This length is scanned like the first four feet of the dactylic hexameter (giving rise to the name dactylic tetrameter a priore). Thus, a spondee substitutes for a dactyl in the third line, but the lines end with dactyls (not spondees).
The final syllable of each line in the above fragment counts as short and brevis in longo is not observed.
The Alcmanian (or Alcmanic) strophe
Horace composed some poems in the Alcmanian strophe[2] or Alcmanian system. It is also called the Alcmanic strophe[3] or the 1st Archilochian.[4] It is a couplet consisting of a dactylic hexameter followed by a dactylic tetrameter a posteriore (so called because it ends with a spondee, thus resembling the last four feet of the hexameter). Examples are Odes I.7 and I.28, and Epode 12:
Quid tibi vis, mulier nigris dignissima barris?
Munera quid mihi quidve tabellas
'What do you want for yourself, woman worthy of black elephants?[5]
It is the only metre in Horace's Epodes not to contain any iambic metra, and the only one to be found in both the Epodes and Odes.
Later Latin poets use the dactylic tetrameter a priore as the second verse of the Alcmanian strophe. For example, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy I.m.3:
Tunc me discussa liquerunt nocte tenebrae
Luminibusque prior rediit vigor.
Ut, cum praecipiti glomerantur nubila Coro
Nimbosisque polus stetit imbribus,
Sol latet ac nondum caelo venientibus astris,
Desuper in terram nox funditur;
Hanc si Threicio Boreas emissus ab antro
Verberet et clausum reseret diem,
Emicat et subito vibratus lumine Phoebus
Mirantes oculos radiis ferit.
'Then as the night was shaken off, the darkness became clear
and the former strength returned to my eyes.
Just as when clouds gather with a strong north-west wind
and the sky threatens with cloudy rainshowers,
The Sun is hidden and, the stars not yet coming to the sky,
The term "Alcmanian" is sometimes applied to modern English dactylic tetrameters (e.g. Robert Southey's "Soldier's Wife": "Wild-visaged Wanderer, ah, for thy heavy chance!"), or to poems (e.g. in German) that strictly imitate Horace's meters.
↑ H. G. Evelyn-White (transl.), Ausonius, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library, p. 91.
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