Fifth spondee in Aeneis I.690

Question

I ran into this hexameter verse by Vergilius when researching for an answer to another question:

exuit, et gressu gaudens incedit Iuli.
(Aeneis I.690)

The only way I seem to able to scan this line is by taking the fifth foot to be spondee. In my experience this is very rare, so I am in doubt. Wikipedia tells me that spondee in the fifth foot was almost never used by Roman poets, and rarely (5 %) by Homeros.

Is my scansion correct? Should I treat this as a highly exceptional case, or something to be expected from Vergilius?

It just occurred to me, after posting the question, that perhaps Iuli could have three syllables: Ĭ-ū-lī. This would save the dactyl but it sounds otherwise weird.

Answer 1

The name Ĭūlus is trisyllabic. It's listed as such in dictionaries, e.g. L&S, and there's ample metrical evidence for this, though much of it is indirect.

A search for forms of Iūlus in the Aeneid finds that it never occurs at the beginning of a line -- in fact, it's almost always line-final, as in the line you quote. This itself is suspicious since if the name was Jūl-, beginning with a consonant, there would be no reason for it not to begin a line. Further, if you look at the final syllables of the words that precede these line-final forms of Iūlus, they always contain short vowels (like the -dit of incedit in your line). This is because they're the second syllables of dactyls. If they were the second syllables of spondees, this would be an odd coincidence.

Finally, I've found one case where the scansion seems unambiguously trisyllabic, namely a line from Propertius, Elegies 4.1a.48:

felix terra tuos cepit, Iule, deos.

This is the second line of an elegiac couplet, and the second half of such a line is always dactylic, which means the last two-and-a-half feet must be cepit I|ule de|os.

The reason this sounds weird to you is maybe the association with the name Iūlius, in which the I is consonantal.