Book Description

Excerpt from Early Latin Verse The removal of the lava and cinders from Pompeii discovered to us a town of the Early Empire. We saw the very room in which a Roman had lived. Would that we could hear him speak! We know his language - the significance of each word, the sound of each letter. But words and letters are the dry bones of a language. It is the tone of utterance that breathes life into them. And that is what this volume claims to discover - Plautus', Terence's (and presumably Cicero's) intonation of the sentence. To disclose it the rubbish of half a century had to be cleared away. Klotz's large book on Early Latin Verse gathered up all the wisdom and - alas! - much of the folly of Ritschl's time. And no more egregious folly than the 'metrical' theory of the Brevis Brevians, that Plautus scanned 'apud me' when the metrical ictus happened to fall on ap-, 'ad Illos' when the metrical ictus happened not to fall on ad. Clear that rubbish away, and you see that 'apud me', 'ad Illos' go with emphasis on the pronoun, while in 'apud me', 'ad illos' the pronoun is a sentence-enclitic. This was pointed out many years ago in a magazine-article (indeed Ritschl had given a hint of the same kind). But on Klotz's layer of rubbish (itself embedded on C.F. Muller's Early Latin Prosody, 1869) the volumes of the Teubner edition have been superimposed, keeping it firmly in its place. Satan must cast out Satan. The word 'rubbish' is not too strong. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.