"tum vero exoritur clamor ripaeque lacusque"

When you do the meter for this line, if you do the elision it does not work out, having 6 feet and all.

So, to make it work what I had to do was not do the elision so what I ended up with was:

Long short short, Long short short, Long long, Long long, Long short short, long long (anceps).

Any reasoning?


First, let us check all vowel lengths:

tŭm vērō ĕxŏrĭtŭr clāmŏr rīpaequĕ lăcūsquĕ

A syllable with a short vowel can be long (by position). The standard assumption is that all possible elisions happen, and that is the case here too. There are two possibilities for a caesura, indicated here by apostrophe. The scansion looks like this:

tŭm vēr' ĕxŏrĭtŭr clāmŏr rīpaequĕ lăcūsquĕ
 —   — | — v v|— ' — |— ' —|—  v   v|—   v 

The first vowel in vero is long, the second vowel of vero is elided away, and the first syllable of exoritur is long by position (because 'x' counts as two consonants since it's pronounced 'ks'). You seem to have the remainder correct. So it starts with a spondee, and all elisions occur.

It's worth noting that you can deduce from the meter that the first vowel in vero is long, since otherwise the first three syllables would be long-short-long. This sort of deduction is frequent when reading hexameter, and often saves you from having to look up vowel quantities. (Now, if you are writing hexameter, you'd better know the vowel quantities in advance!)

Finally, it would be extraordinarily rare for a mid-line elision to be suppressed. The one situation where an elision is often (but not always!) suppressed is the situation where the last word of one line would otherwise elide with the first word of the next line.

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