To write a manual of Latin metre is a simple enough task for the competent metrician; to write a detailed history of Latin metre is a more demanding but, though not yet convincingly attempted, realizable task; to write, however, a sensitive and sophisticated treatment of how Roman poets not only employed but also interacted with their metrical forms is a much more exacting and ambitious undertaking. Musa Pedestris is the fruit of more than a decade's work: the result is a rich and energetic tour through a broad spectrum of Roman poetry. Although the book necessarily has limited coverage, and thus some surprising omissions, it has several facets that make it a rewarding read and a genuine stimulus for future research.
The book comprises a lengthy introduction followed by four chapters each dedicated to a given metre (or family of metres): hendecasyllables; iambics, especially choliambics and pure iambics; sapphics; dactylic hexameters, including their appearance in elegiac and epodic metres. The book ends with a brief conclusion, a disconcertingly brief bibliography, a full index locorum and a less full index rerum. Although the division of the book into metre-specific chapters is a natural one, Morgan's anfractuous style of argument means that the same ground is trodden more than once, often giving the impression that the volume expects specific consultation rather than consecutive perusal.
The introduction to Musa Pedestris is particularly interesting, tackling head-on the book's aims and their place in the theory of classical literary criticism. M.'s primary goal is set in the context of Paul Fussell's tripartite analysis (in his 1965 Poetic Metre and Poetic Form) of the ‘meanings’ that metre can convey, namely the elucidation of his third type — the force a metre and its literary-historical context can possess in Latin poetry. It is the significance of metre via its associations, then, that is cardinal to this book, holding together its variegated readings of various verse forms. M.'s continual assumption is that Roman poets and their audiences were highly literate in metrical matters (yet more so than their Greek predecessors) and thus acutely sensitive to metrical play or posturing (‘metametricality’, 26). The illumination that acceptance of this context can bring to Latin literature is neatly demonstrated at the introduction's close through two close readings of Catullus 17 (in priapeans) and Martial 3.29 (in sotadeans).
Ch. 1 (‘The Hendecasyllable: an Abbreviated History’) tackles the Phalaecian hendecasyllable, in particular its polysemous ambiguity in both origin and employment. M. begins with Statius (a prominent focus of the book) and his fashionable poem on the Via Domitiana (Silu. 4.3), advancing — perhaps with more passion than persuasion — its claims to technopaignia, before he turns to the inescapable backdrop hoisted by Catullus. By giving diligent attention, here as elsewhere, to the theorizing of ancient metricians (qualecumque est) about the true metrical basis of the hendecasyllable, M. instructively outlines why Catullus and his successors may have been ready to exploit the metre's iambic associations as much as the festive and jocular. Unfortunately, Catullus' metrical experimentation in 55 and 58b finds no greater treatment than a brief footnote (51 n. 7).
Ch. 2 (‘Iambics: the Short and the Long of it’) turns to explicitly iambic metres, with especial focus on their relationship to the tradition of Greek (choliambic) invective. Notably useful in this chapter is the analysis of Greeker-than-Greek pure iambics, wrongly hypothesized as the original Greek form on a podic (rather than metric) analysis of the trimeter, though unattested in that language. Despite much of significance on Catullus' concerted use of this metre, one would have expected closer treatment of poem 29, among whose fascinating features are the addressee's name, which resists inclusion — though included — in the metre chosen to attack him, and the question of whether metre was violated (as transmitted) at line 20: if it was, Catullus' and M.'s readers are left asking why. M. explains with verve the curious choice of choliambics for Cat. 31, corroborating earlier theories by claiming that the verse form expresses human weakness, physical or mental. Among the best sections of the book is M.'s detailed account (132–58) of Cat. 4 and its virtuoso parody, Catalepton 10, which offers up fresh insights throughout. For the latter poem, further defence of the date of composition intriguingly posited (late Republican; Calvus?) and its subsequent inclusion among Virgil's juvenilia would have been very welcome.
