In this book F. provides an original discussion of a long-standing problem of old Latin poetry, attempts at whose explanation have divided generations of scholars, the so-called correptio iambica (CI) – iambic shortening. According to the approach of metricians, CI is a metrical license (e.g. C. Questa, La metrica di Plauto e di Terenzio [2007]); from a linguistic perspective, the phenomenon is an actual tendency in everyday speech (W.M. Lindsay, Early Latin Verse [1922], or B. Fortson, Language and Rhythm in Plautus [2008]). For F., both approaches suffer shortcomings: it is clear at the end of the book that he opts for an intermediate approach.

F. offers an analysis of material from Plautus. The text is followed by two appendices in which all the studied cases in Plautus are listed. In Chapter 2 F.'s analysis intends to verify the rule according to which shortened syllables cannot bear the stress. The first considered type is that of ĭste and ĭlle (brevis indicating light syllable), then, there are cases such as vidĕn and volŭptas (mea). In Chapter 3 F. analyses CI in words with trochaic or spondaic onset. Interestingly, he divides the examples into subtypes according to the preceding word. In table 2 (p. 30) the cases of ĭlle and ĭste are considered again. It is immediately evident that not all subtypes shorten in similar percentages: the type quis + ĭlle (and the like) are shortened in 87.5% of occurrences (140 out of 160), cases with conjunctions and prepositions are shortened in 55% and 38% of occurrences respectively, other types have too few examples to be statistically relevant. The type sed ŭxor follows, undergoing CI in 13.75% of examples. There are similar percentages with the types sed ŭxorem and sed ŏptume. For the moment, the validity of stress restriction seems limited to stressed syllables within a word, which are almost never shortened. F. also examines syllables containing long vowels, within which the occurrences of CI are significantly fewer.

In Chapter 4 F. criticises various shortcomings of the metrical approach. He partially follows G.B. Pighi (Studi di ritmica e metrica [1970], pp. 353–9), assuming that a long syllable or a pyrrhic must have been pronounced by the actor a bit faster when covering an anceps than when covering a longum. In a similar way F. imagines that an iambic sequence measured as a pyrrhic must have been pronounced faster in its entirety. F. calls it a ‘prosodic’ approach: the CI might have been a prosodic license that was artificially realised by the actor only in the specific context. He avoids explaining the origin of the CI, limiting himself to describing it. It is a pity that F. does not develop in more detail the typology of monosyllables causing iambic shortening in word groups: it is of some interest if we imagine that the entire group undergoes ‘prosodic’ reduction. We find, finally, an attempt at explaining the rarity of shortening within a word, and stress restriction is abandoned. In conclusion, the major contribution of this work seems not to lie in its explanatory power, rather in the scrupulous collection of data that may give rise to a reconsideration of old theoretical approaches.