THE removal of the lava and cinders from Pompeii discovered to us a town of the Early Empire. We saw the very room in which a Roman had lived. Would that we could hear him speak! We know his language-the significance of each word, the sound of each letter. But words and letters are the dry bones of a language. It is the tone of utterance that breathes life into them. And that is what this volume claims to discover-Plautus', Terence's (and presumably Cicero's) intonation of the sentence. To disclose it the rubbish of half a century had to be cleared away. Klotz's large book on Early Latin Verse gathered up all the wisdom and-alas!—much of the folly of Ritschl's time. And no more egregious folly than the'metrical'theory of the Brevis Brevians, that Plautus scanned'apŭd me'when the metrical ictus happened to fall on ap-,'ad illos' when the metrical ictus happened not to fall on ad. Clear that rubbish away, and you see that'apŭd me','ad illos' go with emphasis on the pronoun, while in'apud me','ad illos' the pronoun is a sentence-enclitic. This was pointed out many years ago in a magazine-article (indeed Ritschl had given a hint of the same kind). But on Klotz's layer of rubbish (itself embedded on CF Müller's Early Latin Prosody, 1869) the volumes of the Teubner edition have been superimposed, keeping it firmly in its place. And so another péya Biẞxíov has to be inflicted on the reader. Satan must cast out Satan. The word'rubbish'is not too strong. What censure can be too strong on people who imagine that the Infinitive of venio could be put at the beginning of a trochaic line and (with ve-'under the ictus') be pronounced venire'(Truc. 504); who fail to see that the difference between Plautus' prosody and Virgil's viii PREFACE must be (in the main) the same as that between any Comedy and any Epic, namely that the lines of Comedy echo conversational utterance,'I'll'for'I will','he's' and'we're'for'he is'(or'he has') and'we are'?