Description
'Words and letters are the dry bones of a language. It is the tone of utterance that breathes life into them. And that is what this volum claims to discover- Plautus', Terence's (and presumably Cicero's) intonation of the sentence.' Lindsay goes on to criticize in no uncertain terms the 'layer of rubbish' deposited on Roman dramatic verse by previous scholars which obstructed any attempt to recover the intonation of contemporary Roman speech. This study, first published in 1922, which quickly established itself as the classic work on metre and prosody in Plautus, deals in meticulous detail with the 'egregious folly' of the so-called law of breves breviantes, or iambic shortening, and with the relation of verse-ictus with the accent of ordinary speech in the context of the comedies -- Provided by publisher.
