More on Greek meter

I don't know how I've missed this till now, but I've just discovered C.M.J. Sicking's Griechische Verslehre (Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 2.4, 1993).

It appears upon a cursory inspection to be the most up to date, clearly layed-out, and well-documented handbook I've seen yet. Just browsing through the section on the dactylic hexameter I see all the names I'd like to see in the footnotes:

Van Raalte, La Roche, E.G. O'Neill, H.N. Porter, Keydell, Nagy, Wifstrand, Harry Barnes, Devine & Stephens, West, et al.

What I've read so far (my German isn't the best) has been clear and helpful, so I've got high hopes for this one.

The textbook has begun

Today I started editing a new edition of an introductory Greek textbook. A brand new iMac was purchased for the project, and despite all of my past dislike for snobbish Mac culture I find myself drawn to it ... it's like the Dark Side. I have to admit, it's very stylish and elegant -- as long as you know how to use.

There's a common myth about Macs that they're more user-friendly than PCs. Most things that can be done on a PC with a click of the right mouse button require secret codes or an annoying amount of clicking and moving of tiled windows. Things get lost easily. But boy, the sound is nice, and it sure is purty to look at.

The whole thing consists of a monitor! Check it out.

http://www.apple.com/imac/

That little slit in the side is for CDs. There's a USB port on the keyboard, and a number of others ports behind the monitor.

Not that I'd ever buy one, but if the school wants to, well ...

Grumble grumble ...

It strikes me that no general reference on Greek meter answers the questions that come up most often when actually dealing with meter. I know that in the past I was chided by one commenter for complicating an issue supposedly deftly handled in Raven's Latin Metre, but truth be told, I wouldn't recommend Raven's second-rate texts to anyone (though it's his work on Greek that is especially troublesome). I pour through Maas's still largely sound handbook (though it was originally published as part of a student's companion), West's disordered mass of undocumented observations (which is heavily Maasian), Snell's concise notes (or Rosenmeyer's, which are based on Snell's), Wilamowitz's unwieldy tome, the equally enlightening and infuriating French handbooks by Dain and Koster, and I still have doubts or find the same ambiguity spread about equally.

Then when it comes to actual analysis I find that the statistics which many arguments rely on are flat wrong.

And I can only conclude that it has been among the discipline's gravest errors to tuck metrical studies away in favor of things like speech-act theory.

Or maybe I'm just becoming a curmudgeon before my time.