[5] The definition quoted above is in an obscure Latin textbook published in England in 1652, which never sold well and of which only four copies are extant today.
He allows participles as the verb in the middle (71, 182), but he does not include the periphrastic verbal form in 271: Atque futurorum gestura est turma nepotum.
Table 1 gives the totals for the golden and silver lines in classical poetry, listed in approximate chronological order from Catullus to Statius.
Other short poems that are not included on the tables, such as the Copa, Moretum, Lydia, and Einsiedeln Eclogues, have rather high combined percentages between 3.45 and 5.26.
Heikkinen[15] makes the case that the golden line was a conscious feature of classical Latin pastoral poetry, as shown by the high percentages in Vergil's, Calpurnius's, and Nemesianus's Eclogues.
Figurative poetry, such as that of Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius and, in Carolingian times, that of Hrabanus Maurus, rarely uses the golden line.
The fact that Caelius Sedulius, Aldhelm, and the Hisperica Famina have a pronounced preference for the form has long been noted.
These skewed percentages may indicate that the golden line is an ideal that is artfully strived for but which cannot be continuously realized over the course of a long epic.
Another possible explanation for the diminished use of golden lines within an author's work (observed already in Virgil; see Table 1) is that, with time, poets may gradually free themselves from the constraints of the form.
The large number of golden lines in poetry from the sixth through ninth centuries could reflect the combination of several trends, such as the preference for hyperbaton and the growing popularity of leonine rhymes.
Even if the golden line was not a conscious poetic conceit in the classical or medieval period, it might have some utility today as a term of analysis in discussing such poetry.
The first person to mention the golden line may be the grammarian Diomedes Grammaticus, in a list of types of Latin hexameters in his Ars grammatica.
However, it is difficult to understand what "conjoin a fluent and contiguous phrase" ( volubilem et cohaerentem continuant dictionem) means and how exactly it applies to this verse.
None of the other ancient metricians use the term teres versus or κυκλοτερεῖς (the Greek form that Diomedes mentions as its equivalent).
The only other commentator to mention the teres versus was the Renaissance scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558), who did not seem to understand Diomedes.
In his book Poetices Libri Septem (1964 Stuttgart facsimile reprint of the 1561 Lyon edition, p. 71-72, text in Mayer), Scaliger offers a muddled attempt at understanding Diomedes.
Scaliger's use of this example is evidence that someone between Diomedes and him took the term teres versus to be similar to a modern golden line.
The earliest is the 1484 De arte metrificandi of Jacob Wimpfeling: And two years later the Ars Versificandi of Conrad Celtes followed Wimpfeling: In 1512 Johannes Despauterius quoted Celtis's remarks verbatim in his Ars versificatoria in the section De componendis carminibus praecepta generalia and then more narrowly defined excellence in hexameters in the section De carmine elegiaco: Despauterius here combines Bede's two rules into one general precept of elegance: Two adjectives should be placed before two substantives, the first agreeing with the first.
The golden line may originally have been the teres versus of Diomedes, but this fact does not legitimate its use as a critical term today.
No commentators today count up versus inlibati, iniuges, quinquipartes, or any of the other bizarre forms assembled by Diomedes.
Today major works and commentaries on canonical poets in Latin and Greek discuss them in light of the golden line, and occasionally even the silver line: Neil Hopkinson's Callimachus, William Anderson's Metamorphoses, Richard Thomas's Georgics, Alan Cameron's Claudian, Andy Orchard's Aldhelm.
Most of these critics assume or imply that golden lines were deliberate figures, practiced since Hellenistic times and artfully contrived and composed by the poets in question.
This process of scouring the canonical texts for such special verse forms is entirely in the spirit of the ancient lists of Servius, Victorinus, and Diomedes Grammaticus.
Thus, in a curious way, the arcane wordplay that fascinated ancient grammarians has—in the English-speaking world, at least—come again to play a role in interpreting and explicating the central works of the classical canon.