Dikaiopolis and his followers speak contemporary Greek, but not, of course, as they would at home or elsewhere. Comic dialogue, like tragic, is in verse, and its characters normally carry on their conversation, as in tragedy, in iambic trimeters. The rhythm, however, as earlier noted, is a free one, which (a) admits a great deal of resolution: in the first five feet anapaests (besides the normal spondees), dactyls (in the first, third, and fifth), and tribrachs may represent iambi; (b) ignores Porson’s Law, i.e. permits a fifth-foot spondee to be shared between two words; (c) permits irregular word-division in trisyllabic feet; (d) neglects caesura. Aristophanes employs the line with skill and versatility — in its strictest tragic rhythm (C. 794-6), and at the other extreme resolved into five anapaests (W. 979, κατάβα κατόβα κατάβα κατάβα καταβήσομαι).