Combinatorics applied to Problems of Classical Poetry

Abstract

The Latin poet was not bound by the grammatical rules for the sequences of the parts of speech within the sentence. He was free to alter the sequence so as to make it fit the prosodic form, e. g. the hexameter, the ruling feature being the order of long and short syllables arranged in either dactyl or spondee. This was made possible by the redundancy of syntactical word order and grammatical form, the latter being, on the whole, sufficient for the precise expression of the relations between the concepts. Whether the transpositions in the order or sequences of parts of speech implies — or hides — also a true grammatical transposition of what the sentence would have been like in prose, is a matter well worth investigating.