stichometry

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sti·chom·e·try

 (stĭ-kŏm′ĭ-trē)
n.
The division of a prose piece into lines of fixed length or into lines whose lengths correspond to the natural divisions of sense, as in manuscripts written before the adoption of punctuation.

[Greek stikhos, stich; see steigh- in Indo-European roots + -metry.]

stich′o·met′ric (stĭk′ə-mĕt′rĭk) adj.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

stichometry

(stɪˈkɒmɪtrɪ)
n
(Poetry) the practice of writing out a prose text in lines that correspond to the sense units and indicate the phrasal rhythms
[C18: from Late Greek stikhometria. See stich, -metry]
stichometric, ˌstichoˈmetrical adj
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

stichometry

the practice of expressing the successive ideas in a prose composition in single lines corresponding to natural cadences or sense divisions. — stichometric, stichometrical, adj.
See also: Language Style
-Ologies & -Isms. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
Translations
Stichometrie
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References in periodicals archive
In a recent edition of Apeiron, Jay Kennedy published 'Plato's Forms, Pythagorean Mathematics and Stichometry'.
A further problem in assessing Kennedy's stichometry is that it is not entirely clear which thesis or theses are being advanced.
The claim that stichometry confirms that our versions of Plato's texts are in good order, when it needs to assume that they are in good order to begin with, also looks distinctly circular.
Kennedy's application of stichometry to the pseudo-Platonic works, although interesting, does not prove a great deal.
As the Critias is unfinished, and we have no trace of the Hermocrates, the claim might then be that without being able to determine the length of the work, we cannot do the stichometry. However, as everyone since antiquity has taken the Timaeus as a whole, and there are abundant indications in its text that it should be taken as a whole, this would be a counsel of despair.
Surely Proclus, who wrote a very detailed commentary on the Timaeus and dealt with the musical aspects in great detail, would have something to say about stichometry and musical structure.
On the evidence presented in Kennedy's first paper, though, I am unconvinced that there is any significant result that comes from applying stichometry to Plato.
Several manuscripts of the Byzantine Renaissance (ninth-tenth centuries) have preserved traces of prose stichometry: marginal notation for two of Plato's dialogues, total amount of lines in acrophonetic notation for the speeches of Isocrates and Demosthenes.
The lists of apocrypha from ancient sources, which James inserted in the body of his book (the Decretum Gelasianum, the seventh-century List of the Sixty Books, and the Stichometry of Nicephorus), have been transposed to follow the Bibliography and modernized (pp.
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