^[5]

In drama the dialogue is Attic. Even a trimeter set inside a sung scene has Attic vowels: ἤγαγες with η, not ᾱ.^[6]

Comedy comes closest to everyday speech. No Athenian conversation ran in regular verse. Even so, the dialogue of comedy gives an approximate picture of natural speech, and it is invaluable to historians of the language.^[7] Comedy also imitates other dialects. The Megarian and the Boeotian in the Acharnians and the Spartan Lampito in the Lysistrata seem to be rendered fairly accurately. They are a precious source for non-Attic Greek of the fifth century.^[8]

Three habits of Attic speech shape the prosody of this dialogue.

Attic correption

In Attic a short vowel normally stayed short before stop + liquid. The dialogue of comedy shows this. Comedy lengthens such a syllable only to parody tragedy or to raise the style. For this reason the short scansion is called Attic correption. Tragedy allows the long scansion within a word, so that τέκνα may be divided tek-na or te-kna.^[9]

Counts of the verses show the same pattern. Within a word the short scansion prevails in tragedy, and it prevails overwhelmingly in comedy. This suggests that it was the norm of everyday Attic.^[10]

Hephaestion already classes such syllables as “common”. He adds that a semivowel before the second consonant, as in ἀμνός and ἑσμός, makes them fully long.^[11]

The two lines below show the difference. The tragic line splits κν and makes τέκ- long. The comic line keeps βρ together and leaves νε short:

The rule in one line: in Attic dialogue a stop + liquid usually leaves a short vowel short; tragedy may make it long inside a word.

A second kind of Attic correption affects the vowels themselves. Inside a word, Attic poets often shorten αι and οι: οἷος, τοιοῦτος, ποιεῖν, παλαιός, γεραιός, Πειραιεύς, Βοιωτός, οἴει, αἰαῖ. They do so invariably in the vocalic forms of οὗτος, ἐκεῖνος and the like when the suffix -ί is added, as in αὑτηΐ and τουτουΐ.^[13] This -ί is the deictic suffix, which points at something present: “this one here”.

Initial ρ

A continuant is a consonant whose sound can be held on, as ρ can. In epic an initial continuant could be held so as to lengthen a preceding short syllable. With ρ this lengthening stays common in iambus and lyric. In the dialogue of Attic drama it is very nearly the rule, with a few exceptions.^[14]

Vowels meeting

Tragedy allows hiatus only in a few places. It occurs next to exclamations, urgent imperatives and similar words, after τί, and in the phrases εὖ ἴσθι and εὖ οἶδα. In lyrics it also occurs before enclitic οἱ or after ἤ.

Comedy admits hiatus in the same places and also after the other unelidable words (τι, ὅτι, περί, πρό, vocative -ι, and ἄχρι, μέχρι before ἄν). It admits it too in the phrases οὐδὲ εἷς, μηδὲ εἷς, μὴ ὥρασι.^[15]

West prefers to explain the apparent elision of οἴμοι before οὐ and ὤ as synecphonesis.^[13] Old Comedy also tolerates synecphonesis between longer words. Elsewhere this is a licence of Sappho and Hipponax:^[16]

Occasionally ι or υ before a vowel is made consonantal. This happens chiefly to fit a proper name into the verse. Euripides’ Ἐρινύων, for example, is scanned ⏑ — —.^[16]

Drama also lengthens the interjection εἶεν as if its final ν closed the syllable (A. Cho. 657, Ar. Pax 663). It is the only instance in drama that West gives of a final continuant treated in this way. He compares it with hiatus after exclamations.^[17]

Tragic and comic trimeters

The table sums up how the comic trimeter differs from the tragic.^[18] Several of its rows are the habits described above:

The Porson row can be given a figure. The comic trimeter breaks the rule on average about once in five lines, and this is one of the main things that distinguish comic dialogue from tragic. The two main authorities differ on the tragic exceptions. Maas knows only one in the tragic trimeter, a Persian proper name at A. Pers. 321, and he counts the trimeter of satyr drama among the verses the rule governs.^[19] West speaks of a very few apparent tragic exceptions, most of them textually suspect. He finds satyr drama perhaps slightly less strict.^[12]

