Dactylic hexameter is a form of meter commonly used in both Ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The best known use is for epic poems, such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid, but it was also used for didactic and pastoral poetry in both languages, and in Latin for satire. It is also combined with a dactylic pentameter to make elegiac couplets, used in Greek for elegies and epigrams, and, especially in Latin, for love poetry.
The name dactylic is derived from Greek (), "finger", referring to the basic rhythm of one long and two short syllables (resembling the long and two short bones of a finger). Hexameter comes from Greek (), "six", because the line consists of six feet. The first five feet contain either a dactyl (a long and two short syllables, written – ᴗ ᴗ) or a spondee (two long syllables, written – –). The last foot contains either a spondee or a long syllable followed by one short syllable, a trochee (– ᴗ). The six feet and their variation is symbolically represented below:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 – ᴗ ᴗ | – ᴗ ᴗ | – ᴗ ᴗ | – ᴗ ᴗ | – ᴗ ᴗ | – x
Genre
The hexameter is traditionally associated with classical epic poetry in both Greek and Latin. Consequently, it has been considered to be the grand style of Western classical poetry. Examples of epics in hexameter are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica, Virgil's Aeneid, Lucan's Pharsalia, Valerius Flaccus's Argonautica, and Statius's Thebaid.
The meter also had a wide use outside of epic. Greek works in dactylic hexameter include Hesiod's didactic Works and Days and Theogony, some of Theocritus's Idylls, and Callimachus's hymns. In Latin famous works include Lucretius's philosophical , Virgil's pastoral Eclogues, the same author's Georgics (a work on farming), Ovid's Metamorphoses (a collection of mythological stories), book 10 of Columella's manual on agriculture, the Astronomica (a work on astrology attributed to Marcus Manilius), as well as satirical works of Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Later the hexameter continued to be used in Christian times, for example in the of the 5th-century Irish poet Sedulius and Bernard of Cluny's 12th-century satire among many others.
Dactylic hexameters were also often paired with dactylic pentameters to make a form known as an elegiac couplet.. Elegiac couplets were used in Greek for funeral elegies, and poems on war, politics, love, and other themes. In Latin they were used for love poetry by Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, for Ovid's letters from exile, and for many of the epigrams of Catullus and Martial.
Structure
Dactylic hexameter poetry consists of lines, which are divided into feet and further divided into syllables.
Feet
A hexameter verse contains six feet. The first five feet can be either a dactyl or a spondee Because Latin is much richer in long syllables than Greek, spondaic feet are more common in Latin hexameter. In both Greek and Latin hexameter the fifth foot is usually a dactyl, and a spondee is also rare in the third foot in Greek hexameter. The sixth foot can be filled by either a trochee or a spondee. Thus a dactylic hexameter line is scanned as follows:
— ᴗ ᴗ | — ᴗ ᴗ | — ᴗ ᴗ | — ᴗ ᴗ | — ᴗ ᴗ | — ×
An example of this in Latin is the first line of Virgil's Aeneid:
"I sing of arms, and of the man who first from the shores of Troy ..."
The scansion is generally marked as follows, by placing long and short marks above the central vowel of each syllable: {| style="text-align:center;" |- | — ᴗ ᴗ || || — ᴗ ᴗ || || — — || || — — || || — ᴗ ᴗ || || — — |- | ar ma vi || || rum que ca || || nō Troi || || ae quī || || prī mus ab || || ō rīs |- | dactyl || || dactyl || || spondee || || spondee || || dactyl || || spondee
In dactylic verse, short syllables always come in pairs, so words such as "soldiers" or "more easily" cannot be used in a hexameter, although the substitutes "warrior" and "easier" could be.
Syllables
Unlike English verse, which is based on stress, ancient Greek and Latin poetry is based on the length, i.e. relative duration, of a syllable. In scansion only the sounds are meaningful, and word boundaries do not matter.
In Greek, a long syllable is called () and a short syllable is called ().Liddell, Scott, Jones, Greek Lexicon s.v. συλλαβή . In Latin the terms are and .Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary, s.v. syllaba .
Greek
In Greek, a syllable is long if it contains a long vowel, a diphthong, or two consonants follow the vowel(s) of the syllable. That is to say, a syllable with a short vowel is scanned as long as it contains a long vowel, a diphthong, or if it is closed; and a syllable is closed only if it ends with a consonant, otherwise it is open.
For example, all syllables in , , and are long. However, there are exceptions to the rules mentioned above.
Latin
In Latin, a syllable is long (by nature) if it contains a long vowel or a diphthong and long (by position) if it contains a short vowel followed by two consonants, even if these are in different words.. For example, all syllables in and are long by nature, whereas , , , and in , are long by position.
However, when a liquid — l or r — follows a plosive, a syllable containing a short vowel may remain short by position. For example, could be scanned either as having a short first syllable or as having a long first syllable .
In scansion the letter h is ignored, and qu counts as a single consonant. So, for example in the phrase the syllable et remains short, and in the word the first syllable remains short too.
The semiconsonantal i and u are scanned as consonants. For example, in and , i is considered a consonant, pronounced like the English y. Thus has three syllables and has two. But, in the first I is a vowel and forms a separate syllable. Additionally, an i between two or more vowels stands almost without exception for a double consonant; so, for example , standing for has two syllables.
In some editions of Latin texts the consonant v is written as u, in which case u is also often consonantal. This can sometimes cause ambiguity; e.g., in the word (= ) "he rolls" the second u is a consonant, but in (= ) "he wanted" the second u is a vowel.
