Metrics and Rhythmics: History of Poetic Forms in Ancient Greece

by Bruno Gentili and Liana Lomiento

(Trans. E. Christian Kopff; Studi di metrica classica 12. Pisa/Roma: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2008)

From the review by Andrea Tessier (Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2009.11.31):

The brief but important chapter that follows ("Modes of Performance," pp. 89-110) not only gives an informative synthesis of the practice of performance and the instruments of antiquity, but along with the first chapter contributes to delineating Gentili's and Lomiento's vision of the relationship of meter, rhythm and performance. This vision, in my opinion, represents one of the book's most interesting aspects. Gentili and Lomiento base their argumentation on an assumption that they are well aware is debatable. For Gentili and Lomiento the Hellenistic "poetry book," and especially the division "in cola" of the lyric sections (which is structured by brief sequences, essentially in dimeters with occasional trimeters and tetrameters), preserves significant information about the traces of the original performances available to the Alexandrian philologists and is the basis of the slightly later metrical and rhythmic theory that has survived (Gentili and Lomiento p. 31). Therefore the division into cola of the melic sections of drama and choral lyric, the "colometry" (which continued to be found in the printed tradition up to the beginning of the nineteenth century) is not the work of inept "Grammatiker" but preserves otherwise lost information about their rhythmic and musical articulations.

Read the full review.