How often Euripides resolves is a valuable means of dating his plays.^[20] There is relatively little resolution in Aeschylus and Sophocles, and a marked rise in Euripides.^[3]

The trochaic tetrameter appears in certain scenes. In tragedy it is found chiefly in Aeschylus and in the later plays of Euripides. Aristophanes neglects its caesura about once in seven lines, while Menander observes it regularly.^[21] There is no undisputed tragic example between the Oresteia (458) and Trojan Women (415). Euripides then brought the metre back, sparingly, in his late plays.^[22]

Comedy moves between levels of style. Brief passages rise to the standard of tragic versification and language, either in parody or to show a character’s self-importance. Only close attention to the metre lets the reader recognise this side of the poet’s art.^[23]

Notes

1. ^ Natoli et al. 2022, p. 328; D’Alessio 2009, p. 120.
2. ^ West 1987, p. 24; D’Alessio 2009, p. 123.
3. ^ ^{a b} Halleran 2005, p. 170.
4. ^ D’Alessio 2009, p. 123.
5. ^ D’Alessio 2009, pp. 122–123.
6. ^ West 1987, p. 57.
7. ^ Willi 2014, p. 174.
8. ^ Willi 2014, p. 180.
9. ^ West 1987, pp. 16–17.
10. ^ Devine and Stephens 1994, pp. 34–35.
11. ^ Hephaestion, Ench. 1.7.
12. ^ ^{a b} West 1987, p. 25.
13. ^ ^{a b} West 1987, p. 14.
14. ^ West 1987, p. 17 and n. 9.
15. ^ West 1987, pp. 13, 16.
16. ^ ^{a b c} West 1987, p. 15.
17. ^ West 1987, p. 18.
18. ^ West 1987, p. 27.
19. ^ Maas 1962, pp. 34–35.
20. ^ West 1987, p. 26; Gregory 2005, p. 257.
21. ^ West 1987, p. 28.
22. ^ Halleran 2005, p. 170; Gregory 2005, p. 257.
23. ^ West 1987, p. 27 n. 4.

Drama delivered its words in three distinct ways. The first was speech without music. The second was recitation to music, called παρακαταλογή (parakatalogē) and usually translated “recitative”. The third was song. What was recited is always in stichic metres or in long periods of a single rhythm. What was sung is normally in non-stichic metres, mostly strophic.^[1]

Parakatalogê, then, was the accompanied delivery of passages that were not sung, and it is distinct from song. It is generally agreed that the aulos accompanied the non-lyric anapaests and the trochaic tetrameters.^[2] The language follows the delivery.

Doric colouring in song

Lyric anapaests differ from marching anapaests first of all by their Doric colouring, in tragedy and in parody of tragedy. They also differ in their metre. They have dimeters without word-division between the metra, and heavy contraction of the bicipitia. They have catalectic dimeters anywhere and acatalectic dimeters in final place. They have runs of four shorts, and an admixture of other cola, especially dochmiac.^[4]

In tragedy lyric anapaests are almost entirely limited to monodies and to dialogues in which an actor sings. Euripides uses them most, above all in Hecuba, Troades, IT and Ion.^[5] Lyric and recitative anapaests can be told apart by their metrical features.^[2]

The Doric colouring is a mark of song, and it is absent from the recited anapaests. Tragic song as a whole has a Doric surface, though far from a thorough one.^[6] Ion’s monody shows it in the vowels:

Each line is a catalectic dimeter with every biceps contracted. That makes seven long syllables (West prints μηδ’ εἰς in 157).^[4] The ᾱ of πτᾱνοί and κοίτᾱς is the Doric long ᾱ, as West marks it. Attic would have πτηνοί and κοίτης. A catalectic dimeter would normally be expected to end a period.^[4]

The language shifts with the metre

In Agamemnon 1136–45 Cassandra’s dochmiacs and cretics alternate with two iambic trimeters. The trimeters have Attic vowels (ἤγαγες, -μένην). This suggests that Cassandra drops for a moment into spoken delivery. One cretic is resolved throughout, so these are best taken as true cretics rather than syncopated iambics:^[7]

In 1143 βοᾶς is Doric, where Attic would have βοῆς. ταλαίναις is the same in Attic. The first dochmius has its second position resolved (ἀκόρε-, ⏑ ⏖ — ⏑ —). Since ᾱ and η are both long, the vowel does not alter the quantity. What it alters is the audience’s sense of the mode.