Elision
In Latin, when a word ends in a vowel or -m and is followed by a word starting with a vowel or h, the last vowel is usually suppressed or elided. For example, .
In Greek, short vowels elide freely; however, long vowels are not elided, though they may be shortened in some cases.: E.g. ()
In modern Greek writing the elision is shown by an apostrophe. For example:
The Greek style of not eliding a long vowel is sometimes imitated in Latin for special effect, for example, "with womanly wailing" (Aen. 9.477).Raven (1965), p. 101.
When a vowel is elided, it does not count in the scansion. So, for the purposes of scansion, has four syllables.
Caesura
A caesura is a word break in the middle of a foot or metron. In Greek hexameter there is a caesura after i) the first syllable of the 3rd foot, a strong or masculine caesura, ii) the second syllable of a dactyl in the 3rd foot, a weak or feminine caesura, or iii) the first syllable of the 4th foot; the first two being more common than the last. In Latin hexameter the weak caesura is rarer than in Greek hexameter. On the one hand, in Virgil the strong caesura is found in ca. 85% of the time.
An example of a weak caesura can be found from the first line of Homer's Odyssey:
"Tell me, Muse, of the man of many wiles, who very much"
And an example of a strong caesura follows on the next line of the Odyssey:
"wandered, after having sacked the sacred citadel of Troy."
In Latin (but not in Greek, as the above example shows), a feminine caesura in the 3rd foot is usually accompanied with masculine caesuras in the 2nd and especially in the 4th feet:
"You are bidding me, o queen, to renew an unspeakable sorrow"
Sometimes caesuras in the 2nd and 4th feet of a line make do, and there is no caesura in the 3rd foot. For example:
"then from his high couch Father Aeneas began as follows"
In Greek
The hexameter was first used by early Greek poets of the oral tradition, and the most complete extant examples of their works are the Iliad and the Odyssey, which influenced the authors of all later classical epics that survive today. Early epic poetry was also accompanied by music, and pitch changes associated with the accented Greek must have highlighted the melody, though the exact mechanism is still a topic of discussion.Cf. Alan Shaw's 1997 essay Some Questions on Greek Poetry and Music. Electronic Book Review. 1 March 1997. Retrieved 19 May 2017. Archived page (January 25, 2022)
The first line of Homer's Iliad provides an example:
"Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilles"
Dividing the line into metrical units or feet it can be scanned as follows:
(-deō is one syllable) — ∪ ∪ | — ∪ ∪ | — — | — ∪ ∪ | — ∪ ∪ | — —
This line also includes a masculine caesura after , a break that separates the line into two parts. Homer employs a feminine caesura more commonly than later writers. An example occurs in Iliad 1.5:
"... and every bird; and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled"
— — | — ∪ ∪ | — ∪, ∪ | — ∪ ∪ | — ∪ ∪ | — —
Homer's hexameters contain a higher proportion of dactyls than later hexameter poetry. They are also characterized by a laxer following of verse principles than later epicists almost invariably adhered to. For example, Homer allows spondaic fifth feet (albeit not often), whereas many later authors do not.
Homer also altered the forms of words to allow them to fit the hexameter, typically by using a dialectal form: ptolis is an epic form used instead of the Attic polis as necessary for the meter. Proper names sometimes take forms to fit the meter, for example Pouludamas instead of the metrically unviable Poludamas.
Some lines require a knowledge of the digamma for their scansion, e.g. Iliad 1.108:
"you have not yet spoken a good word nor brought one to pass"
— — | — ∪ ∪ | — — | — ∪ ∪ | — ∪ ∪ | — —
Here the word (epos) was originally (wepos) in Ionian; the digamma, later lost, lengthened the last syllable of the preceding (eipas) and removed the apparent defect in the meter. A digamma also saved the hiatus in the third foot. This example demonstrates the oral tradition of the Homeric epics that flourished before they were written down sometime in the 7th century BC.
Most of the later rules of hexameter composition have their origins in the methods and practices of Homer.
In Latin
The dactylic hexameter was adapted from Greek to Latin. Though the metre was taken from Greek unaltered, the Latin language has a higher proportion of long syllables than Greek, and so it is by nature more spondaic. Additionally, the Roman poets did not avoid the weak caesura in the fourth foot as much as the Greeks did.
Ennius
The earliest example of hexameter in Latin poetry is the panegyric history of Rome, Annales, by Ennius, establishing a standard for later Latin epics. Ennius experimented with different kinds of lines, for example, lines with five dactyls:
Ennius ap. Prisc. p. 842 P. (Ann. v. 452 Vahl.) "Then the trumpet with terrifying sound went 'taratantara!'"
or lines consisting entirely of spondees:
Ennius, Annales 1.31. "To him replied the king of Alba Longa"
lines without a caesura:
Ennius, Varia 14V. "With scattered long spears the plain gleams and bristles"
lines ending in a one-syllable word or in words of more than three syllables:
Ennius Annales 370. "A single man, by delaying, restored the situation for us."
Ennius, Annales 194–5. "I do not demand gold for myself nor should you give me a price: not buying and selling war, but waging it"
or even lines starting with two short syllables: Ennius, Varia 42V. | u u – | – – | –, u u | – – | – u u | – – "the blacktail, the rainbow wrasse, the bird wrasse, and the maigre" (kinds of fish)