Textual criticism, transmission of texts, Latin metrics and prosody
What the textual-criticism and metrics option tests
Domain 5 divides into two possible skills. Textual criticism asks how a Latin text reached us: manuscripts, archetypes, variants, stemmata and editorial choices. Metrics and prosody ask you to scan verse, name feet and caesurae, and explain elision. The paper may offer one of these options; you must use the technical vocabulary accurately. If the paper offers the metrics option, practise writing the scansion with macrons and breves, and mark the main caesura.
Core rules: transmission
- Surviving witnesses: papyri, inscriptions, codices (capital, uncial, minuscule), florilegia and quotations in later authors.
- Recensio groups manuscripts into families; the archetype is the lost common ancestor; a stemma codicum shows dependence.
- Variants are chosen by lectio difficilior, usus scribendi, and context; emendatio may be divinatio when no witness is correct.
- The apparatus criticus lists sigla, readings and editors; learn to read it.
Core rules: prosody
- Quantity: long by nature (long vowel/diphthong) or by position (vowel + two consonants, or x/z).
- Dactylic hexameter: six feet, dactyl (- u u) or spondee (- -), final foot a trochee (- u); caesura often penthemimeral or hephthemimeral.
- Elegiac couplet: hexameter + pentameter (two half-feet, two feet, two half-feet).
- Elision: final vowel or -m before a vowel or h is not pronounced; synizesis and hiatus are exceptions.
Worked example
Scan Aeneid 1.1: Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris. Feet: Arma vir | umque ca | no, Troi | ae qui | primus ab | oris. Dactyl, dactyl, spondee, spondee, dactyl, spondee (final foot trochee). There is no elision in this line; -que is enclitic and does not elide before cano. Caesura after virumque (penthemimeral).
Traps
- Forgetting elision and scanning an extra syllable.
- Treating -que as a separate word for scansion.
- Confusing ictus (metrical beat) with Latin word stress.
- Assuming every hexameter is dactylic; spondees are common.
- Using a manuscript siglum without explaining it.