since by what is known as the Law of the Penultimate the accent in Latin always falls on the penultimate syllable save in those words of three (or more) syllables which have a short penultimate and take the accent consequently on the ante-penultimate syllable. But those who accommodate the Latin saturnian to the rhythm of 'The queen was in her parlour ...' have to postulate an anomalous accentuation:—
dabúnt malúm Metélli | Naéuió poétae.
The Saturnian line is, they hold, a verse falling into two cola, each colon containing three accented (and an undefined number of unaccented) syllables—word-accent and verse-accent (i. e. metrical ictus) corresponding necessarily only at the last accented syllable in each colon (as Metélli ... poétae above).
Now here there are at least four serious difficulties:
1. While the principle of the verse is accentual half the words in any given line may be accented as they were never accented anywhere else.
2. Sometimes verse-accent and word-accent do not correspond even at the last accent in a colon. There is, for example, no better authenticated Saturnian than
Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus:
and it is incredible that at any period in the history of the Latin language the word-accent ever fell on the middle syllable of Lucius[17].
3. The incidence of word-accent is left unfixed save so far as the incidence of verse-accent enables us to fix it. But the incidence of the verse-accent is itself hopelessly uncertain. In a very large percentage of saturnian lines we abandon the natural word-accent and have at the same time no possible means of determining upon what syllable of what word we are to put the verse-accent.