| A | B |
|---|
| Apostrophe | address to some person or thing not present, usually for emotion al effect |
| Assonance | repetition of vowel or syllable sounds in successive words, for musical (and sometimes onomatopoetic) effect |
| Asydeton | omission of conjunctions where one or more would ordinarily be expected in a series of words or phras es; often employed in connection with anaphora and underscoring the words in the series. |
| Bucolic Diaeresis | an emphatic pause between words between the fourth and fifth feet, relatively uncommon in Vergil and generally employed to emphasize the word immediately preceding or following |
| Caesura | a pause between words occur ring within a metrical foot; the effect at the principal caesura in a line of verse (very often within the third foot, sometimes in both the second and fourth, in the dactylic hexameter) is sometimes to emphasize the word immediately preceding or following |
| Chiasmus | arrangement of words or phrases in an oppositional, ABBA order, often to emphasize some contrast or to create a word-picture |
| Dactyl | a metrical foot made up of one long syllable followed by two shorts; a se ries of dactyls in dactylic hexameter verse is sometimes employed to suggest rapid, abrupt, or violent action |
| Diaeresis | a pause between words co inciding with the end of a metrical foot, less common than caesura and sometimes employed to emphasize the word imme diately preceding or following |
| Diastole | lengthening of an ordinarily short vowel (and hence the syllable con taining it), usually when it occurs under the ictus and before a caesura; sometimes reflecting an archaic pronunciation |
| Ecphrasis | a digression from the main narrative but generally connecting to it thematically and sometimes describing a painting or other pictorial representation |
| Elision | suppression or contraction of a vowel (or a vowel plus -m) or diphthong at the end of a word before a word beginfling with a vowel or a diphthong (or with h- plus a vowel or diphthong); the phenomenon generally reflects actual speech patterns, and it is a factor in the metrical scansion of a line of verse, where it is occasionally employed to suggest rapid action or for some other special effect |
| Ellipsis | omission of one or more words necessary to the sense of a sentence but easily understood from the context; often a form of the verb sum or a speech verb |
| Enjambement | delay of the final word or phrase of a sentence (or clause) to the beginning of the following verse, to emphasize an idea or image or to create suspense |
| Framing | enclosure of a line of verse by placing two closely connected words, often a noun and modifying adjective, at the beginning and end |
| Golden Line | a form of interlocked word order (see below) in which a verb is positioned in the middle of the verse, with adjectives preceding and nouns following in symmetrical arrangement |
| Hendiadys | use of two nouns connected by a conjunction (or occasion ally a preposition), often instead of one modified noun expressing a single complex idea; the usual effect is to give equal prominence to an image that would ordinarily be subordinated, especially some quality of a person or thing |
| Hiatus | lack of elision where two syllables would ordinarily be elided, usually employed for emphasis at the end of a clause |
| Hyperbaton | separation of words that logically belong together, such as noun adjective pairs, often for emphasis or to create a word-picture |
| Hyperbole | emphatic overstatement of a point or a description |
| Hypermetric Line | line of verse with an extra syllable at the end which elides with the first syllable of the following verse |
| Hysteron Proteron | description of events in an order reversing their logical sequence |
| Ictus | the verse accent, or beat, occur ring on the first syllable of each foot in the dactylic hexameter; when the ictus coin cides with the normal word accent, the rhythm flows more smoothly and rapidly, and when the two conflict (i.e., occur on different syllables) there is a more disjointed effect; assonance and other sound effects can be accentuated by carefully arranging words so that selected syllables fall under the ictus |
| Interlocked Word Order (Synchysis) | arrangement of related pairs of words in an alternating ABAB pattern (e.g., adj. A / adj. B! noun A I noun B), often emphasizing the close connection between two thoughts or images |
| Irony | the use of language with a meaning opposite that suggested by the context |
| Litotes | a form of deliberate under statement, generally with a softening effect and often achieved through describing one quality by denying its opposite |
| Metaphor | an implied comparison, using one word for another that it suggests, usually with a visual effect |
| Metonymy | a type of imagery in which one word, generally a noun, is employed to suggest another with which it is closely related |
| Onomatopoeia | use of words whose sounds suggest their meaning or the general meaning of their immediate context |
| Oxymoron | use of seemingly contradictory words within the same phrase or clause |
| Personification | a type of imagery by which human traits are attributed to plants, animals, inanimate objects, or abstract ideas |
| Pleonasm | a purposefully redundant description, where more words are employed than needed |
| Polyptoton | repetition of a key word with changes in form, e.g., a noun with different case endings |
| Polysyndeton | use of a greater number of conjunctions than usual or necessary, often to emphasize the elements in a series |
| Praeteritio | suggesting that one will pass over a topic and then going on to mention it |
| Prolepsis | attribution of some characteristic to a person or thing before it is logically appropriate, especially application of a quality to a noun before the action of the verb has resulted in that quality |
| Prosopopoeia | representation of an absent or dead person, or even something inanimate, as speaking or acting |
| Rhetorical Question | a question, often exclamatory or expressing indignation, that is posed by a speaker but in fact expects no answer |
| Simile | an explicit comparison (often introduced by ut, velut, quails, ceu, or si mills) between one person or thing and another, the latter generally something more familiar to the reader (frequently a scene from nature) and thus more eas ily visualized; some of Vergil’s similes are quite brief while others are extended and involve numerous and frequently complex points of comparison |
| Spondee | a metrical foot made up of two long syllables; a series of these in a dactylic hexameter line is sometimes used for emphasis or to suggest slow or ponderous or solemn action |
| Syncope | omission of a short, unaccented vowel, reflecting contractions common in daily speech and often employed in poetry for metrical convenience |
| Synecdoche | a type of metonymy in which a part is named in place of an en tire object, or a material for a thing made of that material, or an individual in place of a class |
| Synizesis | the running together or contraction of two vowels into a single syllable, often treating the vowels i and u as consonants |
| Systole | shortening of a vowel which was ordinarily long, sometimes reflecting an archaic pronunciation, and not ordinarily occurring when the syllable containing the vowel was under the ictus |
| Tmesis | separation of a compound word into its constituent parts, generally for metrical convenience |
| Transferred Epithet | application of an adjective to one noun when it properly applies to another, often involving personification and focusing special attention on the modified noun |
| Tricolon Crescens | a climactic series of three (or more) examples or illustrations, each (or at least the last) more fully developed or more intense than the preceding |
| Word-Picture | a type of imagery in which the words of a phrase are arranged in an order that visually suggests the image being described |
| Zeugma | use of a single word with a pair of others (e.g., a verb with two objects, an adjective with two nouns), when it logically applies to only one of them or applies to them both, but in two quite different ways |
