This metre is illustrated by Nos. 1-4 (?), 5-6, 8, 10, 12-13 in this selection. Three views have been taken of its character.
1. It was at one time supposed to be purely quantitative. This view had the support of Bentley, who in the Phalaris (226-8) identified the Saturnian with a metre of Archilochus.[11] 'There's no difference at all', he says blithely. In more recent times the quantitative theory, in one form or another, has numbered among its adherents scholars of repute: e.g. Ritschl, Lucian Mueller, Christ, Havet. To-day it may be said to be a dead superstition. Its place has been taken by what may be called the 'semi-quantitative' theory.
2. The 'semi-quantitative' theory was popularized in this country by H. Nettleship[12] and J. Wordsworth[13]. It enjoyed the vogue which commonly attends a compromise; and it still has its adherents, as, for example, E.V. Arnold[14] (who follows the Plautine scholar F. Leo). But the more it is examined the more it tends, I think, to melt into a 'pure-accentual' theory. 'It allows the shortening of a long syllable when unaccented (dĕvictis)', says Nettleship[15]. Surely to say that dĕvictis is 'allowed' for dēvictis is to abandon the cause outright. But it is considerations of a more general character which seem likely to render untenable both the 'quantitative' and the 'semi-quantitative' theories. The recent researches of Sievers[16] and others into the earliest metrical forms tend to shew that this metre is an 'Indo-European' heritage, and that it must be judged in the light of its Eastern and Germanic cognates.
3. The best opinion, therefore, in recent years has been strongly on the side of the view which makes the principle of the Saturnian metre purely accentual. At the moment this view may, in fact, be said to hold the field. Unhappily those who agree in regarding the metre as purely accentual agree in little else. We may distinguish two schools:
(a) There is, first, what I may perhaps be allowed to call the Queen-and-Parlour school. 'There cannot be a more perfect Saturnian line', says Macaulay, 'than one which is sung in every English nursery—
The queen was in her parlour eating bread and honey'.
Place beside this English line the Latin line which has come to be regarded as the typical Saturnian—
dabunt malum Metelli Naeuio poetae.
If we accent these five words as Naevius and the Metelli would in ordinary speech have accented them, we shall have to place our accents thus:—
dábunt málum Metélli Naéuio poétae;