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Arnav couldn't wait to attend football camp. He had been selected to join a special, two-week training session led by professional footballers from India and a
Porson's Law. Porson's Law, or Porson's Bridge, is a metrical law that applies to iambic trimeter, the main spoken metre of Greek tragedy. It does not apply to iambic trimeter in Greek comedy. It was formulated by Richard Porson in his critical edition of Euripides ' Hecuba in 1802. The law states that if a non-monosyllabic word ends on ...
An alternative hypothesis, supported by Devine and Stephens in their book The Prosody of Greek Speech, is that in certain contexts some long syllables in Greek had a longer duration than others, and this may have made them unsuitable for the anceps position of the third metron of a trimeter.
There are, as West observes, very few breaches of Porson's Law in extant Greek tragedy. When the manuscript tradition, therefore, transmits a line that breaches Porson's Law, this is taken as a reason for suspecting that it may be corrupt.
In the Latin equivalent of the iambic trimeter, the iambic senarius, Porson's law is not observed, and lines like the following which break Porson's law are perfectly possible: Lines like the following, where there is an apparent conflict between ictus and word-stress in the last metron, are also common: