Terentianus Maurus, who belongs to the end of the third century, speaks of it when treating of the Anacreontic verse, because the first division of the Saturnian bears some resemblance to it. But the real Saturnian verse is quite a different one, which I intend shortly to prove in a detailed treatise. It has many forms, and is altogether distinct from Greek metres. The Latin term for Rhythmus, which in later times only was applied to Greek metres, is _numeri_. But the Greek metre is based on music and quantity, while in theirs the Romans really _counted_, the syllables being little measured, or rather not at all: a certain degree of rhythm was, however, kept. Our ancestors, in the same way, had no idea of short and long syllables in the Greek manner; and in the old Latin church hymns likewise short syllables are made long, and _vice versa_. Plautus and Terence also, in their iambic and trochaic verses, really observed the ryhthmical measure only, and not the quantity. This is the case with all northern people. The pervading characteristic of the Saturnian verse is this, that it must consist of a fixed number of trisyllabic feet. Generally speaking there are four of them, in which either Bacchics or Cretics interchange with Spondees. Sometimes the Cretics and sometimes the Bacchics predominate. When kept distinct they have a very fine movement; but they are usually very much mingled together, so that it is difficult to make them out. These verses, found from the very earliest times, are quite analogous to the Persian, Arabian, and to our own old German and northern ones, and also to those of the Anglo-Saxon, and to all in which alliteration prevails. The old German verse is divided into two halves, in the first of which two words begin with the same consonant, which once more occurs again in the second, and it has four beats. In the old Saxon Harmony of the Gospels there is this quadruple measure, and likewise in Otfrid and others; but five or six measures may also be found. In Persian poetry there are uniformly four feet of three syllables each; in Arabic this is often the case, but not unseldom there are quadrisyllabic ones also. Exactly agreeing with these are the Spanish _coplas de arte major_, which were in use before the introduction of the Alexandrine, and have also passed into the Flemish. In all probability this metre was also used in the longer poems of the Provençal. This old Roman syllabic measure is universal in the Roman poems down to the seventh century. I have found a long string of them, and a chapter of an old grammarian with fragments of wonderful beauty, principally from Nævius. This important treatise on the Saturnian verse I shall publish. For this grammarian has really understood that metre,[37] which in Plautus is worked up to a high degree of beauty.