How does the caesura work on this line?

Question

sed leve pondus erat nec quod cognoscere possent
Solis equi, solitaque iugum gravitate carebat
(Ovid Metamorphoses book 2)

At first I thought it might be like this, as my first explorations of Ovid seem to show that a -que word is often used as a caesura (i.e. the que comes in the second half - here with elision of course).

 – ⏑  ⏑/–    ⏑ ⏑/ – ‖   –/–    ⏑ ⏑/– ⏑  ⏑/–  ⏑
Solis equi, solitaque iugum gravitate carebat;

... but in these cases (i.e. a caesura before -que), this then inevitably puts a lot of semantic emphasis on the previous word, here solita, "habitual". That seems to be OK, you can probably have the adjective "habitual" hanging in the air the space of a caesura...

But looking at it again, I am wondering: maybe it should be:

 – ⏑  ⏑/– ‖  ⏑ ⏑/ –     –/–    ⏑ ⏑/– ⏑  ⏑/–  ⏑
Solis equi, solitaque iugum gravitate carebat;

... obviously Ovid himself has (maybe!) put a comma there (or someone has, in this Oxford Classical Texts edition)... and the sense groups seem to make more sense. But on the other hand, this makes the second half of the line a real mouthful: not impossible to say, but a bit "heavy", sort of inelegant. I am doing a lot of reading out loud as I get to grips with Ovid.

More generally, how often do unusual caesurae in fact occur? In Ovid, for example. Where do these commas come from? Are they Ovid's? If so, does a comma usually coincide with the caesura?

PS I'm not entirely sure about iugum: maybe this consists of 3 vowels, in fact. That would make all the feet into dactyls (apart from the final one), but wouldn't change the question.

Answer 1

There are really two senses of "caesura", one of them objectively definable, the other not so much.

Most basically, a caesura is defined simply as any word break in the line that occurs within a foot, rather than at a foot boundary. (The opposite of a caesura is a diaeresis, which is a word break that corresponds to a foot boundary.) In this sense any line will obviously be likely to contain multiple caesurae. In the line you cite, none of the word breaks corresponds to a foot boundary, so there's actually a caesura between every word and the word that follows:

sōlĭs | ĕquī | sŏlĭtāquĕ | iŭgūm | grăvĭtātĕ | cărēbat

In dactylic hexameter, sometimes a caesura occurs after the first syllable of a dactyl or spondee (as after equi in this line), sometimes after the second syllable of a dactyl (as after solis). The first kind is called a "masculine caesura" or "strong caesura", the second a "feminine caesura" or "weak caesura".

However, when people talk about "the caesura" in a line, what they mean is the so-called "principal caesura". This means whichever of the caesurae is felt to represent the most substantial "break" in the line, in terms of meaning or syntax (hopefully both will coincide, but that's not always the case). This can get a bit more subjective since readers can disagree on where they feel a line most naturally divides into two units.

In the case you're asking about, I think it's actually pretty clear:

sed leve pondus erat || nec quod cognoscere possent
solis equi, || solitaque iugum gravitate carebat

The main syntactic division in the second line is between two independent clauses, where the modern editor has inserted a comma. It's very hard to argue that any of the other caesurae in the line represent in any sense a bigger break than that.

It's true that most principal caesurae fall in the third or fourth foot, but that shouldn't lead you to think that a Roman reading a line of hexameter would always have looked for a natural break or pause somewhere in those two feet. Sometimes there just isn't one; that's part of the rhythmic variety of Latin poetry.

Whether marking the principal caesura in a line is in any way a useful exercise is debatable. Personally, I don't see that doing so tells you anything about the line that you didn't know before (and when teaching meter, I mostly ignore the caesura), but others may feel differently.

Answer 2

As a supplement to qwertxyz's answer, which gives the correct scansion, I'll note that this line fits into the scheme described in D.S. Raven, Latin metre §66:

The 'weak' third foot caesura is far less common in Latin than in Greek ... [I]n the most developed type of hexameter verse ... it is nearly always combined with 'strong' caesura in the fourth foot at least ... and usually also with 'strong' caesura in the second foot...

The relevant parts of the example provided (Aeneid 1.87) correspond closely to your line (except that the second foot is spondaic instead of dactylic):

insequitur | clamorque | virum | stridorque rudentum

Answer 3

Here is the correct prosodic scan of this holodactylic verse:

sṓlĭs ĕquī́, | sŏlĭtā́quĕ || iŭgū́m | grăvĭtā́tĕ cărḗbat