![]() It surely is not beyond the powers of type designers to make the traditional system serve Dee’s purpose just as well.ĭee states that his book presents a clear picture of the hexameter patterns by giving their linear sequence from the beginning to the end of the poem, and the set of individual lines showing each pattern. I find his system less attractive, if only because ‘l’ is a horizontally shorter letter than ‘s’, and the visual impression is given that the dactyl (‘lss’) is longer in duration than the spondee (‘ll’), and the code for a holodactylic line when printed is much longer than that for a holospondaic line. Thus the first four lines of the First Book are represented byĭee thinks that this system gives a good impression of the texture of dactyls and spondees in the versification, 5 and claims that in the traditional notation of macrons and breves the symbols “are usually too small as printed and not easily distinguished at a glance” (p. The possible patterns of dactyls and spondees are indicated numerically by numbers from 1 to 32, and graphically by ‘lss’ for dactyls and ‘ll’ for spondees. 4 As a sample, I list his deviations from Tarrant’s text in Met. For reasons of copyright, it seems, Dee’s publisher required him to construct a text of his own. I proof read a section of 600 lines and checked the scansions: there was found only the trivial mistake at 8.283, which has “habet Sicula” for “habent Sicula” (an error reported by Magnus from Tarrant’s L, s. We are told that the text and scansions were created manually, and that we should allow for human error. 3 As in Part I, the patterns of scansion are numerically and graphically coded in the left margin, and on the right are found book and line references, and the other right hand symbols used in Part I. In this part the verses are arranged in “whole-word alphabetic-character” order. Part II of the work classifies the verses by the possible patterns or ‘schemata’ of scansion. The obelus is used in the usual way to indicate corrupt transmission in six passages only. 2 Verses “bracketed in most if not all of the source editions as an interpolation or some form of redundant duplicate” are marked in the text with square brackets. 1 On the right hand also there are used on occasion (i) the numeric symbol (two obliquely crossing pairs of parallel lines), which indicates 56 passages where variants in the source editions give differing scansions, and (ii) the black spot, which is the mark of verses bracketed by Tarrant’s alone among the five modern source editions. The right margin gives the book and line reference, and shows whether the verse contains any word in reported speech. Both numerical codes and the letters ‘l’ and ‘s’ (see below) on the left margin indicate the pattern of dactyls and spondees in each line, and indications are given when the pattern of scansion is repeated in successive lines. Part I sets out a complete text of the Metamorphoses, with sets of marginal marks. The bulk of the book consists of two parts. There is a clear introduction setting out the author’s purpose (“to offer a … picture of the hexameter patterns” (p. This reviewer has some difficulty in envisaging the variety of uses to which it may be put by its readers. One must, however, be grateful for the tedious labor that has produced this reliable index. The information contained is confined to the use of dactyls and spondees, and hence pays no attention to caesurae or the other important features used so subtly by the great poets to vary the aesthetic effect of the hexameter. ![]() In my opinion a digital format with suitable search programs would have provided a much more flexible instrument. It is meticulously prepared and accurately produced, which is a cardinal virtue in such a volume. This book consists of a metrical concordance to Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
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