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Identifying a Cadential Rhythm in Homeric Speech

This paper proposes a new methodology for analyzing Homeric composition, ultimately arguing that the poet of the Iliad employed at least three elements of composition to effect a closing, or “cadential”, sound to the characters’ speeches. Studies of the Greek dactylic hexameter often concentrate on one element of either composition or performance, including word placement (e.g. O’Neill 1942), colometry (e.g. Frankel 1962), enjambment and clause boundaries (e.g. Parry 1929), accentuation (e.g. Abritta 2015), and scansion (e.g. Jones & Gray 1972). While such studies reveal synchronic, and sometimes diachronic, standards of versification, they do little to help us understand the sequencing of and relationship between verses, leaving aside whether such irregularities would have been so striking not just statistically but also in context. The methodology proposed in this paper tracks word boundaries, clause boundaries, and scansion, and the hope is to begin addressing how Greek epic poets employed the many acoustic and rhythmic effects available to them in concert and across multiple verses.

In applying this trilateral methodology to the speeches of Homer’s Iliad, I will argue that the poet signals the end of a speech rhythmically. The effect is created without breaching those established standards of versification because individual speeches create local norms for word division, clause division, and scansion. Repetition across all three parameters establishes the rhythm of a speech; violation of that repetition is audible, and often marks the closing, or “cadence”, of a longer thought or an entire speech. Up for discussion is why Homeric speeches all seem to have cadential verses: perhaps because no speaker properly interrupts another as the narrator always intervenes. Nevertheless, such a dependence on the context has made this feature of composition especially difficult to locate because it does not breach any broad standard for word boundary, clause boundary, or scansion.

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