Classical World

Kiichiro Itsumi—best known for his definitive articles on the glyconic and the choriambic dimeter in tragedy—here offers a study of Pindar full of unexpected observations and of commentary that is hard to find elsewhere. But the "in-joke" in the subtitle, an indirect reference to A. M. Dale's articles on "Metrical Units" (now in her Collected Papers), predicts that the book is really for those who want to follow out a specific line of discussion within outlines already drawn by Dale and her English successors.

Itsumi's subject is the odes that are not in dactylo-epitritic meter. He seeks to discover, by rigorous observation, the minimal units, or "phrases" (sometimes "cola") that are chained together, sometimes with the use of "link anceps," to compose the "verses" (he prefers the common European term to "periods") of which stanzas are comprised. His goal is to establish which phrases and combinations of phrases are more common and which less, or absent, across the corpus. He contrasts his approach, which he calls "static," with the (sometimes complementary) "dynamic" method of Snell, adopted by West in his Greek Metre, which looks for the variations and repetitions of known forms of cola and metra within a single ode.

"Part I: Introduction" (110 pages) provides the method and the results. Itsumi proceeds from two axioms: "Phrase boundary should be automatically and exclusively placed: a) between true longs, b) before anceps flanked by two longs." From these he generates seven "rules for consistent analysis" that cover the variety of metrical contexts and allow him to analyze almost all (90 percent, he claims) of the verses into units without ambiguity. On the basis of his analyses, he asserts that Pindar uses meters of two types in addition to dactylo-epitrites: aeolic (pure or composite) and "freer dactylo-epitrite." The former are characterized by the presence of the dodrans and the "reverse dodrans" (Dale's B and A in her Lyric Metres of Greek Drama) or, if they have full- or half-base, the familiar aeolic cola and their reverse [End Page 272] forms; the latter feature the phrases "d" and "e" (= Dale's d and s, the choriamb and cretic), but not in the regular combinations of dactylo-epitrite, and with fewer anceps syllables (and those mostly short). In each type there are also lengthier phrases that have additional longs and single shorts or dactylic expansion. The discovery of "freer d/e" he regards as a major achievement of his method, avoiding the Scylla of Snell's system, which simply lumped disparate meters into an "aeolic" group, and the Charybdis of Dale's articles suggesting d and s as universal units of composition, which made broader observations about type impossible. Subsequent chapters provide full detail on the use of each phrase within each type, on the ways they are combined into verses (with due attention to the remaining ambiguous cases), and on how the verses are combined into three "classes" of stanza: aeolic, freer d/e, and amalgamated. A long excursus details the critical history of a particularly problematic passage, N6s6-7, where the eight repetitions provide three scansions that are hard to accommodate to one form. Part II, the bulk of the book, goes through the odes individually, offering a metrical analysis, a general overview, comments on particular verses, and explanatory comments on individual lines in which meter and textual problems intersect. This last will be valuable to anyone trying to make sense of the apparatus of the major editions. Whenever he touches on the editorial history of the text and its presentation (even the line numbers), Itsumi's scrupulous reviews clear up confusion.

Once one masters Itsumi's idiosyncratic technical terms, his writing is lucid and fluent. Once his procedure and axioms are accepted, the analysis follows with only rare stumbles. But why should we accept them? Itsumi's first axiom excludes syncopation in single-short, and choriambic expansion of aeolic phrases. He offers no justification. Itsumi's second axiom...