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What is here represented as a 10/8 bar arises from the impaction of two of the 6/8 bar-types used in the preceding lines:  . It is similar with the Alcaic stanza, which is also built from two matching lines followed by a third which is longer and develops their rhythms further. The pattern of the first two lines is |
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Again the 10/8 bar represents two of the 6/8 bars overlapped, this time both of the same form, as in the dactylic expansion discussed above. |
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To some people it will perhaps seem more natural to measure the line according to the pattern of Example 5.15; |
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but we should not allow our own culturally determined sense of what is natural in these matters to induce us to reject an odd-looking but vital rhythm in favour of a relatively bland one. All aeolic verses can be made to sound like gently babbling brooks if one adopts the Boeckhian method of assuming that  and  occupy equal time. If, on the other hand, one takes these metrical asymmetries to betoken rhythmic asymmetries, one is rewarded by the discovery of many snappy syncopations and lively, wrong-footing changes of bar-length, disconcerting to people brought up on English nursery rhymes and the Viennese or Liverpudlian classics, but in keeping with what we have found in several other of the ancient Greek rhythmical genres, and with the character of Balkan music as it exists today. |
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