Sedes as Style in Greek Hexameter: A Computational Approach

summary:

This article investigates the role of metrical position, or sedes, in the poetics of Greek hexameter through a process of computation and close reading. Previous scholarship treated sedes as either a quantitative or an inter-textual phenomenon. This article offers a new model of sedes expectancy that identifies unexpected metrical positions of words and demonstrates its utility in an intervention in intertextual studies and close reading of a passage (Odyssey 1.345–59). In both, the model reveals otherwise invisible patterns of style, structure, semantics, and rhetoric that suggest a poetics of sedes expectancy persists within and between Greek hexameter texts.