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The Prosody of Greek Proper Names in -A in Plautus and Terence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
Editors and writers on the prosody of Plautus and Terence disagree about the prosody of the final -a in the nominative and vocative of proper names taken from the Greek First Declension. The fact that they are often quoted as examples of syllaba anceps either at the diaeresis of longer iambic lines or at loci Iacobsohniani would seem to imply that they normally scan as Latin First Declension nouns with short -a in the nominative and vocative singular. So R. Kauer in the commentary of his edition of Terence's Andria (1930) on line 301 writes ‘die griechischen Eigennamen auf -a (griech. -as)—Sosia, Byrria, Chaerea, Phaedria usw.—haben bei Terenz stets kurzes -a’.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1955
References
page 206 note 1 I should like to thank Professor W. A. Laidlaw for his advice and comments on a draft of this article.
page 206 note 2 Viz. ‘at the fourth arsis of the iambic senarius (and the corresponding part of the trochaic septenarius) and at the second arsis of a trochaic septenarius’ (Laidlaw, W. A., The Prosody of Terence, 1938, p. 62).Google Scholar
page 206 note 3 Sosia does not occur in Terence except at the line end (or in elision), where the quantity of its final -a cannot be determined: for its quantity in Plautus see below
page 207 note 1 Contrast Menander, Her. 309 
page 208 note 1 Cf. Fraenkel, E., Iktus u. Akzent im lat. Sprechvers, c. viiiGoogle Scholar (Die ‘aufgelösten Hebungen’ des Typus diceré uolui), esp. p. 266, footnote 3.
page 208 note 2 There is not sufficient evidence to show whether -a in thesi must always be short. In all the cases where it is certainly short Iambenkürzung may be at work. Where Iambenkürzung cannot operate, viz. in nouns with a long penult, there is no case where the quantity of the final -a can be determined with certainty (vid. supra on Dorippa in Merc. 683 and infra on Palaestra (in lyrics) in Rud. 677).