Golden Line - History

History

The first person to mention the golden line may be the grammarian Diomedes Grammaticus, in a list of types of Latin hexameters in his Ars grammatica. This work was written before 500 CE, and it has been plausibly suggested that he wrote after 350 CE. Diomedes' chapter entitled “De pedibus metricis sive significationum industria” (Keil 498-500) describes the teres versus, which has been identified by del Castillo (p. 133) as the golden line:

Teretes sunt qui volubilem et cohaerentem continuant dictionem, ut

Torva Mimalloneis inflatur tibia bombis

Rounded verses are those that conjoin a fluent and contiguous phrase, such as

Torva Mimalloneis inflatur tibia bombis.

The example verse is a golden line. However, it is difficult to understand what "conjoin a fluent and contiguous phrase" ( volubilem et cohaerentem continuant dictionem) means and how exactly it applies to this verse. None of the other ancient metricians use the term teres versus or κυκλοτερεῖς (the Greek form that Diomedes mentions as its equivalent). The only other commentator to mention the teres versus was the Renaissance scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558), who did not seem to understand Diomedes. In his book Poetices Libri Septem (1964 Stuttgart facsimile reprint of the 1561 Lyon edition, p. 71-72, text in Mayer), Scaliger offers a muddled attempt at understanding Diomedes. He mentions that "Quintilian and others" mention this as a teres versus:

Mollia luteola pingens vaccinia calta (a mangled version of Virgil, Eclogue 2.50)

Our manuscripts of Quintilian do not include this verse of Virgil, but it is the first pure golden line in Virgil and it becomes the most famous golden line citation. Scaliger's use of this example is evidence that someone between Diomedes and him took the term teres versus to be similar to a modern golden line.

The English fascination with the golden line seems to trace back to Bede. Bede advocated a double hyperbaton, and also the placing of adjectives before nouns. In the examples from each criterion (double hyperbaton and adjectives before nouns) Bede includes at least one golden line, but from his other examples it is clear that he did not limit these injunctions to the golden line:

But the best and most beautiful arrangement of the dactylic verse is when the penultimate parts respond to the first ones and the last parts respond to the middle ones . Sedulius was in the habit of using this arrangement often, as in

Pervia divisi patuerunt caerula ponti

and

Sicca peregrinas stupuerunt marmora plantas

and

Edidit humanas animal pecuale loquelas

Bede’s remarks in his De arte metrica were repeated and made more strict by Renaissance guides to versification, ultimately leading to Burles’s description of the golden line. The earliest is the 1484 De arte metrificandi of Jacob Wimpfeling:

It will be a mark of extraordinary beauty and no mean glory will accrue when you have distanced an adjective from its substantive by means of intervening words, as if you were to say

pulcher prevalidis pugnabat tiro lacertis.

And two years later the Ars Versificandi of Conrad Celtes followed Wimpfeling:

Fifth precept: the most charming form of poem will be to have distanced an epithet from its substantive by means of intervening words, as if you were to say

maiores cadunt altis de montibus umbre

pulcer prevalidis pugnabit tiro lacertis.

In 1512 Johannes Despauterius quoted Celtis’s remarks verbatim in his Ars versificatoria in the section De componendis carminibus praecepta generalia and then more narrowly defined excellence in hexameters in the section De carmine elegiaco:

Elegiac poetry rejoices in two epithets, this is to say adjectives, (not swollen, or puffed-up, or affected adjectives). This is almost always done so that the two adjectives are placed in front of two substantives, so that the first responds to the first. Nonetheless, you will frequently find different types, for we are not imparting laws, but good style. Propertius, book 2:

Sic me nec solae poterunt avertere sylvae

Nec vaga muscosis flumina fusa iugis.

Nor is this inelegant in other genres of poetry, for examples

Sylvestrem tenui musam meditaris avena.

Care must be taken that the two words are not in the same case and number, because that leads to ambiguity. That is not the case when Virgil says

Mollia lutheola pingit vaccinia calta.

Moreover, there should not be two epithets, because that is faulty according to Servius. An example would be:

dulcis frigida aqua.

Despauterius here combines Bede’s two rules into one general precept of elegance: Two adjectives should be placed before two substantives, the first agreeing with the first. It is not quite the golden line, for there is no provision for a verb in the middle. However, Despauterius quotes the famous example of the golden line, Eclogue 2.50, as a good example of the type. This line is the first pure golden line in Virgil's works. It is also the example line given in Scaliger above. The same general remarks about epithets are found in John Clarke’s 1633 Manu-ductio ad Artem Carmificam seu Dux Poeticus (345):

Epitheta, ante sua substantiva venustissime collocantur, ut :

Pendula flaventem pingebat bractea crinem

Aurea purpuream subnectit fibula vestem,

Vecta est fraenato caerula pisce Thetis.

The source of Clarke’s first example line is unknown, but the same line is also one of Burles’s examples of the golden line. Burles’s discussion of the golden line is clearly based upon this tradition concerning the position of epithets. Burles’s golden line is a narrow application of the principles outlined by Bede almost a millennium earlier.

Scholars like to believe that their critical approaches to classical poetry are direct and immediate, and that they understand classical literature in its own context or, depending on their critical stance, from the perspective of their own context(s). However, the use of “the golden line” as a critical term in modern scholarship demonstrates the power of the intervening critical tradition. The golden line may originally have been the teres versus of Diomedes, but this fact does not legitimate its use as a critical term today. No commentators today count up versus inlibati, iniuges, quinquipartes, or any of the other bizarre forms assembled by Diomedes.

In all likelihood the golden line is a term gradually developed by Medieval and Renaissance grammarians, from Bede to Burles, but this indeterminate (and apparently unknown) pedigree does not explain its curious hold on Anglo-American scholarship. Far more interesting than the appearance of the golden line in ancient and medieval poetry is the use of the term by these modern critics. Today major works and commentaries on canonical poets in Latin and Greek discuss them in light of the golden line, and occasionally even the silver line: Neil Hopkinson’s Callimachus, William Anderson’s Metamorphoses, Richard Thomas’s Georgics, Alan Cameron’s Claudian, Andy Orchard’s Aldhelm. Most of these critics assume or imply that golden lines were deliberate figures, practiced since Hellenistic times and artfully contrived and composed by the poets in question. This process of scouring the canonical texts for such special verse forms is entirely in the spirit of the ancient lists of Servius, Victorinus, and Diomedes. Thus, in a curious way, the arcane wordplay that fascinated ancient grammarians has—in the English-speaking world, at least—come again to play a role in interpreting and explicating the central works of the classical canon.