The golden line is a type of Latin dactylic hexameter frequently mentioned in Latin classrooms and in contemporary scholarship about Latin poetry, but which apparently began as a verse-composition exercise in schools in early modern Britain.K. Mayer, "The schoolboys' revenge: how the golden line entered classical scholarship", Classical Receptions Journal, Volume 12, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 248–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clz029 For the contrary view that maintains that the golden line was known in antiquity, see Seppo Heikkinen, "From Persius to Wilkinson: The Golden Line Revisited", Arctos : Acta Philologica Fennica 49 (2015), pages 57-77..
Definition The golden line is variously defined, but most uses of the term conform to the oldest known definition from Burles' Latin grammar of 1652:Edward Burles, Grammatica Burlesa. London 1652, p. 357. Facsimile edition, ed. R. C. Alston, in the series English Linguistics 1500-1800 (A Collection of Facsimile Reprints), 307. Menston, England: Scholar Press Ltd. 1971. "If the Verse does consist of two Adjectives, two Substantives and a Verb only, the first Adjective agreeing with the first Substantive, the second with the second, and the Verb placed in the midst, it is called a Golden Verse: as, Lurida terribiles miscent aconita novercae. (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.147) Pendula flaventem pingebat bractea crinem."The source of this line is unknown. It first appears in the 1584 edition of John Withals, A Dictionary in English and Latine ... Recognized by Dr. Evans ... and then by W. Clerk. And now at this last impression enlarged, etc. United Kingdom: T. Purfoot, 1584 p. 70. also p. 214 of 1602 edition in Google Books. Verses added in the 1584 edition included many golden lines (added verses marked with a ¶ or ⁋ sign) and described: "Now Lastlie Augmented with More than Six Hundred Rythmical Verses, Whereof Many be Prouerbiall, some Heretofore found in Old Authors, and Othersome Neuer before this Time Seene Or Read in the Latine Tongue, as Having their Originall Grace in English." The verse was next seen in John Clarke's treatise Manu-ductio ad artem carmini-ficam, seu dux poeticus included in his Formulæ oratoriæ in usum scholarū concinnatæ, unâ cum orationibus, declamationibus &c., dé collocatione oratoria et artificio demum poetico, præceptiunculis. quarta editio longé et auctior et emendatior. (Manu-ductio ad artem carmini-ficam, seu dux poeticus.). Excudebat A.M. Augustine Mathewes impensis Roberti Mylbourne: Londini. 1632.link to 1637 edition These lines have the abVAB structure, in which two adjectives are placed at the beginning of the line and two nouns at the end in an interlocking order. Lurida terribiles miscent aconita novercae. adjective a, adjective b, VERB, noun A, noun B (abVAB) "fearsome stepmothers mix ghastly aconites"
Pendula is an adjective modifying bractea and flaventem is an adjective modifying crinem. Pendula flaventem pingebat bractea crinem. "hanging gold leaf was colouring her yellow hair"
Another would be Virgil, Aeneid 4.139: Aurea purpuream subnectit fibula vestem, "a golden clasp fastens her purple cloak" Word-by-word the line translates as "golden purple fastens clasp cloak". The endings on the Latin words indicate their syntactical relationship, whereas English uses word order to do the same task. So a Latin listener or reader would know that golden and clasp go together even though the words are separated.
The term "golden line" and its form originated in Britain, where it was an exercise for composing Latin verses.K. Mayer, "The schoolboys' revenge: how the golden line entered classical scholarship", Classical Receptions Journal, Volume 12, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 248–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clz029 The first known use, as aureus versus, is by the Welsh epigrammatist John Owen in a footnote to his own Latin poem in 1612.A scan from the original 1612 edition. In modern editions the epigram is cited as 5.51 The definition quoted above is in an obscure Latin textbook published in England in 1652, which never sold well and of which only four copies are extant today. It appeared in about a dozen citations between 1612 and 1900, including in some American and British Latin Grammars in the 19th and early 20th century.Mayer 2020 collects about a dozen citations before 1900. Scans of most of those citations are arranged chronologically in this Flickr album. G.A. Jacob, The Bromsgrove Latin Grammar, London: Simpkin & Marshall 1858, p. 259. C. Cooper, An Introduction to the Latin Hexameter. (Melbourne 1952). p. 44-45. Scholars outside the English-speaking world have only mentioned the golden line since 1955. It is not found in any current handbooks on Latin grammar or metrics except for Mahoney's online Overview of Latin Syntax and Panhuis's Latin Grammar.Dirk Panhuis, Latin Grammar, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006 p. 206
The term "golden line" did not exist in Classical antiquity. Classical poets probably did not strive to produce them (but see the teres versus in the history section below). S. E. Winbolt,S. E. Winbolt, Latin hexameter verse; an aid to composition, London: Methuen, 1903, pp. 219–221. the most thorough commentator on the golden line, described the form as a natural combination of obvious tendencies in Latin hexameter, such as the preference for putting adjectives towards the beginning of the line and nouns at the emphatic end. The golden line is an extreme form of hyperbaton.
There are about ten different definitions of the "golden line". Often scholars do not explicitly offer a definition, but instead present statistics or lists of golden lines, from which one must extrapolate their criteria for deeming a verse golden.
