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“At uidete quam concinne”. Changing Attitudes to Metrical Harmony in Giovanni Pontano’s Actius
Traditional approach to Latin metrics, inherited from Classical Antiquity, was based on evaluating every verse according to few unchanging rules. This trend, however, contradicted one very popular attitude to classical texts, known to the Middle Ages, e.g., from Servius' commetaries, that presupposed commentator's ability to mention ever new beautiful features in the a priori perfect works of Latin classics, and so to deduce new ways of making text beautiful (et bene dixit, quia...). This conflict resulted in the new theory of Latin metrics, based on the latter approach, formulated in Giovanni Pontano's dialogue Actius (1495-1499). Instead of applying xternal rules to verses, Pontano tries to deduce their internal rules; the main goal of poetry is for him to arouse admiratio, and while admiring Vergil's perfectly harmonious verses (which, of course, reminds of Servius' posture), the characters of the dialogue try to understand what exactly produces this perfect harmony. Thus in Actius unaccountably beauty must first be felt, and only later tentative explanations can be given, while for ancient scholars you determine whether a verse is harmonious or not once you have checked if it observes the rules. Pontano's approach turns out to be very productiveand helps him to introduce several new notions, such as alliteratio.