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After the recent fall of the Capital to the Latin invaders the Empire was in dire need of an identity boost to bring the discouraged population together. With the Empire having already become homogenised through the eating away of the non-hellenophone territories by the Turks in the east and the Latin crusaders in the west, the attention of the Roman elites has been directed towards the common cultural, linguistic and philosophical tradition they've shared with the Hellenes*, resulting in a period sometimes known as the Third Sophistic, a cultural reflection of the wider Komnenian restoration of the Empire.
One of the consequences of the said movement was an increased interest towards the Greek poetical and metrical tradition of the past. More and more poets would start trying their hand at writing quantitative poems, though it's important to mention that those poems wouldn't be acoustically recognisable as poems due to the phonetic changes in the language.
The middle and late Byzantine reception of the Ancient Greek tradition has also modified some of the metrical rules in turn creating its own separate system that was largely based on the orthography:
— open syllables containing diphthongs as well as the vowels ω η would always be seen as being long,
— open syllables containing the vowels ε ο would always be seen as being short
— open syllables containing the vowels α ι υ would change their quantity depending on needs of the meter
— closed syllables would always be seen as being long
It's quite interesting that fuelled by the same sentiment of willing to differentiate from the Catholic "others" the very same poetic tradition would also resurface half-millennium later, yet this time on the Ukrainian ground.
As described in his Грамматíки Славе́нскиѧ пра́вилное Сѵ́нтагма by Meletius Smotrytsky the vowels and diphtongs of the Slavonic language (mirroring the Greek model) could be split into:
— long, и ѣ ѡ / оу ы є ꙗ ѧ / ий ѣй ѡй оуй ꙋй ый єй юй ꙗй ѧй
— short, е о / ей & ой
— dichrona (being able to be both long and short) а і ѵ / у ю / ай їй ѵй
Giving the Slavic hexameter following look when applied in practice:
Сарматски новорастныѧ моусы стопꙋ первꙋ,
Тщащꙋюсѧ Парнасъ въ обитель вѣчну заѧти,
Христе царю, прїими: и благоволивъ, тебе съ отцемъ
И духомъ свѧтымъ пѣти оучи рѡссїйскїи
Родъ нашь, чистыми мѣры славенски ѵмны...
with the following scansion:
—— —uu —— —— —uu —x
—uu —— —uu —— —— —x
—uu —— —— —uu —uu —x
—— —— —— —— —— —x
—— —— —— —— —— —x
*The Medieval Greek word "Hellene" has mostly been used only to refer to the pagan Greeks of the past as a way to differentiate them from the concurrent Christian Romaîoi, though this usage was definitely not without exceptions.
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