Enjambement am Pentameterende

This paper traces the enjambment techniques employed by Hellenistic and Latin authors at the end of the elegiac couplet. While the Alexandrians make deliberate use of enjambment at the end of the pentameter, in later Hellenistic and in Latin epigram there is a discernible movement toward a unity of syntax and metre, as testified by the poets’ tendency to avoid enjambment between distichs. The earliest Latin epigrammatists loyally render their Greek contemporaries’ aesthetics. Catullus, in his turn to Callimachean poetics, at times employs enjambment in this position, especially in elegy (as opposed to epigram). These techniques are largely abandoned by the Augustan poets, who rigidly introduce epigrammatic avoidance of enjambment into longer elegiac poems; among them, only Propertius in his fourth book rarely uses it as a stylistic means.