This is valuable experience for later using the meter to work out quantities.
![scansion of aeneid scansion of aeneid](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-toAltGvATnM/Tkf3GOD-c9I/AAAAAAAAAN4/YrIZfhEFKsI/s1600/Aeneid+Bk1+1-5+007.jpg)
If they see those groupings, they know they must have done something wrong. They learn from this experience, without me needing to tell them, that there are some impossible rhythms – three shorts in row, or a short between two longs, for instance. At this point any mistakes the teacher hasn’t caught will become very obvious to the student. The students now add the foot-divisions into their lines. For the benefit of the musical students, I say it’s like a piece of music in 2/4 time, and I draw the musical notation for the dactyl and spondee bars with crochets and quavers. Each foot contains a pattern of longs and shorts: in dactylic hexameter, this must either be a long-short-short (dactyl) or a long-long (spondee). Each line is divided into six musical bars (hence the hex- in hexameter) which are called feet. I explain that this type of poetry is called ‘dactylic hexameter’. This next principle is the division into feet. This is perfect for setting up the next principle. The student thus ends up with “fully scanned” lines that just don’t have any foot divisions yet. They’ll make lots of mistakes here but you can go around to each of them and coach them through each mistake, until they get more accurate at marking long and short syllables. I then get students to write long and short marks on all the syllables on lines of poetry, paying close attention to macrons, consonants in the following word, and whether something counts as a diphthong. I can see the merits of starting with just practicing syllable division, I just haven’t done it that way myself. *Maybe in the future I’ll try explaining the last thing using the terminology of closed versus open syllables, but I tend to skip the step of dividing syllables with the students, because I don’t want to overcomplicate something that is already quite complicated. the vowel in it is followed by 2 or more consonant sounds:*.ui is only a diphthong in 4 words: huic, huius, cui, cuius.it contains a long vowel: ā, ē, ī, ō, ū.Then I write out the three reasons a syllable can be long, with examples:Ī syllable is LONG if any of these are true… (I also avoid using the term ‘a vowel long by position’, as that implies that somehow the short vowel sound is lengthened if a cluster of consonants follows it – I would simply call that a ‘long syllable’ which may contain a short vowel.) I explain that long syllables take twice as much time to say as short syllables, and I draw some musical notation (a crochet and a quaver) to reinforce that this is a timed rhythm. The words ‘long’ and ‘short’ are more clearly about the quantity of time. I use the words ‘long’ and ‘short’ rather than ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ because ‘heavy’ sounds like a stressed syllable and ‘light’ sounds like an unstressed syllable, and I don’t want them to think that way.
![scansion of aeneid scansion of aeneid](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lR_wA04jNjg/maxresdefault.jpg)
It is far more intuitive to get the feel for scansion in a Greek environment, so why not set up a similar type of situation initially for our Latinists?įirstly, I explain that Latin syllables can be long or short. In my own experience, I have found that scansion is far easier to pick up in Ancient Greek than in Latin, because even if not all long vowels are given macrons, at least the eta and omega characters mark the long ē and ō, and all elisions are printed for you. By starting with a text of printed macrons, it is easier for students to see (without the teacher explaining it) that the rhythm emerges from the word choice, and macrons are not just invisibly appearing whenever the puzzle demands it.
![scansion of aeneid scansion of aeneid](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/scansionandmeter-100511123921-phpapp01/95/scansion-and-meter-10-728.jpg)
In other words, it is not the meter which determines the vowel length, but the vowel length which produces the meter. But the poet worked the other way, carefully choosing words according their innate sounds so that they would produce the desired rhythms. When you learn to scan on blank letters, you end up thinking backwards about vowel length – ‘it can be worked out when you know the rules’. By printing macrons, we show them that Latin vowels are innately long or short – not just whether they ‘need to be for the meter’. I start with a text that has the macrons printed in it (and I pre-mark out the elisions, if I haven’t already taught elision). My goal is to bring them to understand scansion from first principles. My goal in this session is not to give students a step-by-step formula for answering exam questions – not yet. Icarus and Daedalus – our set passage from Ovid, and perhaps a metaphor for how students feel when they first see hexameter scansion.