The metres of song and their prosody

The choral songs of fifth-century tragedy mix metres more freely than earlier lyric. In the end late Euripides and Timotheus give up strophic repetition for free composition. Attic dramatists were fond of the dochmiac, and the sources describe its tone in slightly different ways. D’Angour ties it without exception to agitation or distress.^[8] For West its tone is always urgent or emotional.^[9] Battezzato associates it with fear or extreme emotion, but notes that in late Euripides it can also carry joy.^[10]

Some prosodic habits of the sung parts differ from those of the dialogue:

• In dochmiacs stop + liquid seldom lengthens a syllable. When in doubt, take the short scansion.^[11]
• In his lyric iambics Aeschylus strongly prefers a short syllable in every anceps position except the last. He is very sparing with resolution there.^[12]
• Hiatus is admitted in lyrics before enclitic οἱ or after ἤ.^[13] The word οἱ once began with a digamma (ϝοι).^[14]
• When the cola are those of Lesbian and Pindaric song, the metre is called “aeolic”. The label is no more than a broad family name.^[15]
• There is no dactylo-epitrite in the genuine plays of Aeschylus. It is used, however, in Prometheus and in the earlier plays of Sophocles and Euripides.^[16]
• Ionics are commonest in Aeschylus and prominent in the Bacchae. They carry an association with devotional cult, and perhaps an Asiatic flavour.^[17]

The dramatists often pass from one kind of metre to another inside a single strophe. The widest range comes in some of the long astrophic monodies and lyric dialogues of late Euripides and Sophocles. Philoctetes 1169–217, for example, runs through iambics, ionics, anapaests, aeolics, dactyls and dactylo-epitrite. It lacks only cretics and dochmiacs.^[18] The sources do not say how the Doric colouring behaves across such a passage, beyond its being a feature of song.

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} West 1987, p. 48.
2. ^ ^{a b} Battezzato 2005, p. 151.
3. ^ West 1987, pp. 48, 60.
4. ^ ^{a b c} West 1987, p. 60.
5. ^ West 1987, p. 61.
6. ^ Battezzato 2005, p. 149; Goldhill 1997, p. 128.
7. ^ West 1987, p. 57.
8. ^ D’Angour 2022, p. 138.
9. ^ West 1987, p. 56.
10. ^ Battezzato 2005, p. 158.
11. ^ West 1987, p. 58.
12. ^ West 1987, p. 52.
13. ^ West 1987, p. 16.
14. ^ West 1987, pp. 15–16.
15. ^ West 1987, p. 33.
16. ^ West 1987, p. 65; see Doric of choral lyric, tab 6, for the Medea ode.
17. ^ West 1987, p. 62.
18. ^ West 1987, pp. 66–67.
19. ^ West 1987, pp. 24, 57, 60.
20. ^ West 1987, pp. 57, 60, 65.

After the fifth century the trimeter outlives the dramatic genres that formed it. Attic, too, outlives its own pronunciation. What follows traces the spoken metres and the last sung ones. The next tab follows dialect as a deliberate Hellenistic choice, and the change in the language itself.

Menander and the comic trimeter

New Comedy keeps the comic trimeter but tidies it. With very few exceptions it avoids the “split” anapaest. In a split anapaest, a word that begins before the anapaestic foot ends inside it.^[1]

An anapaest is the foot ⏑ ⏑ —. Comedy admits it freely in the trimeter, where the iambic scheme has × —, the anceps taking two shorts.^[2] The diagram shows where a word may and may not end around it.

In the trochaic tetrameter, Aristophanes neglects the caesura about once in seven lines. Menander observes it regularly, though he allows a postpositive after it.^[3] A postpositive is a small word, such as δέ (de), “and, but”, or γάρ (gar), “for”, that cannot stand first in its phrase.