The so-called "silver line" Although Burles's 1652 definition (see the introduction above) is explicit about the abVAB structure, many scholars also consider lines with this chiastic pattern to be "golden": Humanum miseris volvunt erroribus aevum (Prudentius, Hamartigenia 377) adjective a, adjective b, VERB, noun B, noun A (abVBA) "they involve the human race with wretched errors"
Perhaps this more inclusive definition is based upon the famous definition offered by the poet John Dryden in his introduction to the Silvae, "That Verse commonly which they call golden, or two Substantives and two Adjectives with a Verb betwixt them to keep the peace." WilkinsonL. P. Wilkinson, Golden Latin Artistry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963, pp. 215-216. offered the humorous definition "silver line" for this variant. Wilkinson also offered another humorous distinction, the "bronze line", but this term has rarely been used since.One exception: Dirk Panhuis, Latin Grammar, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2006, p. 206.
Criteria for inclusion and exclusion Different scholars use different definitions of a golden line."I interpret the concept 'golden line' more strictly than (e.g.) W. B. Sedgewick, Speculum V (1930) p. 50, who seems to count any combination of two epithets, two nouns, and a verb, though less strictly than L. P. Wilkinson Golden Latin Artistry (1963) p. 216 for whom chiastic order of nouns and epithets count only as 'silver.'"—Alan Cameron, Claudian: Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorius (Clarendon Press Oxford 1970), p. 290. Most scholars exclude the less common variants in which one or both nouns precede the verb, gold (aBVAb, AbVaB, ABVab) and silver (aBVbA, AbVBa, ABVba). Some scholars include lines with extra prepositions, adverbs, exclamations, conjunctions, and relative pronouns. For example, OrchardA. Orchard, The Poetic Art of Aldhelm, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 97. does not offer a definition of the golden line, but his criteria can be extracted from his list of the golden lines in Aldhelm's Carmen de virginitate. He allows relative pronouns (2, 4, 112, 221, 288), prepositions (278, 289), conjunctions like ut and dum (95, 149, 164, 260), exclamations (45), and adverbs (14). He also allows extra adjectives, as in "Haec suprema". He includes silver lines (4, 123, 260). He disqualifies inverted or mixed order, where nouns come first (101, 133, 206, 236, 275, 298). He allows participles as the verb in the middle (71, 182), but he does not include the periphrastic verbal form in 271: Atque futurorum gestura est turma nepotum.
Use by classical poets Statistics illuminate some long-term trends in the use of the golden line. The following statistical tables are based on one scholar's definitions of golden and "silver" lines (the tables are from Mayer (2002)K. Mayer, "The Golden Line: Ancient and Medieval Lists of Special Hexameters and Modern Scholarship," in C. Lanham, ed., Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: Classical Theory and Modern Practice, Continuum Press 2002, pp. 139-179. with additions of Juvenal, Calpurnius, and Nemesianus from HeikkinenSeppo Heikkinen, "From Persius to Wilkinson: The Golden Line Revisited", Arctos : Acta Philologica Fennica 49 (2015), pages 57-77.). Table 1 gives the totals for the golden and silver lines in classical poetry, listed in approximate chronological order from Catullus to Statius. Table 2 gives similar figures for a few poets in late antiquity, while Table 3 gives figures for a selection of early medieval poems from the fifth to tenth centuries.
In all three tables, the first column is the total number of verses in the work in question, followed by the number of "golden lines" and "silver lines" in the work. The last three columns give the percentage of golden and silver lines in respect to the total number of verses. Aside from a few exceptions, only poems with more than 200 lines are included, since in shorter poems the percentage figures are arbitrary and can be quite high. See, for example, the combined percentage of 14.29 in the Apocolocyntosis. Other short poems that are not included on the tables, such as the Copa, Moretum, Lydia, and Einsiedeln Eclogues, have rather high combined percentages between 3.45 and 5.26.
Table 1 Golden and Silver Lines in Classical Poetry Poem Total Verses Golden Silver % Golden % Silver % Gold & Silver Catullus 64 408 18 10 4.41 2.45 6.86 Horace, Satires & Epistles 3981 14 4 0.35 0.10 0.45 Virgil, Eclogues 829 15 7 1.81 0.84 2.65 Virgil Georgic 2 542 11 5 2.03 0.92 2.95 Virgil Georgic 4 566 5 2 0.88 0.35 1.24 Virgil Aeneid 9896 34 26 0.34 0.26 0.61 Culex 414 18 5 4.35 1.21 5.56 Ciris 541 27 12 4.99 2.22 7.21 Ovid, Metamorphoses 11989 126 28 1.05 0.23 1.28 Lucan 8060 118 51 1.46 0.63 2.10Laus Pisonis 261 16 4 6.13 1.53 7.66 Persius 650 6 6 0.92 0.92 1.85 Ilias Latina 1070 20 8 1.87 .75 2.62 Apocolocyntosis Divi Claudi 49 6 1 12.24 2.04 14.29 Statius, Thebais 1 720 5 3 .69 .42 1.11 Statius, Thebais 2 743 8 4 1.08 .54 1.62 Statius, Thebais 3 721 2 1 .28 .14 .42 Juvenal, Satires 1-5 990 14 1 1.41 .20 1.61 Calpurnius, Eclogue 1 94 8 1 8.51 1.06 9.57 Calpurnius, Eclogue 2 100 8 3 8.00 3.00 11.00 Calpurnius, Eclogue 3 98 3 0 3.06 0 3.06 Calpurnius, Eclogue 4 169 7 0 4.14 0 4.14 Calpurnius, Eclogue 5 120 5 1 4.17 .83 5.00 Calpurnius, Eclogue 6 92 2 0 2.17 0 2.17 Calpurnius, Eclogue 7 84 4 0 4.76 0 4.76 Calpurnius, Eclogues TOTAL 757 37 5 4.89 .66 5.55