Senecan Anapaests and Steps for Scansion

STEPS FOR SCANSION

1. Elision
a. Check for elisions.*
b. Double check (remember final vowel + m elides, and h does not count).
*Caveat: Interjections will never elide. This makes sense since you would not want to blur or drop out such an emphatic word. Thus in "O iniuste" and "Vae amicos" there is no elision.

2. Mark known metrical values such as the final iamb in iambic trimeter.

3. Long by position
a. Mark all syllables that are long by position, i.e. followed by two consonants (or double consonants x or z) that are pronounced separately. Qu (and sometimes gu and su) counts as one consonant. Sometimes sc and st are pronounced together and count as one (at the beginning of words, not elsewhere).
b. Double check and make sure that you did not mark a syllable long if it may be short or long because it is followed by a mute + a liquid (r/l): pl, cr, dr, tr, fl, ...

4. Long or short by nature
a. Mark all syllables that you know are long or short because they contain diphthongs (au, oe, ae always; eu, ei, ui sometimes), because you know the ending (e.g. long o dative and ablative singular, long e in doces), or because you know the stem vowels (e.g. the preposition a is a long a, and ab has a short a; the perfect stem of video has a long i, and the present stem has a short i.).
b. Double check that you did not mark them incorrectly.

5. Finishing up
a. Now you should have most of the syllables scanned without guessing. Usually you can scan the rest of the line simply by knowing the metrical pattern (e.g. iambic trimeter) and filling in the appropriate values to fit the meter.
-Look for complete feet and metra to help orient you in the line; mark the boundaries between metra if you can tell.
-Where there is one unmarked syllable, see if it must be long or must be short according to the meter.
-Where there are two or more unmarked syllables in a row, look at the context to see which feet they might belong to. Then you may be able to tell whether you have two shorts in place of a long or anceps.
b. If all else fails, when doing homework you may look up words in a dictionary that has long marks to see the lengths (e.g. manus"hand" has a short a, manes "ghosts" has a long a). At this time you should also double check any from #4 that you were not 100% sure about.

6. After all syllables are scanned, put in any foot or metra marks that you had not made yet. Then mark your major caesura by looking for a word break that corresponds with a sense break in an appropriate metrical position (e.g. in the second metron after the first half of the first foot or after the first half of the second foot of an iambic trimeter line).


ANAPAESTS

An anapaest is a foot of three syllables, short short long (uu-).

In anapaestic verse, anapaests may be substituted with a spondee (--) or a dactyl (-uu).

Typically anapaestic stanzas are dimeter (two metra of two feet each) or trimeter (3 metra of two feet each). We will be scanning dimeter, though some short lines are just one metron (two feet). The caesura usually goes in the middle of the dimeter, so it is technically a diaresis, pause at foot break.

Examples
sidera prono languida mundo
- u u - - || - u u - -
nox victa vagos contrahit ignes
- - u u - || - u u - -