7 - Metre and music

Summary

Metre

Greek metre

Greek metre is simple. All metrical structures are built out of two bricks, short and long syllables, combined in a variety of simple, yet imaginative ways. Knowing Greek metre is indispensable. It is essential for understanding origins, genre, performance conditions, literary allusions and overall meaning in Greek poetry. It also gives fascinating glimpses of what came before Greek poetry. This chapter is designed to describe the most important types of metre used in Greek lyric, showing their interaction and their development. The presentation is meant to be accessible even to students with no prior knowledge of Greek metre.

The basics

A knowledge of Greek prosody (the study of the sound of a language, especially speech rhythm and its relationship to versification) is necessary for scanning poetry. The basic rules are as follows. When we scan a line of Greek verse, we must ignore word division and regard all words as joined together.