Kitap 9
2.83
Every one of these feet is employed in prose, but those which take a greater time to utter and derive a certain stability from the length of their syllables produce a weightier style, short syllables being best adapted for a nimble and rapid style. Both types are useful in their proper place: for weight and slowness are rightly condemned in passages where speed is required, as are jerkiness and excessive speed in passages which call for weight.
2.84
It may also be important to remark that there are degrees of length in long syllables and of shortness in short. Consequently, although syllables may be thought never to involve more than two time-beats or less than one, and although for that reason in metre all shorts and all longs are regarded as equal to other shorts and longs, they none the less possess some undefinable and secret quality, which makes some seem longer and others shorter than the normal. Verse, on the other hand, has its own peculiar features, and consequently some syllables may be either long or short.
2.85
Indeed, since strict law allows a vowel to be long or short, as the case may be, when it stands alone, no less than when one or more consonants precede it, there can be no doubt, when it comes to the measuring of feet, that a short syllable, followed by another which is either long or short, but is preceded by two consonants, is lengthened, as for example in the phrase agrestem tenui musam. Ecl. i. 2. But Virgil wrote silvestrem.
