The words ‘long’ and ‘short’ are more clearly about the quantity of time. I use the words ‘long’ and ‘short’ rather than ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ because ‘heavy’ sounds like a stressed syllable and ‘light’ sounds like an unstressed syllable, and I don’t want them to think that way. It is far more intuitive to get the feel for scansion in a Greek environment, so why not set up a similar type of situation initially for our Latinists?įirstly, I explain that Latin syllables can be long or short. In my own experience, I have found that scansion is far easier to pick up in Ancient Greek than in Latin, because even if not all long vowels are given macrons, at least the eta and omega characters mark the long ē and ō, and all elisions are printed for you. By starting with a text of printed macrons, it is easier for students to see (without the teacher explaining it) that the rhythm emerges from the word choice, and macrons are not just invisibly appearing whenever the puzzle demands it. In other words, it is not the meter which determines the vowel length, but the vowel length which produces the meter. But the poet worked the other way, carefully choosing words according their innate sounds so that they would produce the desired rhythms. When you learn to scan on blank letters, you end up thinking backwards about vowel length – ‘it can be worked out when you know the rules’. By printing macrons, we show them that Latin vowels are innately long or short – not just whether they ‘need to be for the meter’. I start with a text that has the macrons printed in it (and I pre-mark out the elisions, if I haven’t already taught elision). My goal is to bring them to understand scansion from first principles. My goal in this session is not to give students a step-by-step formula for answering exam questions – not yet. Icarus and Daedalus – our set passage from Ovid, and perhaps a metaphor for how students feel when they first see hexameter scansion.

Scansion marks