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Anapaests in Plautus

The ancient grammarians distinguished anapaestic patterns from other types of pattern in Plautus' comic scripts, but not always without difficulty. Hence the enigmatic entry in Sisenna's commentary on the Aulularia: haec scaena anapaestico metro est. sed concisa sunt, ut non intellegas. Those who tried to indicate the patterns in book texts perhaps found it hard to separate dimeters from tetrameters. Certainly, corruption in our witnesses often conceals what grammarians had decided on more or less rational grounds. During the great age of modern Plautine studies scholars differed widely about where to apply the label 'anapaestic'. At the beginning Ritschl deplored a 'pruritus anapaesticus'; at the end Lindsay could complain about the 'recklessness' of the Teubner editors and say 'we are all too ready to find this metre where Plautus never put it' {Early Latin Verse [Oxford, 1922], p. 300). Sandro Boldrini, a pupil of Cesare Questa, submitted a dissertation to the University of Urbino in 1968 on 'I versi anapestici di Plauto' and since then has published a series of articles on various aspects of Plautus' anapaests (in RFIC 99 [1971], 421-30; ibid. 101 [1973], 195-203; Atti Ace. Line. Mem. Cl. diSc. mor. stor. efilol. 8.17 [1973-4], 367-403; GIF n.s. 7 [1976], 154-68; ASNP 3.11.3 [1981], 641-73). The present volume reprints these articles in an updated form, adds a hitherto unpublished essay 'Un semioritmema' (pp. 153-74), a bibliography (which includes the set of statements on verse of B. V. Tomashevskii put together and translated by T. Todorov in Theorie de la litterature. Textes des formalistes russes [Paris, 1965], pp. 154-69), and two indexes. Stray references to things like stylemes, metremes and semantemes occur in the old material (pp. 26,69,108). In the new the now fashionable jargon runs riot. The criteria used by B. in establishing his corpus of 873 dimeters and tetrameters can be seen from the discussions of individual passages to have been thought out with some care. Given the importance his essays attach to statistical argument, the lack of systematic exposition of these criteria is regrettable.