Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Book 9, chapter 5, section 90

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[90] For a large proportion of feet are formed by the connexion or separation of words, which is the reason why several different verses can be made out of the same words: for example, I remember that a poet of no small distinction writing the following line:

Astra tenet caelum, mare classes, area messem,
¹

a line which, if the order of the words be reversed, becomes a Sotadean; again, the following Sotadean, if reversed, reads as as an iambic trimeter:

caput exeruit mobile pinus repelita.
²

Feet therefore should be mixed,

1 “The heaven holds the stars, the sea the fleets, and the threshing-floor the harvest.” messem area, classes mare, caelum tenet astra is identical in scansion with the Sotadean which follows, save that it opens with a spondee instead of an anapaest.

2 The sense is uncertain. It appears to refer to a pine beam or trunk floating half-submerged. “The pine-beam caught afresh put forth its nimble head.”

Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.

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