On the Role of Accent in Ancient Greek Poetry

In this paper, I set out to study the distribution of some accentual types of two different word shapes in the Homeric hexameter: iambs and iambic ending words and dactyls and dactylic ending words. Following Nagy 2000 and 2010 and David 2006, I start from the idea that accent has a role in Ancient Greek poetry, which has been corroborated in Abritta 2015 by studying the distribution of trochaic ending words. In the sections corresponding to each word shape, after a statistical consideration of the distribution, I examine some literary uses of accentual types, which the poet places in the line apparently in order to produce a certain effect on the audience. The article is conceived as a first approximation to the study of accentual distribution in Ancient Greek poetry.