Tempora mutantur

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, Latin for " Times change and we change in them." This hexameter is occupied as saying since the 16th century.

Before 1554 Caspar Huberinus extended the subject of Ovid:

A German translation added 1565 John Nas at:

The frame ... et nos in illis mutamur appeared a year later, at Andreas Gartner.

Matthias Borbonius dedicated in 1595 the fate of the Emperor Lothair I. the couplet:

The version tenses mutantur et nos in illis mutamur is prosodically incorrect: The length structure of the verse must be according to the first half of the third Versfußes (here - ntur of mutantur ) long; da- ntur of nature but is not long, lengthening by position length is necessary. A position length is when followed by a vowel at least two consonants: In this case, nos must follow mutantur so that connect to the - u the consonants r and n. , If it is connected with et, the position length is not guaranteed by - ntur why the verse does not in this case corresponds to the rules of prosody.

However, the strict adherence to these rules is not mandatory here, as the Zurich classical scholar Klaus Bartels explains: In classical Latin poetry ( is ) at this point - in elevation, before the caesura - quite now and then a short final syllable, which is deemed " stretched metric " applies. A " -r " in final position can be indeed really imagine stretched. A familiar example and a close parallel is the much-quoted Vergilvers ( Bucolica 10, 69): Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori. ( Love conquers all, give also we love; ed.) The standard work of Friedrich Crusius, Roman metrics, § 31, calls other classics sites.

Comparable are on the one hand, the motto of Ovid's " Metamorphoses " (" Transformations "), 15, 165 and 214ff. Omnia mutantur, " Everything changes ," on the other side of the figure corresponding contradictory in the case of late antiquity sentence in the late antique epic poet Corippus, locust 7, 91: Tempora permutas nec tu mutaris in illis, " The times you change, but you do not change yourself in them ."