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Each line was clearly marked off from the next, but its internal structure did not lend itself to bar-divisions. One could not usefully beat time to it. |
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By Sappho's time this type of verse had acquired a more definite form. Her glyconic can be described as two unregulated notes which stand outside the rhythm, leading in to a rhythmized set of six notes:  . The initial indeterminate notes are such an integral feature of the structure that they remain even when she extends the verse by prefixing the figure  (fr. 98):  . |
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But after Sappho and Alcaeus the freedom of these two notes was curbed. It became established that at least one of them should be long, and presently that such a long might be divided into two shorts. The quantitative principle, the counting of time, took them into its control. There was still freedom as between  and  , but this is no greater freedom than we find in several other types of rhythm, where it represents the pressing of two long notes into the space appropriate for a long and a short. |
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The whole verse should now be amenable to rhythmic analysis. The ancients divided it into two measures, one 'antispastic' ('retroflex'), i.e.  , the other iambic,  , each containing a thesis and arsis of equal duration.53 In modern notation:  . |
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We should certainly accept this analysis in preference to nineteenth-century attempts on the lines of  which are based on the premise, laid down by August Boeckh, that the verse is made up of trochaic and (irrational) dactylic feet, each bar beginning with a long note.54 This reflects the way in which German- and English-speakers instinctively read such metre, aligning long syllables with stressed beats which we make equidistant, and taking the intervening short syllables faster or slower according to whether there are more or fewer of them.55 The ancient analysis gives an altogether more interesting rhythm, hinging on the juxtaposition of  with  , something that we have already met in the choriambic inversion of iambic. The glyconic variants in which the sequence  occupies the first or the second half of the verse instead of the centre appear |
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53 Heph. Ench. 10, Aristid. Quint. p. 49. 20ff.; 'Mar. Vict.' (Aphth.) Gramm. Lat. vi. 42. 13, 88. 6ff. |
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54 Cf. R. Westphal, Griechische Rhythmik, 134.. |
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55 Cf. Georgiades 64-71; my Greek Metre, 23. |
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