Where Cicero's clausulae come from: a pre-registered word-group shuffle test on Cicero, Caesar, Sallust and Livy

Research note (version 1.0) on the prose rhythm of Cicero, compared with Caesar, Sallust and Livy. Cicero's speeches prefer a small set of sentence endings (the "artistic" clausulae: cretic + trochee, double cretic, double trochee, hypodochmiac) and avoid spondaic and heroic endings, as known from Cicero himself, from Zielinski and from the automatic counts of Keeline and Kirby (2019). This note asks whether the preference comes from the words Cicero chose or from the order in which he placed them. Each text is compared with itself after the word groups of every sentence have been shuffled: the words stay the same, only their order changes. The test was registered in writing, with its criteria and their readings, before any measurement on prose (20 October 2026), and run once. Vowel quantities are taken as certain only where every analysis of a word form agrees; on hexameters the scansion errs on 0.69% of the syllables it decides. With Keeline and Kirby's conventions it reproduces their published figures for Cicero's speeches within the tolerances fixed in advance. Results: the speeches have 84.4% artistic clausulae, against 71.6% in the letters to Atticus, 62.1% in Caesar, 44.0% in Sallust and 36.7% in Livy. Shuffling the word groups lowers the artistic clausulae of the speeches by 31% and multiplies their spondaic and heroic endings by 2.7; in Caesar the artistic clausulae fall by 7%. Cicero's preference lies in the arrangement of his words, to a degree that is his own. Exploratorily, Sallust and Livy show the opposite sign: their arrangement avoids the Ciceronian endings. The method was introduced for Greek prose in a preprint on the Demosthenic corpus (doi:10.5281/zenodo.23442934). A fuller paper on the method, covering Greek and Latin, will follow as a new version of this record. Files: the note (pdf) and the counts for every work and variant (CSV). Texts: Perseus canonical Latin corpus (public). Contact: [email protected]