Bede is also the first author to give an appropriate presentation of rhythmic or non-quantitative verse, anticipating later medieval poetic practices. Bede s discussion of other poetic metres is mainly restricted to those employed in Christian hymnody, and their simplified analyses correspond with Christian usage. Bede s views have been influenced by his belief in the biblical origins of metre, an idea expounded by several Christian apologists. Instead of relying on the example of Vergil and other classics, he seeks to base his presentation of metrical rules, from syllable lengths to larger structures, on the example of Christian poets, most notably Sedulius, implying that pagan authors were even prosodically less advanced than Christian ones. Even here, Bede consciously strives to create a consistently Christian literary norm. The work departs from previous grammatical tradition by incorporating syllable lengths into its discussion of poetic metres, a didactic solution necessitated by the linguistic conditions of Anglo-Saxon England. The main focus of De arte metrica is on hexameter verse and the problems inherent in its composition at a time when syllable quantity had disappeared from spoken Latin. This historical background, together with the author s Christian agenda, is present in virtually every aspect of the way the work discusses the Latin poetic heritage. It played a central role in the transmission of the classical literary tradition to the medieval audience, but, at the same time, constitutes one of the first efforts at creating a textbook on metrics that was primarily intended for the monastic curriculum. ![]() The Venerable Bede s eighth-century De arte metrica was the most important treatise on Latin metrics to emerge in the early Middle Ages. What follows explores Caesar’s Civil War, a work of a genre whose prosaic rhythm patterns have yet to be exhaustively analyzed, in an attempt to understand similar intentionality or rhetorical force in the heroic clausula in Caesar and perhaps claim that the extraordinariness that heroic clausulae encode in prose is a cross-genre phenomenon. Like rhyme in formal English literature, the heroic clausula is said to represent a similar odd-sounding prosodic (or phonetic) feature, and like the rhyme, I expect this oddness to pervade literature of any genre (Grillo 2015). Adams contends that Cicero employs the heroic clausula, specifically, to encode an intentional irony or inappropriateness of the situation, and I ask the same question of Caesar. ![]() It is this last paper that serves as a motivator for mine: could it be the case that the heroic clausula maintains a similar “inappropriate” or extraordinary meaning in genres other than that to which Adams’ discussion is limited? Caesar, more known for his memoirs than his oratory, is among the authors surveyed in Keeline & Kirby, whose data indicate that 23 heroic clausulae appear in the first book of the Bellum Civile. Previous studies have examined, at length, heroic clausulae among only a few authors (Shipley 1911), in much broader scope among vast corpora of prose texts of varying genre (Keeline & Kirby 2019), and, in particular, various interpretations of the extratextual or connotative meaning of the heroic clausula specific to oratory (Adams 2013). Shipley (1911) discusses Cicero’s oratory and Quintilian’s treatise-writing, but analyses of prose rhythms in narrative historical accounts or commentaries have not appeared. Examinations of the heroic clausula have to date been primarily concerned with oratory, but there are other genres of prose that have been left unconsidered.
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