more recent and by present ones’ (3. 32. 13); (Indra) ‘who has been fortified
by former and present songs of the praise-singing Rishis’ (6. 44. 13); ‘thus for
Indra and Agni has an ancestral, new (song)... been voiced’ (8. 40. 12); ‘him
(I praise) alike with (my) song and with the fathers’ poems’ (8. 41. 2).^4 In
the passages from Greek poets cited above the word used for ‘new’ is νο or
νεοχμο ́ , that is, new in the sense of young, newly appeared, not καινο ́
‘novel’; Timotheos (PMG 736) is the first to boast of his καινο ́ τη. The
traditional poet can advertise his new song while at the same time acknow-
ledging his older models, as the twelfth-century Welsh poet Hywel ab Owain
Gwynedd does when he writes (6. 45 f.) ‘I compose an original song, music of
praise such as Myrddin sang’.
Poets who write in a tradition, having been trained in the style and tech-
niques proper to that tradition, do not strive for novelty of manner. They
take over vocabulary, formulaic phrases, and typical expressions from older
poets, and their language in general tends to have a more archaic appearance
than that of contemporary speech. Archaism and formularity are con-
spicuous attributes of most of the older Indo-European poetic traditions:
Indic, Iranian, Greek, Celtic, Germanic, Slavonic.^5 The poet of the Lay of Igor
asks at the outset if it is not fitting to tell his story ‘in ancient diction’,starymi
slovesy.
Two further features characteristic of Indo-European poetry, both of them
favoured by the nature of the ancient language, are modification of word
order and the use of formal figures of speech of various kinds. The figures will
be studied in the latter part of this chapter. As to word order, it was not
a matter of licence to arrange the words in any scrambled sequence, but of a
greater freedom than in ‘unmarked’ speech to move a word into a position of
emphasis: the verb, perhaps, or an adjective separated by the verb from its
noun. Watkins has collected some illuminating material on this topic, but it
would certainly repay a more systematic, large-scale study.^6
Wackernagel drew attention to a particular type of modified word order
in which, by an inversion of the normal Indo-European naming pattern
‘X the son (or descendant) of Y’, we have ‘the son of Y, X’. He cited only
Greek and Latin examples: the Homeric Πηληϊα ́ δεω Lχιλη
ο,Τυδεδην
∆ιομ δεα,Τελαμ.νιο ΑAα, and the Scipionic epitaph CIL i.^2 7 (Saturnian
(^4) Cf. also 1. 62. 11, 13; 3. 31. 19; 6. 22. 7; 8. 95. 5; Fortson (as n. 1), 131.
(^5) Numerous formulae common to Vedic and Avestan are identified by Schlerath (1968). For
theMaha ̄bha ̄rata and Ra ̄ma ̄yan
̇
a see Brockington (1998), 103–15 and 365–73. On linguistic
archaism as a poetic feature cf. Campanile–Orlandi–Sani (1974), 236; Campanile (1990b),
156–61.
(^6) See Watkins (1995), 36 f., 40 f., 128 f., 132 f., 146, 191, 280, 319; id. in H. Hettrich (ed.),
Indogermanische Syntax: Fragen und Perspektiven (Wiesbaden 2002), 319–37.
76 2. Phrase and Figure