From kolb@ucla.edu Sun Mar 24 02:47:40 2002 Received: from mailscan5.cac.washington.edu (mailscan5.cac.washington.edu [140.142.32.14]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with SMTP id g2OAlbDN174832 for ; Sun, 24 Mar 2002 02:47:37 -0800 Received: FROM mxu2.u.washington.edu BY mailscan5.cac.washington.edu ; Sun Mar 24 02:47:37 2002 -0800 Received: from serval.noc.ucla.edu (serval.noc.ucla.edu [169.232.10.12]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with ESMTP id g2OAlaZB018307 for ; Sun, 24 Mar 2002 02:47:36 -0800 Received: from computer.ucla.edu (ts11-108.dialup.bol.ucla.edu [164.67.21.117]) by serval.noc.ucla.edu (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id CAA23104; Sun, 24 Mar 2002 02:47:15 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.2.20020324024307.02678ae0@pop.ucla.edu> X-Sender: kolb@pop.ucla.edu X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1 Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 02:47:13 -0800 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: Jack Kolb Subject: Greeks were slaves to the beat Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable http://www.nature.com/nsu/020318/020318-9.html Greeks were slaves to the beat Maths shows that Greek poets had more rhythm than the Romans. 22 March 2002 PHILIP BALL Roman poets broke rules of rhythm that classical Greek poets observed=20 fastidiously, say two mathematicians. Their analysis of verse structure=20 could help classics scholars probe the interplay between linguistic style=20 and poetic effect1. Ricardo Mansilla and E. Bush of the National Autonomous University of=20 Mexico in Mexico City have taken an unconventional approach to studying the= =20 verse of Homer, Ovid, Virgil and others. Ignoring the poetry's semantic=20 content of adventure, love and philosophy, they looked at its sequences of= =20 long and short syllables and pauses. The key element of this underlying structure is the hexameter, a verse line= =20 consisting of six units called meters or feet. "Greek and Latin poets used= =20 the hexameter, but the Greeks did it in a more strict sense," say the=20 researchers. The Romans' poems were more rhythmically complex. In a sense,= =20 Virgil represents a Stravinsky to Homer's Bach. That much is obvious even without the maths. But Mansilla and Bush used a=20 technique that draws on the information theory developed in=20 telecommunications research in the 1940s. They specify exactly how, and by= =20 how much, these rhythms differ. As well as pointing up prevailing fashions of style, the analysis could=20 fuel some long-standing debates. For instance, some scholars have=20 questioned whether the Greek poet Homer existed at all, and whether he=20 really wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey. They'll be pleased to hear that mathematically speaking the Odyssey shows a= =20 freer rhythm than the Iliad, making it closer to the works of the later=20 poet Lucretius. Calculated to move Poetry doesn't sound as if it should benefit from mathematical dissection,= =20 but the classical Greeks might not have minded. For them, composing was a=20 rigorous affair. The strict rhythmic structure served to differentiate=20 poetry from everyday speech, and thus emphasize its ritualistic= significance. Bowing to the beat also aided the Greeks' memory - poetry was then=20 primarily an oral tradition. The later tendency to write down verses might= =20 have allowed the Romans greater rhythmic latitude. The first five meters of a line of hexameter verse are dactyls - one long=20 syllable followed by two short ones, like the word 'carpenter'. The sixth=20 meter has one long and one short syllable, like 'barter'. Other rhythmic=20 elements allow for variation of this pulse, such as the spondee (two long=20 syllables) and the caesura (a pause). There were rules for how these elements were to be placed. But the poet's=20 art lies partly in shuffling and sometimes subverting the allowed=20 permutations into a composition that has a clear pulse yet has variations=20 that please the ear. Mansilla and Bush converted the Greek and Roman poetry into strings of=20 three symbols, representing the dactyl, spondee and caesura. They then=20 mapped out the correlations between symbols in these strings, for example=20 to measure the typical distance between caesurae. This reveals how=20 organized or complex the verses are. Mathematical methods like this are now widely used to analyse texts, and=20 can be used to spot plagiarism. References * Mansilla, R. & Bush, E. Increase of complexity from classical Greek= =20 to Latin poetry. Preprint, (2002). =A9 Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002 .