The term alliteration was invented by the Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), in his dialogue Actius, to describe the practice common in Virgil, Lucretius, and other Roman writers of beginning words or syllables with the same consonant or vowel. He gives examples such as "the rocks were resounding with the salt-water" or "he recognised his friend Anchises" or "defended by a great force of men". Pontano also used the term alliteration to refer to repetition of letters in medial positions. Among other kinds, he mentions the frequent case when the last syllable of a word begins with the same consonant as the first syllable of the next word, as in "the rigid breastplate made of bronze" (Virgil). Since "x" is pronounced [ks], the phrase "the rocks were resounding with sea water" (Virgil) can also be considered an example of this kind. Alliteration was a prominent feature of Latin literature (in contrast to Greek), especially in poetry in the 3rd to 1st centuries BC, and continued to be used by some writers even in the Middle Ages. Definitions Scholars differ as to how alliteration should be defined. Some, such as Keith Maclennan (2017), suggest that the term alliteration should be used only of repeated sounds at the beginning of words, and assonance of sounds repeated in another context. Tracy Peck (1884) also gives examples only of word-initial alliteration. However, Pontano himself, who invented the term, used it also of the alliteration of medial consonants. The French scholars A. Cordier (1939) and Jules Marouzeau (1933) similarly define it as "the repetition, near or exact, of a phoneme or group of phonemes at the beginning of syllables (e.g. ) or at the beginning of words (e.g. ) nearby one another in the utterance." The German classicist August Ferdinand Naeke (1829) also accepted internal alliteration and cited examples such as "you've nearly broken the hinges of the door, you idiot!" (Plautus), in which the first F, though medial, clearly contributes to the effect of the whole. The Lucretius specialists Cyril Bailey (1947) and Margaret Deutsch (1939), on the other hand, give a slightly different definition. They define alliteration as the repetition of consonants (whether initial or medial), and assonance as the repetition of vowel sounds or of syllables. From the examples Bailey gives, such as , it is clear that he considered that consonants at the end of syllables and words could contribute to