Rhythms of Ancient Poetry

The Hexameter (1)

I’m writing a book with this title, partly because the acronym RAP seems perfect for it. The book will explain in simple, aural, terms how ancient Greek and Latin poetic rhythms worked to make the poetry singable and memorable.

The most ancient classical verse is that of Homer’s epics (Iliad and Odyssey). When Homer sang around 700 BC, he composed in semi-improvised manner from formulaic elements, just like rap artists do. The system he used is called ‘dactylic hexameter’. Such names sound daunting to the non-specialist, so my aim in the book is to demystify them.

Stress and quantity

All ancient Greek metres were simply rhythmical systems to which words were composed and nearly always sung. The difference from English is that those rhythms were based not on stress but on the length of each syllable.

To explain: the basic rhythm of dactylic hexameter may be illustrated by the following English mnemonic (memory aid):

           Everyone knows that ‘Survive’ was sung by Gloria Gaynor

If you say this aloud in English, you could give it six equidistant stressed beats as follows (shown by accents on vowels and numbers above):

           1                  2                 3                    4              5          6

        Éveryone knóws that ‘Survíve’ was súng by Glória Gáynor

The Greek equivalent was not stressed like this. Instead, the syllables in those places would take double the time to enunciate as the other syllables, just as if they were set to music to the following rhythm:

So ancient metres are analysed by quantity - the duration of syllables - rather than stress.

The hexameter

The reason this line is called a hexameter is that it consists of six (hex in Greek) measures (metra). Each measure consists of either two equal long beats (♩  ♩ as in ‘was sung’), or a long beat followed by two short ones (♩ ♪ ♪ as in ‘Gloria’). One might mark the measures with a vertical line separating them:

The word ‘dactyl’ comes from the Greek for ‘finger’ (think of pterodacyls) and was used because the rhythm  ♩  ♪ ♪  was thought to be like the shape of a finger: one long section and two short ones. And just like a finger might be equally divided into two sections by the knuckle, a ‘contracted’ dactyl was ♩  ♩. That contracted form is always used as the last dactyl of the six in a hexameter.

Each measure, then, consists of a dactyl, either uncontracted ♩  ♪ ♪  or contracted ♩  ♩. Six of these in a row make the rhythm of hexameter verse. In ancient times the measure was called a ‘foot’ (relating to dance feet), so you may sometimes read that “a dactylic hexameter has six feet”.

From Greek to Latin - and English - verse

You now know the basic rhythmical nature of the dactylic hexameter. There are additional features to note when it is used in Greek and Latin verse. But armed with this knowledge you can declaim the first line of Virgil’s epic, the Aeneid. Virgil was a Roman poet of the 1^st century BC, and he emulated Homer when he composed his own epic in Latin. The opening line has exactly the same rhythm of the English line above:

     ( = Arms and the man I sing, who first came from the shores of Troy…)

When Dryden translated the Aeneid, he chose to do so in a different metre, that of the English iambic pentameter (which I will explain in another post). But he was conscious that the very opening words, arma virumque cano, could (and should) be heard in the same lofty dactylic metre: