https://classicalstudies.org/scs-blog/kenneth-mayer/blog-golden-line%E2%80%94-classroom-canon page 1 Blog: The Golden Line—From Classroom to Canon By Kenneth Mayer | Nov 13, 2017 New ideas customarily enter the classroom in a kind of scholarly trickle-down, from the university to daily educational practice. Think of the New Criticism of the 1950s, social history, or backward design. The phenomenon in Latin versification known as the “golden line” represents a striking example of the reverse: an idea generated in the classroom and resisted by the academy for decades, if not centuries, before becoming mainstream in erudite classical scholarship. The term is first attested in 1612. The earliest citations follow a clear and consistent definition: two adjectives and two corresponding nouns, separated by a verb in balanced symmetry: mollia securae peragebant otia gentes ("carefree people lived lives of easy leisure, Ovid Met. 1.100, a commonly quoted example). 1 Producing such lines was a staple of 17 th to 19 th century British pedagogy, which heavily emphasized Latin verse composition. Early citations show that teachers expected students to churn out golden lines in rote daily exercises and competitions. And rote is the word: a three-page 1730 dictionary entry on hexameter is mostly devoted to six tables for generating hexameters. The tables date back at least to 1677, and were later used in the famous Eureka Machine that typed out random Latin hexameters (Peter 1677, Baldwin 2012). The golden line was an exercise to get beginners composing Latin hexameters, and almost all educated writers from 1600 to 1890 regarded it as such. Throughout this period, university dons do not refer to the golden line in print. But when mandatory verse composition began to wane in the late 19th century, authors of school texts started to notice and praise them. T.E. Page, in one of his widely-used commentaries, says "some of the finest effects in Virgil owe much to the same device" (Page 1895, 58). Winbolt, who wrote extensively about the golden line in his verse composition manual, points out that the device is "used sparingly by Virgil, and only in solemn or exalted passages … In Lucan, Statius, and Claudian golden lines are cheap as pewter" (Winbolt 1900, 88). By the 1960s, enthusiasm for the device would reach beyond secondary schools and school commentaries. Senior scholars in Britain and America began to take notice of the construction in their textual criticism and scholarly commentaries. L.P. Wilkinson’s 1963 book Golden Latin Artistry treated the golden line at length and brought it to the attention of scholars across the world. That book and W. F. Jackson Knight’s 1944 Roman Vergil were points of reference for scholars in 1 Page images of early citations are available here. Figure 1: The epigrammist John Owens points out his own golden line in 1612. Owen, J. 1612. Epigrammatum Ioannis Owen : Libri Tres, Ad Henricum, Principem Cambriae Duo, Ad Carolum Eboracensem Unus. 1st ed. London: Ex Offcina N. De Quercubus [i.e. Okes]; sumptibus Figure 2 Charles Hoole, A new discovery of the old art of teaching schoole; in four small treatises. London: J. T. for A. Crook.p. 201.