Ch. 3 (‘“Narrower Circuits”: the Sapphic Stanza’) analyses the Romans' appropriation and reconceptualization of the signature stanza of Sappho. M. begins once more with Statius (Silu. 4.3), before moving back to Catullus' revolutionary practice (poems 11, 51). A partial survey of Horace's innovative practice is offered through detailed and clever readings of Odes 1.12, 3.14, 4.2, 4.6 and the Carmen saeculare: the benefits of this method are evident in allowing more Latin to appear on the page yet important questions remain about quite how significant the use of sapphics was in all of Horace's twenty-six poems in that metre. If it was always meaningful per se (which seems doubtful), its general purpose could be profitably tabulated, however inexactly. The chapter concludes with a beneficial but brief consideration of alcaics via Stat., Silu. 4.5, Horace, Odes 1.9 and 32, and Alcaeus himself.
Ch. 4 (‘The Dactylic Hexameter and its Detractors’) moves to the dactylic hexameter, the metre that has lurked in the background throughout the rest of the book, constantly playing foil to other metres and the associational baggage they bring. M. begins, like Latin metre, with saturnians, a verse form that still repays — as well as repudiates — close analysis; especially insightful is M.'s treatment of Callaecus' temple of Mars and its probable inclusion of saturnians commissioned from Accius, although the latter's seeming belief in the metre's Greek origin must add further complications to the narrative. After a cursory view of Ennian hexametric practice, M. moves to Lucilius in order to elucidate not only his deflation of the herous by its scandalous adoption as the metre of satire but also his sneeringly ambiguous engagement with all things Greek. M.'s lively treatment of the difficult question of Horatian style vis-à-vis Lucilius (especially Serm. 1.5) leaves the reader wanting more on the same theme. But the rhythm moves relentlessly on to elegy, viz. Ovid and Propertius (especially 4.6), where pentameter must ever echo hexameter. Amidst all of this is a fine discussion (366–9) of Domitius Marsus' elegant quatrain on Tibullus' death: multum in paruo indeed.
With a brief as ambitious in scope as M.'s, it is perhaps inevitable that the book has its biases, as a quick look at the index locorum (and rerum) can demonstrate: Horace and Statius, followed by Catullus and Ovid, are well represented; yet either nothing or very little appears on some of the most interesting of metricians — Lucretius, Virgil, Persius, Juvenal. Further, although fragmentary, the varied metrical creations of Laevius, Varro Reatinus and Petronius could only reward if put under the microscope.
M.'s careful reading and careful writing merit careful reading. That said, one cannot escape the feeling that more could have been achieved over 400 Oxford pages. At any rate, the book's long gestation has allowed M.'s engaged thought about many metrical issues to be set out with confidence. A corollary of this is that several of his most interesting observations have found their way already into his published articles, if not occurred independently to others (especially Alessandro Barchiesi) in the meantime. The text contains occasional inconsistencies and a few misprints (most strikingly the wholesale elision of ingens on p. 206 and the aporetic page-references on pp. 168 and 221). For better or worse, technical material is generally restricted to footnotes. Items written after 1950 account for more than 90 per cent of the bibliography, only 2.5 per cent preceding the twentieth century; this undue focus on criticism of recent decades may suggest to the novice that there is little benefit in earlier treatments of metre, but this would be a mistaken inference. To take two works half a century old, Wilkinson's Golden Latin Artistry (1963) and Bonavia-Hunt's Horace the Minstrel (1965, not in the bibliography), the products of widely read and metrically sensitive scholars, can still only repay consultation.
M.'s provocative and keenly promoted case — that Roman poets were deeply self-conscious in their manipulation of metre — is generally a convincing one. Musa Pedestris gains additional value in shedding important light on the fetishistic engagement of Latin poets with their Greek cultural heritage; a question that still requires further subtle probing is how such learned Latin play impinged upon Greek poetics under the Empire. M.'s eloquent defence of why and how ‘metre matters’ can only be salutary to modern classical scholarship more broadly.
