Dactylic hexameter
Dactylic hexameter is a form of meter used in Ancient Greek epic and didactic poetry as well as in epic, didactic, satirical, and pastoral Latin poetry.
Its name is derived from Greek δάκτυλος and ἕξ.
Dactylic hexameter consists of six feet. The first five feet contain either two long syllables, a spondee, or a long syllable followed by two short syllables, a dactyl. However, the last foot contains either a spondee or a long syllable followed by one short syllable, a trochee. The six feet and their variation is symbolically represented below:
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, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Lucan's Pharsalia, Valerius Flaccus's Argonautica, and Statius's Thebaid.
However, this meter 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 De rerum natura, Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, book 10 of Columella's manual on agriculture, 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 Carmen paschale of the 5th-century Irish poet Sedulius and Bernard of Cluny's 12th-century satire De contemptu mundi among many others.
Hexameters also form part of elegiac poetry in both languages, the elegiac couplet being a dactylic hexameter line paired with a dactylic pentameter line. This form of verse was used for love poetry by Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, for Ovid's letters from exile, and for many of the epigrams of 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. However, 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:Where "—" represents an accented syllable, "ᴗ" represents an unaccented syllable, "ᴗ ᴗ" represents either two soft syllables or one hard syllable, and in this case "×" represents 'anything goes'.
An example of this in Latin is the first line of Virgil's Aeneid:
The scansion is generally marked as follows, by placing long and short marks above the central vowel of each syllable:
In dactylic verse, short syllables always come in pairs, so words such as mīlitēs "soldiers" or facilius "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 συλλαβὴ μακρά and a short syllable is called συλλαβὴ βραχεῖα. In Latin the terms are syllaba longa and syllaba brevis.
Greek
In Greek, a syllable is long if it contains a long vowel, a diphthong, or two consonants follow the vowel 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 μήτηρ, οἰκτείρω, and φλόξ are long. However, there are exceptions to the rules mentioned above.
Latin
In Latin, a syllable is long if it contains a long vowel or a diphthong and long if it contains a short vowel followed by two consonants, even if these are in different words. For example, all syllables in Ae-nē-ās and au-rō are long by nature, whereas et, ter, tot, and vol in et terrīs, tot vol-ve-re 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, pa-trem could be scanned either as having a short first syllable pa-trem or as having a long first syllable pat-rem.
In scansion the letter h is ignored, and qu counts as a single consonant. So, for example in the phrase et horret the syllable et remains short, and in the word aqua the first syllable remains short too.
The semiconsonantal i and u are scanned as consonants. For example, in Iuppiter and iēcit, i is considered a consonant, pronounced like the English y. Thus Iup-pi-ter has three syllables and iē-cit has two. But, in I-ū-lius 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 a-io, standing for a-iio 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 uoluit "he rolls" the second u is a consonant, but in uoluit "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, poss Ītalia; Teucrōr āvertere, monstr horrendum.In Greek, short vowels elide freely; however, long vowels are not elided, though they may be shortened in some cases: E.g. Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος.
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, fēmineō ululātu "with womanly wailing".
When a vowel is elided, it does not count in the scansion. So, for the purposes of scansion, Iu-n ae-ter-num 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:
And an example of a strong caesura follows on the next line of Odyssey:
In Latin, a feminine caesura in the 3rd foot is usually accompanied with masculine caesuras in the 2nd and especially in the 4th feet:
Sometimes caesuras in the 2nd and 4th feet of a line make do, and there is no caesura in the 3rd foot. For example:
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.The first line of Homer's Iliad provides an example:
Dividing the line into metrical units or feet it can be scanned as follows:
This line also includes a masculine caesura after θεά, 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:
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, 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:
Here the word ἔπος was originally ϝέπος in Ionian; the digamma, later lost, lengthened the last syllable of the preceding εἶπας 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:or lines consisting entirely of spondees:
lines without a caesura:
lines ending in a one-syllable word or in words of more than three syllables:
or even lines starting with two short syllables:
However, most of these features were abandoned by later writers or used only occasionally for special effect.