In the iambic tetrameter catalectic of Old Comedy, about three lines in four have the caesura after the second metron. Most of the rest have it one position later. Menander uses the two positions about equally.^[4] The sources used here do not describe the dialect of Menander’s Attic, so nothing is claimed about it.

Hellenistic tragedy and the late trimeter

In Hellenistic tragedy and epigram, and in Lycophron’s Alexandra, the trimeter is handled fairly strictly, with only occasional resolution. But a short final syllable is sometimes made long by a stop + liquid at the start of the next word. The papyrus drama about Gyges does this, and it is one of several signs that the piece is post-classical.^[5] This reverses Attic practice in dialogue, where stop + liquid normally leaves a short syllable short.^[6]

Later still, the trimeter in common use in late antiquity is basically of the comic type. By then the difference between the two types was no longer properly grasped. Two examples are Lucian’s little parody Podagra and the makeshift ending of Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis (1578–629), which West judges very harshly. Both admit features of the comic trimeter: anapaestic feet, breaches of Porson’s Law and, in pseudo-Euripides, lines without caesura. Both also have false quantities.^[7]

Such breaches were already a mark of the comic type. In comedy the trimeter breaks the rule on average about once in five lines.^[8]

The last of classical lyric

The lyric koinē outlived the canon of nine. Yet the little we can see of late-Classical and Hellenistic lyric points to a further simplifying of the dialect. In Timotheus, at the end of the fifth century, the Aeolic element seems to have vanished altogether.^[9]

Timotheus’ style was polymetric and astrophic. It was the end-point of a development that runs from late Euripides.^[10] But it was not typical of what followed. Such elaborate pieces by virtuoso musicians do not represent fourth-century song as a whole.

The usual metre of lyric for educated middle-class audiences in the fourth and third centuries was dactylo-epitrite. It was generally astrophic, simple in structure, and so smooth as to be facile. After about 190 BC it disappears from view.^[11] Overall the later centuries simplify and narrow the range. Dactylic lyric and the dochmiac fall out of use.^[12]

The one exception for the dochmiac is a papyrus. P.Dryton 50, the fragmentum Grenfellianum, is a long Hellenistic lyric monologue. Its wording is often prosaic, which sits oddly with the complexity of its metre. The lyrics are polymetric and non-strophic, in the manner of the New Music, and full of dochmiacs. Extensive use of this colon had been thought to belong to Classical tragedy alone, and it is seen here for the last time. A loan of 174 BC on the other side of the papyrus fits a Hellenistic date.^[13] This is the only place outside drama where dochmiacs recur. The piece is a melodramatic Hellenistic song for a single voice.^[14]

Notes

1. ^ West 1987, p. 26.
2. ^ West 1987, pp. 26–27.
3. ^ West 1987, p. 28.
4. ^ West 1987, p. 29.
5. ^ West 1987, p. 81.
6. ^ See tab 1.
7. ^ West 1987, pp. 81–82.
8. ^ Maas 1962, p. 35.
9. ^ de Kreij 2022, p. 160.
10. ^ D’Angour 2022, p. 138.
11. ^ West 1987, p. 70.
12. ^ West 1987, p. 68.
13. ^ Sampson 2022, pp. 113–114.
14. ^ West 1987, p. 68 n. 1.

Two things make the post-classical history of the literary dialects different in kind. First, the Hellenistic book-poets choose a dialect as they choose a metre. Second, the spoken language changes underneath them. It first absorbs Ionic forms into common Greek. Then it loses the distinction between long and short syllables on which the metres rest.

Dialect as a Hellenistic choice

The scholar-poets reversed the old rule that genre fixes dialect. Callimachus brings Pindar’s rich lyric language back to life. He uses it even outside the lyric metres, in hexameters and elegiac couplets. He bends his language as he pleases. He writes Doric iambi (Ia. 6, 9, 11), though iambus was normally tied to Ionic, and an iambus with Aeolic echoes (Ia. 7). Theocritus wrote a group of Lesbian poems (28–31) in Lesbian metres and the East Aeolic dialect. Most of his other poetry is in Doric hexameters.^[1]

