ABSTRACT
The text, or. recta, proposed earlier would mean: “It did not last long until it (i.e. the trimeter) admitted etc.” A long syllable following a short one makes an iambus. He is a quick foot; this is why he ordered iambic lines to be called trimeters, although he was giving six beats to the line, and was the same in form from first to last. As the author have suggested with his pause after longe, he assume that we have to do with a more colloquial and elliptic construction, basically paratactic, which we could render more adequately in this way: “It did not last long: in order to reach the ears with somewhat more slowness it (the iambus) adopted steady spondees into its ancestral rights.”.
