In teaching the rules of the Latin senarius it is a pedagogical mistake to compare it with the Greek trimeter as Lindsay does in his brilliant book, _Early Latin Verse_; indeed I am persuaded that it distorts historical facts to do so. If Livius was the man who shaped this line for Latin needs, we must remember that he had reached Rome as a mere child and had as a youth grown accustomed to the swing of verse pronounced in the Saturnian and the quadratus meters and that he would not have had any occasion at Rome to learn to comprehend the amazing precision of the Menandrian trimeter. And Naevius, the Campanian soldier, must have had much the same experience. To such men the Greek trimeter could only have suggested the possibility of writing a six-foot iambic line which would carry through to the end, with the lightness of the quadratus, the opening rhythm of the Saturnian. And the rules of the first hemistich of the Saturnian must have been the determining regulations of the senarius. Those rules had all to do with the purely Latin problem of writing quantitative verse that should not overmuch offend the demands of an accentual stress. Indeed it is fair to say that if Livius had never seen a Greek trimeter but had undertaken to adapt a six-foot iambic line on suggestions taken only from the Saturnian and the quadratus, he would have arrived at precisely what he did. By failing to see this simple historical sequence we have, from Bentley to the elaborate but misleading statistics of Klotz, followed Horace in misconceiving the spirit of the very worthy Latin senarius. But there was more for the early dramatists to do than to shape a line suitable for dialogue, for Greek drama had taught these poets that a great variety of meters must be used to give the mood and tempo of emotional scenes. The Roman writers of tragedy did not attempt to reproduce the intricate polymetric and antistrophic Greek songs. However, they adopted several very effective meters (perhaps also creating some) which they used for massed effects, such rhythms as the cretic, bacchiac, anapaestic, glyconic, and the longer iambic and trochaic lines, not to mention various rarer forms. In a fragment of Ennius quoted by Cicero, Andromache in distress runs from senarii through a passage of pleading cretics: (Quid petam praesidi aut exequar quove nunc etc.) then through excited narration in excellent alliterative septenarii: (Fana flamma deflagrata tosti alti stant parietes) into turgid and wild anapaests: (Priamo vi vitam evitari etc.). And Cassandra’s mad scene runs similarly from septenarii through dactylic tetrameters, trochaic octonarii, and anapaests into iambic octonarii. The tone of such cretics has been caught fairly well in Tennyson’s _The Oak_, All his leaves, fall’n at length, while the bacchiac rhythm is, if pronounced with care, conveyed by Arnold’s Ye storm-winds, of autumn