On the whole the book-poets were not trying to write imitation song. They were trying to enlarge the stock of stichic and distichic metres.^[2] So they reused lyric metres in stichic runs or in couplets, rather than reproducing the old strophes.^[3] In this way the hexameter, the Ionic metre par excellence, acquires a Doric voice:

The Doric forms here are ἁδύ, ἁ, ἅ, τήνα (= ἐκείνη),^[4] ποτί (= πρός), and παγαῖσι with long ᾱ. καί is shortened before ἁ (1.1). Both lines have word-end after the fourth foot. This word-end is called the bucolic caesura. Theocritus’ bucolic poems have it in 74% of lines, against 47% in Homer.^[5]

μελίσδεται shows σδ for ζ. The spelling goes back to grammarians who knew that Aeolic ζ was pronounced [zd]. It entered the texts of Theocritus and Alcman as well as those of the Lesbian poets.^[6] Metrically it changes nothing. Like ζ, σδ makes the preceding syllable long (λίσ-).

The same deliberate, self-aware handling of dialect appears in Hellenistic epigram. Nossis wrote in a literary Doric. It suited both inscribed funerary epigram and her native Epizephyrian Locris. Erinna wrote largely in the Doric of Telos, and she added Aeolic features that engage with Sappho.^[7]

The koinē

A number of Ionic forms later passed into the common Greek of the late Classical and Hellenistic periods. So in a lyric text it can be hard to tell an epic reminiscence from a late intrusion.^[8]

The Imperial lyric that survives is loose. Mesomedes was a Cretan at Hadrian’s court. He helps himself to every poetic form and phrase on offer, with no concern for consistency. Most of his non-Attic elements can fairly be called a Doric colouring, with some East Aeolic forms. P.Oxy. 5191, of the Roman period, mixes Ionic and Doric. It mostly keeps long ᾱ and has no East Aeolic. It shows that the lyric koinē was still alive.^[9]

The accent

The classical pitch accent played no part in the metre. From the Hellenistic period onward it slowly took on an element of stress. By about the third century AD the contrast of long and short syllables had more or less vanished from speech. Quantitative verse then became a highly artificial exercise.^[10]

The stress accent arose together with the loss of vowel quantity and syllable weight. The change began in popular speech, perhaps as early as the vulgar Attic of the fourth century BC. It reached literary writing late, first in Christian authors of the early fourth century AD, while learned poets went on writing quantitative verse.^[11]

The change had three effects on verse.

• From the late Hellenistic period, some poets seek or avoid accented syllables near the end of a colon or line. A paroxytone word has the acute accent on its next-to-last syllable, and the later Anacreontea favour paroxytone line-ends.^[12] The trimeter avoids a final accented syllable from the first century BC.^[13]
• From the third century AD there is unskilful verse with false quantities.
• From the fourth or fifth century there are purely accentual metres in the Church.^[14]

Synapheia weakens as well. After Lucian no successive lines are run together.^[14]

The end of the story is the trimeter of George Pisides in the seventh century. It is correct in quantity and paroxytone at the end. After him the verse is in effect × × × × × ⁝ × × : × × × ×́ ×, with an accent on the eleventh syllable. It has ceased to be an iambic trimeter and has become the Byzantine dodecasyllable, in which resolution hardly occurs.^[15]

The diagram sets the two verses one above the other. In the trimeter every position has a quantity. In the dodecasyllable only the number of syllables, the word-ends and the accent on the eleventh syllable count.

Notes

1. ^ de Kreij 2022, p. 160; Barbantani 2009, p. 307.
2. ^ West 1987, p. 76.
3. ^ Barbantani 2009, p. 307.
4. ^ Natoli et al. 2022, p. 332.
5. ^ West 1987, p. 78.
6. ^ Tribulato 2021, p. 145.
7. ^ Natoli et al. 2022, pp. 328, 332.
8. ^ de Kreij 2022, p. 143.
9. ^ de Kreij 2022, p. 160.
10. ^ West 1987, pp. 68–69.
11. ^ Devine and Stephens 1994, p. 215.
12. ^ West 1987, p. 71.
13. ^ West 1987, p. 82.
14. ^ ^{a b} West 1987, p. 69.
15. ^ West 1987, pp. 82–83.