Porson's Law

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Porson's Law is a metrical law concerning a "bridge" in Greek iambic trimeters, the most common dialogue-meter in Greek tragedy and comedy. In its most general form it states that, in anceps-cretic or cretic-anceps meters, such as the iambic trimeter, no word-break may follow a long anceps, except in the case of a main caesura.

This metrical law, named after its discoverer, the late-18th-century British Classical scholar Richard Porson, appeared originally in Porson's edition of the Hecuba of Euripides. Its original phrasing is

“

Nempe hanc regulam plerumque in senariis observabant Tragici, ut, si voce quae Creticum pedem efficeret terminaretur versus, eamque vocem hypermonosyllabon praecederet, quintus pes iambus vel tribrachys esse deberet (That is to say, the tragic poets generally followed this law in iambic trimeters: If a verse ends with a word which produces a cretic foot, and if this foot is preceded by a word of more than one syllable, then the fifth foot [sc. the first foot of the third iambic metron] of this verse must be either an iambus [i.e. two metrically long syllables] or a tribrachys [i.e. three metrically short syllables].

”

Martin L. West (1987:25) has defined Porson's Law thus: "When the anceps of the third metron is occupied by a long syllable, this syllable and the one following belong to the same word, unless one of them is a monosyllable." Accordingly, after a short anceps in the third metron, the beginning of a new word is avoided. West further observed that "there are very few exceptions in tragedy, most of them textually suspect."