METAMORPHOSIS AND THE METAMORPHOSES
Horace's 'Callimachism' than about the Sapphic strophe per se. Chapter 4 opens with an admirable description of the battles the Greek hexameter had to wage in the second century B.C. when it replaced the native Italian Saturnian as the sublime metre of celebration and solemnity. M. focusses on Accian Saturnians celebrating Brutus Callaecus on the walls of a temple that reflected the state of the art in Hellenising architecture, as well as on the surfacing of elegiacs in one of the elogia of the Scipios, which are otherwise composed in Saturnians. The chapter then tells the story of the hexameter's continued development in two opposite directions: on the one hand, it came to be used to portray everyday life in the Satires of Lucilius or Horace; on the other, it was 'eroticised' (in its pentametric 'abbreviation' in Latin elegiac poetry. In this last chapter I would have expected to read about the somewhat parallel evolution of the Greek hexameter, which after a rather monolithic epic phase (it is difficult to consider the Margites an archaic poem) was adopted in the fourth century as the metre of gastronomic poetry by the parodic poets. I would also have expected to find greater attention paid to how rule violations in the use of caesural division of hexameters or iambs in cola express specific connotations (see, however, pp. 230, 330) But this mimetic device in Greek and Latin versification could easily be the topic of another short book; and M.'s brilliant book may pave the way to a new outburst of interest in Anglo American philology for the 'semantics of versification'
The Classical Review