¹ The circumflexus (a rising followed by a falling pitch) is not noticed until Quintilian's time, and even in Quintilian seems to be somewhat uncertain (possibly mere theory adopted from Greek grammarians), for he treats it as an acutus and describes it in practically the same terms as he describes an emotional tone associated with oratorical delivery. The term ictus for a metrical stress also seems to be post-classical, and in Quintilian usually implies the beating of time—pedum et digitorum ictu. It is the writer's opinion that the ictus as a metrical stress was really as theoretical in classic Latin verse as it is in modern music, being employed to mark time when syllable lengths were no longer communibus infixa sensibus but had to be taught the young by beating with the hand or foot, just as musical time is now taught to one who is learning to play a musical instrument.

² Quantitas appears in Quintilian and is used by him in a general sense relating to the pitch of the voice (vocis quantitas), not to the length of syllables. Qualitas is likewise a general term in Quintilian and denotes voice quality, not what we call ‘accent’ (Inst. 11. 3. 14); accentus is another of his new terms and is employed by him in association with pitch increments as the Latin equivalent of Greek . In 1. 5. 22, metrum is his equivalent for the Greek , (id est dimensio); rhythmus is pure Greek in Cicero: Quintilian uses it for Cicero's numerus—'Nam rhythmi, id est numeri, spatio temporum constant, metra etiam ordine: ideoque alterum esse quantitatis videtur alterum qualitatis.' 9. 4. 45-6. Rhythm in its modern application to alternating pulses of stress was quite inconceivable to the Romans. Augustine in his first essay at stress verse-design produces irregular lines which run like Old English and Germanic verses. What we call rhythm did not appear in Latin poetry until the fifth and sixth centuries, and then only in the Latin psalmi of those Christians whose ‘ears could not tell the difference between long and short vowels', but whose hearts ‘made melody unto the Lord’ in new modi unimaginable to Horace and Vergil. It was the efforts of mediaeval grammarians to force these new verse forms under the old rubrics that produced the bewildering confusion of terminology which still characterizes our prosody.

³ Greek in the second century was shifting from a pitch to a stress pronunciation, and the earliest stress poetry on record appears among the early Greek Christians.

⁴ These secondarily stressed syllables play an important role in the development of the Romance languages.

⁵ It was this tendency which radically changed the quantitative values of accented vowels in the English of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, so that thereafter the quantitative values of mediaeval Latin vowels which had gone through the same development agreed with those of English vowels in similar positions.

⁶ Diez, Grammatik der Romanischen Sprachen, I. 485-7; Meyer-Lübke, Encl. Britt. 23. 506, gives the fourth century as the date of the change.

⁷ Donatus, for instance, records later the ‘barbaric’ pronunciation of deus with long first vowel and short second, but does not notice the lengthening of other classic short vowels where they stood in an open accented syllable, dies, meus, pater, and the like.

⁸ Pacatus, in Theod. 1. 3.

⁹ Sequatur statim et Latina eruditio, quœ si non ab initio os tenerum composuerit, in peregrinum sonum lingua corrumpitur. Hieron. Epist. 7. Pro voluntate lectorum ac varietale regionum eadem verba diversis sonis atque accentibus proferantur. Ibid. 73.8.

¹⁰ ‘Afrae aures de correptione vocalium vel productione non indicant.‘ De Doctrina Christi 4. 10. 24. The passage is often cited without reference, and sometimes incorrectly. The writer is indebted to Professor W. A. Oldfather for running it to earth.

¹¹ 'Miror valde quare multi corripiunt sillabas in prosa quae in metro breves sunt, cum prosa absoluta sit a lege metri sicut pronuntiant pater brittonice, et malus, et similia quae in metro habentur breves, mihi tarnen videtur melius invocare deum patrem honorifice producta sillaba quam brittonice corripere quia nec deus arti grammaticae subiciendus est. Ælfric, Grammar, Prœfatio.

¹² For evidence of these English-Latin pronunciations see the treatises of Palgrave (1530), Salesbury (1547), Hart (1569—Hart gives us an interesting phonetic transcription of how the French pronounced Latin), Bullokar (1580), Gill (1621). Oxford scholars, although quite familiar with the work of Corrsen, Conway, and Ellis, still maintain this traditional pronunciation because of its historical background. For an Oxonian reasons, ‘Latin being a dead language, it makes little essential difference how one pronounces it so long as he is intelligible to his audience.’ In 1893 a new Regius Professor of Civil Law came to Oxford from the University of Edinburgh which had been using the Roman pronunciation for a generation. It is the function of the Regius Professor of Civil Law to introduce the candidates for degrees at the Encaenia, and a long standing custom, not then fallen into desuetude, for certain undergraduates to make plebean comments on the proceedings from the top gallery of the Sheldonian. When the new Regius professor had finished the exordium of his initiatory public function, and while the walls of the ancient temple of learning for the first time in its history were resonating to the sonorous cadences of a truly Ciceronian Latinity, a triumphant voice broke over the audience with the words, ‘Oh, I have it—that is Latin! That is Latin with the Scottish accent.'