Arveriatis’. This certainly seems to show poetic diction and word order, and it
can be arranged into three verses of seven or eight syllables with quantitative
cadences in... ∪−− || or... ∪−∪− ||.^77 The similarity with the prototypes
reconstructed for Graeco-Aryan is remarkable.
Irish verse does not come into view until half a millennium later, but the
high proportion of words that are exclusively poetic is a sign of the antiquity
of the tradition behind it.^78 In this poetry an initial stress accent has replaced
quantity as a formative factor. In the earliest epic and gnomic poetry the
commonest type of verse is a heptasyllable of the form
××××|×′××||This closely resembles the heptasyllable that forms the first half of the Latin
Saturnian, and we can derive it in just the same way from the ^^G prototype.
Freely alternating with the heptasyllable, or sometimes as the fourth line of
a quatrain, we find a verse that differs from it only in having one more syllable
before the caesura. This would correspond to the full G. There is also a longer
verse, apparently very archaic and soon abandoned, in which the hepta-
syllable is preceded by a protasis of four or (less often) five syllables, marked
off by caesura:
(×)××××|××××|×′××||This is exactly parallel to the construction of longer verses in Graeco-Aryan
by prefixing 4 | or 5 | to G, ^^G, etc.
If these Irish verses ending in... | ×′×× || go back to acatalectic prototypes,
we should expect that catalectic ones would appear with an ending... | ×′
× ||, as they do in Latin and (without the consequential caesura) in Avestan.
Such verses in fact occur. Indeed a complete series of ‘acatalectic’ and
‘catalectic’ measures can be found: 5 | 3 and 5 | 2 (= G: G^^), 4 | 3 and 4 | 2 (^^G:
^^G^^), 3 | 3 and 3 | 2, 2 | 3 and 2 | 2. When members of these pairs are
combined in a stanza, the ‘acatalectic’ ones precede. Thus Watkins cites
stanzas of the forms 4 | 3 || 3 | 2 || 4 | 3 || 3 | 2 |||, 3 | 3 || 3 | 2 || 3 | 2 || 3 | 2 |||, 2 | 3 ||
4 | 2 |||, and 2 | 3 || 2 | 3 || 4 | 2 |||. This is in accord with the predominantly
clausular character of the catalectic type in Vedic and Greek.
(^77) W. Meid, Zur Lesung und Deutung gallischer Inschriften (Innsbruck 1989), ad fin.; id.
(1990), 47 f. For the Chamalières defixio see Lambert (2003), 152–61. In another major Gaulish
text, the lead tablet from Larzac (Lambert, 162–74), G. Olmsted finds metre (JIES 17 (1989),
155 ff.; 19 (1991), 280–2), while Meid (1990), 48 finds ‘eine teilweise rhythmisierte Prosa mit
einem hohen Anteil an lautfigurativen Elementen’.
(^78) Thurneysen (1921), 56. In the account that follows I rely on Watkins’s seminal paper (as
above, n. 63), while noting that it has been subjected to some strong criticism: see E. Campanile,
ZCP 37 (1979), 193–7; K. Klar, B. O Hehir, and E. Sweetser, Studia Celtica 18/19 (1983/4), 47–51;
McCone (1990), 38–41, 45. Cf. also Kuryłowicz (1973), 159–71.
- Poet and Poesy 53