I promised these to a reader. They are handouts I’ve used in various Latin classes to introduce second-year students to meter, beginning with Ovid and Martial, and continuing with Horace. I kept them down to two pages each, so they could be printed out as single-sheet double-sided handouts. That meant a certain amount of simplification, but I’ve included the essentials.
The first handout, Latin Meter I: Ovid and Martial is here (.doc), here (.pdf), and here (.pdf). The second, Latin Meter II: Horace, is here (.doc), here (.pdf), and here (.pdf). Please feel free to use them in your own classes, and to suggest improvements in the comments or by e-mail.
Finally, I’m hoping someone can tell me whether the first or second of each PDF file is better in any way. It’s been a long time since I’ve used Acrobat, and I wasn’t sure whether to use PDFMaker or Acrobat Distiller, so I did them both ways and in that order. The metrical marks are done in Century Gothic, whose U’s are the best approximation I’ve found of a breve. If interested readers can let me know whether they come out right on their computers, I will be very grateful. It looks to me like the Distiller files add tiny tails to the U’s, making them less useful as brevia, but I can’t tell how others see them. I used Word 2000 for Windows and Adobe Acrobat 4.0, which should both (I hope) be old enough for compatibility with most reader’s systems.
One Response to Meter handouts