Aeolic verse
| In this article ¯ indicates a longum, ˘ indicates a breve, and × indicates an anceps. |
Aeolic verse is a classification of Ancient Greek lyric poetry referring to the distinct verse forms characteristic of the two great poets of Archaic Lesbos, Sappho and Alcaeus, who composed in their native Aeolic dialect. These verse forms were taken up and developed by later Greek and Roman poets and some modern European poets.
Sappho and Alcaeus' verses differ from most other Greek lyric poetry in their metrical construction:
Antoine Meillet and later scholars, by comparison to Vedic meter, have seen in these principles and in other tendencies (the sequence ...¯˘˘¯˘¯..., the alternation of blunt and pendant verses) conserved traces of Proto-Indo-European poetic practices.
In Sappho and Alcaeus, the three basic metrical groups ¯˘˘¯˘¯ (dodrans or choriambo-cretic), ¯˘˘¯ (choriamb) and ¯˘¯ (cretic) figure importantly, and groups are sometimes joined (in what is probably a Greek innovation) by a link anceps. Aeolic poems may be stichic (with all lines having the same metrical form), or composed in more elaborate stanzas or strophes.
One analysis of Aeolic verses' various forms identifies a choriambic nucleus (¯˘˘¯), which is sometimes subject to:
For example, an Asclepiad may be analyzed as a glyconic with choriambic expansion (glc, gl2c), and a glyconic with dactylic expansion produces the stichic length (×× ¯˘˘¯˘˘¯˘˘¯ ˘¯, or gl2d) in which Sappho composed the poems collected in Book II.
In this analysis, a wide variety of Aeolic verses (whether in Sappho and Alcaeus, or in later choral poetry) are analyzed as a choriambic nucleus (sometimes expanded, as just mentioned), usually preceded by anceps syllables and followed by various single-short sequences (e.g. ˘¯, ˘¯˘¯, and, by the principle of brevis in longo, ˘¯˘¯¯, ˘¯¯, ¯), with various additional allowances to accommodate the practice of the later poets. (By also taking the cretic unit, mentioned above, into account, this analysis can also, for example, understand the third line of the Alcaic stanza—and other stanza lines as in Sappho frr. 96, 98, 99—as Aeolic in nature, and appreciate how the initial three syllables of the Sapphic hendecasyllable were not variable in Sappho's practice.)
...
Wikipedia