is not a music to pray to or dance to or die to. A much easier and more lively movement would be
dábunt málum Mételli Naéuio póetae,
that is, the movement given by the old protosyllabic accentuation.
The suggestion that the protosyllabic accent survived as a conscious archaism in saturnian verse right down to the time of the Scipios is, I think, at any rate worth considering. It carries us into speculations far wider than the particular problem with which it is immediately concerned. For if the protosyllabic law did actually survive in this way we can the more easily explain the swift and decisive victory which the Hellenizing Latin poetry won over the old native verse. What was conquered was an archaism, something purely artificial. The conquering force was not merely Hellenism but Hellenism plus a complete and radical change in Latin speech.
If anyone cares to analyse the extant remains of saturnian verse in the light of this suggestion, I would formulate three rules which can, I think, be deduced:
1. Each line has five feet, and each foot contains one accented syllable plus either one or two unaccented syllables.[19] The first foot, however, may consist of a monosyllable.
2. The third foot must consist of a trisyllabic word or 'word-group'[20]: save that occasionally the second and third feet together may be formed of a quadrisyllabic (or pentasyllabic) word with secondary accent.
3. The first and second, and again the fourth and fifth, feet may be either disyllabic or trisyllabic: but (a) two trisyllables may not follow one another in the first two feet, and (b) if the fifth foot (usually trisyllabic) is a disyllable the fourth must be trisyllabic.
The normal type is
| ─́─ ── │ ─́─ ── │ ─́─ ── ── | ││ ─́─ ── | │ ─́─ ── ── |
| ││ ─́─ ── ── |