In Cl. prosody, this term should denote a meter of five measures or feet, as its name says, but in fact the Gr. p., which is dactylic, does not contain five of any metra: it consists of two hemiepes (q.v.) with an invariable caesura:. Contraction of the shorts in the first half of the line is common; the second half runs as shown. P. is the conventional name for the second verse in the couplet form called the elegiac distich (q.v.), though this is probably a hexameter shortened internally (West calls it “an absurd name for a verse which does not contain five of anything”). The Cl. Gr. and Lat. p. should not be confused with the Eng. “iambic p.,” despite the fact that the Ren. prosodists derived that name from Cl. precedent, for the Eng. line had been written in great numbers for two centuries (Chaucer) before it was given any Cl. name, and the internal metrical structures of the two meters are quite distinct—this follows form the deeper and more systematic differences between quantitative and accentual verse-systems Other terms lacking Cl. connotations which were formerly and are sometimes still used for the staple line of Eng. dramatic and narrative verse include “heroic verse” and “decasyllable” which term of these three one chooses depends on what genealogy one assumes for the Eng. line (Cl., native, Romance, mixed) and what featuers of the line one takes as constitutive—feet, stress count, syllable count, or the latter two, or the latter two as creating the first one (feet). Despite the fact that trochaic tetrameters
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