HOME | Dactylic - Elegiac - Iambic - Sapphic - Goliardic

Iambic Meter

English iambs. You may already be familiar with the famous "iambic pentameter" in English, since this is the meter of Shakespeare's plays. Roughly speaking, you can think of iambic pentameter like this:

There are five (pentameter) pairs - the "iambs" - of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables.

Latin iambic verse. In Latin, the iambic meters consist of alternating long elements - but these long elements do not alternate with short elements in a simple, regular pattern. Instead, they alternate with an "anceps" element, which can be short or long. There are a variety of Latin iambic verse meters, and one of the most common and most important for Latin poetry is the iambic senarius, or the 6-foot iamb, also called iambic trimeter.

Phaedrus: Iambic senarius / trimeter. It just so happens, in fact, that the oldest surviving collection of Aesopic fables is found in the poetry of Phaedrus, written in iambic senarius (iambic trimeter). This is also one of the meters found in archaic Roman comedy.

In this representation of the iambic senarius (iambic trimeter), the X represents the anceps, and the L a long element. S is a short element. You can see that the senarius consists of six feet (hence "senarius") composed of two elements, although it is also seen as being composed of three sets (trimeter) containing four elements each:

X-L-X-L || X-L-X-L || X-L-S-L

The problem with this meter is the range of substitutions possible for the long elements, and for the anceps. As you already know if you have studied the dactylic hexameter, it is possible for a long to be realized as two shorts. Worse: the anceps, when it is long, can also be realized as two shorts, so that the anceps can represent either a long, or a short - or two shorts! There are other types of substitutions as well, so that the line can take on the most unpredictable series of longs and shorts.

The result can be... baffling. In the dactylic hexameter, it's very easy to get used to the possibility that a long element can be resolved as two shorts. After all, even with all the possible variation that this permits there are still only 64 possible variations of the dactylic hexameter line. With the iambic senarius, there are actually 354,288 different patterns that could, theoretically, be found in a line of senarius verse!

How to cope with the iambic senarius? Thankfully, you will find quite a few iambic senarius lines that are simply 12 syllables long, in which case you can read with a confident "da-Dum-da-Dum" as you might read an English iambic line. But when the verse line is more than 12 syllables long, it may take a good deal of pondering to find the iambic pattern that is lurking behind the substitution of two-syllable elements for the single syllable long element or the single syllable anceps.

So, my advice to you when reading iambic poetry is simply to sit back and enjoy listening to it for a while before you begin attempting to scan lines of iambic verse for yourself. If you go on to become a scholar of Latin meter (and they are few and far between!), you can learn the innumerable rules and regulations that govern the iambic senarius. But for now - your goal should be to enjoy the meter as much as you can! And it is a very wonderful thing to enjoy since it is one of the main meters in which Roman comedy is written.

Fudging the vowels and other ways to cheat the iambic senarius. If your goal is to have fun with this meter, you can manage to do that by fudging the vowels and employing a bit of syncope. So, for example, when you are dealing with a two syllable element and one of those syllables is the vowel "i" or the vowel "u", you might instead choose to regard those as the semivowel "y" or "w". You can call it fudging or cheating... but it's not a bad way at all to cope with the chaos of the iambic meter for beginners. Treating these vowels as semivowels is a great method to help clear some of the syllables out of the way when you are dealing with a line longer than 12 syllables, and to do so in a way that is not inconsistent with some of the underlying phonetic patterns of Latin. You might also find it useful to syncopate, simply dropping out a short vowel when the meaning of the word will still come through clearly (reading "fac're" instead of "facere", for example). Please note that these are not rules of Latin metrics - they are just ways for Latin students in the 21st century to cope with the ancient iambic senarius, and manage to have some fun while doing so.

Additional references. Here are some reference materials online to help you learn about the iambic dimeter and trimeter:

Viva Voce. A comprehensive website for a wide variety of Latin meters, with audio.

Scansion of Poetic Meter. A page covering the meters found in Catullus, including iambic meters.