An excerpt from THE SACRED TRIPUDIUM.
Caesius Bassus and Metrical Pragmatism.
The sciences of culture-history, above all others, have found their pole-star of method in the evolutionary doctrine of Heraclitus, while they have relegated to a purely subsidiary relation in scientific inquiry the static doctrine of the Eleatics. The all-important problem of humanistic inquiry is to trace the historical process, the successive stages of which are mapped out in the statistics provided by the static method. Thus static analysis is merely the hod-carrier of historical investigation, whose essential task is to follow the stream of human changing, and to determine the genetic relations of the successive cross-sections of phenomena. From such chronological observation of the phenomena of being, there emerges the dynamic law of becoming, which is the final goal of culture-historical inquiry.
Axiomatic as the evolutionary standpoint in general has become in humanistic investigation, the assertion of the historical over against the static standpoint in the study of ancient accent and rhythm has been accomplished but slowly and painfully under the auspices of a traditional orthodoxy, which from the days of Caesius Bassus and his Neronian coterie has too often encouraged ingenious guessing in place of scientific inquiry; cf. Caesius Bassus on his predecessors, Keil, "Grammatici Latini" VI. 265. 9.
The Stress Laws oe Latin Speech and Verse.
I. "The Tripudic Accentual System of Latin Speech and Verse."
§ 1. Critical examination of the phenomena of Latin versification reveals to us a stress accent for Latin speech, and not an accent of mere musical elevation like that of early and classic Greek. These same phenomena, moreover, reveal the fact, that Latin accent falls rhythmically in Latin speech from the beginning to the end of the word-foot, and not arrhythmically as in Greek. The magical and sacred Tripudium (triple-tramp) in its several forms is the accentual norm of Latin speech, and the rhythmic norm of Latin verse: it is an arsisless measure, in which a primary acute thesis is contrasted with a secondary acute or grave stress in arsis.
