Latin Sudoku I

So I've decided to address a problem which has been plaguing our schools, the heart of our very society. It seems we are no longer able to reason or work through a problem rationally. We no longer know how to scan Latin verse. I am here to rectify this issue.

On Dactylic Hexameter or, All I Ever Need to Know I Learned from Latin Hexameter Verse

So we'll be working with a particular favourite line of mine: Explicit hic totum, pro scripto da mihi potum (there is another particular variant I just discovered which reads thus, Explicit hic totum, pro Christo da mihi potum).

The first thing to know is what is dactylic hexameter? It is a form of verse consisting of six feet, each of which is either a dactyl or a spondee. A dactyl is a long vowel followed by two short ones, and a spondee is two long vowels.

In English, when we speak of long and short vowels, we are usually referring to stress. That is because English is a qualitative language which is not sensitive to vowel length. (This does not mean that all of our vowels are the same length, it just means that we neither notice nor care in English). Latin, however, is a quantitative language, which is, in fact, sensitive to the length of vowels, and that is what matters in poetry.

So what determines if a vowel is long or short? First is whether its natural length is long or short, which you can find easily in any half-decent dictionary. Second is by the weight of its spoken syllable. And third, one of the easiest, is if it falls at the end of the line. We'll cover that last one first, as it is the easiest, and also the very first thing you do with dactylic hexameter. I will be showing long vowels thūs, and short vowels sö.

At the end of the line, without any exception I have ever heard of, you will have a dactyl and a spondee. So, the first thing you want to do is look at the right-hand side of the line and mark the first two vowels you see as being long. This is the spondee. Then mark the next two as short and the next as long. This is the dactyl. You already have two of the six figured out. While we are doing things we know must be true, regardless of the line, we will make the first vowel of the line long, because both dactyls and spondees begin with a long vowel, and consequently the very first vowel of the line, being the start of either one or the other, must be long. Ēxplicit hic totum, pro scripto / dā mïhï / pōtūm.

The next thing we need to consider is syllable weight. There are two elements that cause a syllable to be counted as heavy, and therefore the vowel long. The simplest is that all diphthongised vowels are long. This means that au, ae, oe, and ei are all, automatically, counted as a single, long vowel. Also, more rarely is eu, as in seu, or such cases of ui as huic, cui, and hui, but nowhere else.¹

The other element is the consonants which follow the vowel. We will now enter into a bit of phonology and consider what forms a syllable. A syllable consists of two main parts: the onset and the rime. Because Latin phonology moves from right to left, the onset is irrelevant. The rime consists of two sub-parts: the nucleus and the coda. In Latin, the nucleus is always a vowel. The coda is the consonants which follow it. A heavy syllable is any case where the coda has two or more consonants in it. Orthographic word boundaries are unimportant and non-existent in a spoken language, and they are thus unimportant and non-existent in Latin poetry. This means that in the case of 'erat verbum', the 'a' in 'erat' is long, because it is followed by 't v'.

So let's apply this to what we already know about the line: Ēxplicit hīc totūm, prō scrīpto / dā mïhï / pōtūm. As a note, with what we see here, 'h' is a funny one which sometimes switches between being treated as a consonant and as not really existing. The main thing is to try it one way, and if it doesn't work, try it the other way. I usually err to treat it as absent initially and see where that leaves me.

We've now reached a point where we can choose between looking up words in the dictionary to see how they scan, or we can do things far faster and more reliably (in case the author is doing anything tricksy) by employing that wonder of the Greeks which we call logic. We know that every foot must be either a dactyl (¯¨¨) or a spondee (¯¯). This means that every vowel in the line must fit into one of those two patterns. So we look at the line as it stands: Ēxplicit hīc totūm, prō scrīpto / dā mïhï / pōtūm, and we see that the 'o' in 'scrīpto' is at the end of a foot, and the 'i' is long. Because a long vowel must either be at the start of three syllables (a dactyl) or in a spondee, we know that the 'o' must be part of a spondee. This gives us our third foot: Ēxplicit hīc totūm, prō / scrīptō / dā mïhï / pōtūm.

And now we see that it is preceded by another spondee, which we will mark out immediately: Ēxplicit hīc to/tūm, prō / scrīptō / dā mïhï / pōtūm.

Again, with 'hīc to-' we are in the same scenario as before with 'scrīptō', so we know that the 'to-' must be long, giving us this, Ēxplicit / hīc tō/tūm, prō / scrīptō / dā mïhï / pōtūm.

This leaves us with five feet and just the two 'i's in 'Ēxplicit' to sort out. Because this is our final foot, and there is only one foot that can take three syllables, that is, a dactyl, we know it must be that.

And so we can see that it scans thus, Ēxplïcït / hīc tō/tūm, prō / scrīptō / dā mïhï / pōtūm.

I hope that thinking it through like a puzzle makes it easier to do. There are some exceptions, such as elisions, which I have not considered in depth lest I terrify you too much. These will likely come up in part II where we look at elegiac couplets.

1. Wheelock's Latin, 6th Ed. p.xli. As a note, this also includes huius and cuius, however, as I tend to treat the 'i' there as a consonant, this is not a serious issue for scansion.