A real advance was made by Antoine Meillet, who based his conclusions
mainly on a careful comparison of Vedic with Greek metres.^62 Without men-
tioning Westphal, he made many of the same points; but whereas Westphal’s
eye had focused, for the Greek side, on the hexameter and the iambic dimeter
and trimeter, Meillet found better comparanda in the metres of the Lesbian
lyricists. And whereas Westphal (and the other Germans) could not compre-
hend any metre except in terms of a regular beat, the Francophone Meillet,
writing at a time when music was coming to be written more often without
bar lines, understood that quantitatively patterned verses may be taken at face
value and need not be divisible into feet of equal duration.
While there have been a few sceptics, most investigators since Meillet have
accepted that his conclusions form a sound basis for further work. The two
major extensions to his edifice have been the analyses of Slavonic metre by
Roman Jakobson and of Old Irish metre by Calvert Watkins.^63 Continuing
efforts have been made to bring Italic and Germanic verse under the same
umbrella, and there have been various claims for the recognition of Indo-
European elements in specimens of Hittite, Luwian, Lycian, Lydian, Sidetic,
Phrygian, Gaulish, Celtiberian, Welsh, and Tocharian verse. The following
survey must necessarily be succinct, concentrating on the main facts and
leaving aside much subsidiary detail.^64
Graeco-Aryan metreIt is still Greek and Vedic that show the clearest relationship. This may be
because they are two of the oldest attested and bear the best witness to an
original system that had become deformed by the time the evidence from
other branches comes into view. Or it may be because Graeco-Aryan had
developed a particular system that never existed in the same form in other
parts of the Indo-European area. In any case the best procedure will be first to
see what can be established about Graeco-Aryan metre, and then to inquire
how far the results can be extended to MIE or PIE.
The governing principles of prosody and versification are essentially iden-
tical in Vedic and early Greek. The unit of composition is a verse containing a
(^62) Meillet (1923), foreshadowed in previous publications. On the development and influence
of Meillet’s views see Françoise Bader, ‘Meillet et la poésie indo-européenne’,Cahiers Ferdinand
de Saussure 42 (1988), 97–125.
(^63) R. Jakobson, ‘Studies in Comparative Slavic Metrics’,Oxford Slavonic Papers 3 (1952),
21–66= id. (1962–88), iv. 414–63; Watkins (1963), 194–249= (1994), 349–404.
(^64) Cf. Schmitt (1967), 307–13; West (1973), 161–87; Durante (1976), 62–5, 70; Gamkrelidze–
Ivanov (1995), 738–40; Watkins (1995), 19–21, 54.
46 1. Poet and Poesy