"
Aeolic" alludes to the poets Sappho and Alcaeus, of the Aeolian island of Lesbos, who first used these meters.
The dialect of the poem is primarily Ionic, with a strong subsoil of
Aeolic, which had been the language of the earlier inhabitants of the part of Ionia from which Homer traditionally came.
(--); for the
aeolic metron in dactylo-epitrite, compare Tim.
The asclepiad consisted of an
aeolic nucleus, a choriamb to which were added more choriambs and iambic or trochaic elements at the end of each line.
Translating [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as `unrein' (impure), he suggested a connection with the
Aeolic dialect of Pindar's birthplace, Boeotia, which tended to have dental consonants where other dialects had sibilants.(13) The idea lacks conviction, as Pindar commonly uses a standard literary Doric devoid of dialectal variants.(14) A more likely candidate for the unusual pronunciation of s might be Arion of Methymna, to whose alleged invention of the [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] at the Dorian-speaking court of Periander of Corinth (c.
the region "Zalpuwa"), Carruba argues that second-millennium Ahhiya(wa) was an Anatolian designation for all of the islands and coastlines of the Aegean, and that the word was indeed the forerunner of the later (originally
Aeolic) Greek '[Greek Text Omitted].
In classical prosody, a choriamb is scanned - U U - ; it is sometimes used by itself to form a complete system but is more often found as the nucleus of a colon such as a glyconic or another
aeolic pattern.
The word is clearly formed from [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] `fastened, jointed', by means of the highly productive suffix [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].(2) Because its relationship to [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] must have been obvious to all, we cannot argue from the coexistence of the dialect forms that it came into use before the Attic-Ionic change of original [bar] [Alpha] to [Eta]; if it began as [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] among Ionians, speakers of
Aeolic or Doric would naturally have restored [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] after [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], and vice versa.
It consists either of the
aeolic pattern | UUU U- - U | - U U - in which four variable syllables precede the choriambic nucleus (- U U -) and create what is called choriambic dimeter, or the same pattern lacking the final syllable (catalectic).
Hermes swoops down from Ida in the guise of a hawk, and a relative clause apparently expands on the connotations of the noun to emphasize its reference to the bird's swiftness, which is not immediately obvious from the
Aeolic form [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]:
The most common
Aeolic verse form used for Greek and Latin lyric poetry and named for the Greek poet Glycon, about whom little is known.