Old Verses for New Rhythms. Hexameters, Dodecasyllables, and Medieval Poetic Practices

Throughout the Middle Ages, poets continued to employ ancient quantitative metres, both in Medieval Latin and Byzantine literature. Since the distinction between long and short vowels had been lost in medieval Greek (and Latin), quantitative patterns could be grasped intellectually only by a learned audience; yet poets continued to employ them. Conversely, everyone perceived the disposition of stress and the resulting rhythm. Several dimensions intersect when composing a piece in ‘old verses’: a lexicon and register suited to the verse form; the reception of ancient metres as mediated by medieval treatises and reading; the new rhythms and, therefore, the living poetic practice, acquired through reading and listening. The beauty of learned poetry arises from the interplay among all these dimensions. The paper investigates the ‘old verses’ found in Byzantine literature with particular attention to two poles, the hexameter and the dodecasyllable, to show how inherited metrical norms, exempla from earlier poets, and medieval practice operated in the rhythmical texture of poems, as well as how poets crafted their lines to appeal to all listeners and readers as contemporary ‘good verses’, while simultaneously stimulating precise intellectual processes and emotional responses among highly educated audiences sharing a common body of cultural knowledge. This dynamic is relatively transparent in the dodecasyllable, whose language diverges little from the ‘Byzantine koiné’; it is far more intricate in the hexameter, where the Homeric language, largely detached from the koiné, is paired with a metre that appears purely quantitative in both form and transmission. Drawing on recent research (Lauxtermann 2022), the paper offers a new account of medieval practice in learned verse, with case studies from Ioannes Mauropous, Ioannes Tzetzes, Michael Choniates, and other poets, and sets these against purely rhythmical metres (such as the pentadecasyllable) and parallel developments in Medieval Latin literature.