116v

[Hubert Dale]

I had an idea recently that we could advance to some success in the following way - we write down the possible variants and then see which combinations thereof form a valid grammatical phrase together. For example "multos" is a word form, likewise "te" is also a word form (ablative or accusative, if I remember correctly). Those various word forms should form the puzzle together consistently. In other words, these words should be analyzed not isolated, but in a single grammatical context.

I'm coming characteristically late to the party, but as well as being a grammatical phrase you should probably be looking for something which fits metrically too.  

Philip Neal noted on the mailing list years back that the first half of line 1 is, metrically, the first part of a Latin hexameter.  I'm pretty sure the rest is meant to be too.  A reading like:

anchiton ola dabas multos te carcere portas

gives a proper metrical hexameter.  I'm not saying this means this is the correct reading, but it's certainly encouraging.

If this line is meant to be a hexameter, the metre gives us some constraints on possible readings.  For example, the 'o' of 'anchiton' has to be short to give the initial dactyl, which means that any attempt to connect it with Greek 'chiton', which has a long 'o', can't be right.  It also means the the two syllables before 'portas' have to be short, so you shouldn't have anything like 'cerae' which has a long second syllable.

Apologies if I'm repeating what someone else has already pointed out, but I've looked through all 28 pages of this thread and couldn't obviously see it

A propos, Nick Pelling recently posted something about the 'Cisiojanus' mnemonic, which was new to me:

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which is a mixture of identifiable Latin words and fragments of others joined together in...a Latin hexameter.