Concept
Dactylic hexameter
Overview
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 δάκτυλος (dáktulos), "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 ἕξ (héx), "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:
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Verily the theologians take this meaning otherwise than do the poets: but, because my intention here is to follow the way of the poets, I shall take the Allegorical sense according as it is used by the poets. The third sense is termed Moral; and this is that which the readers ought intently to search for in books, for their own advantage and for that of their descendants; as one can espy in the Gospel, when Christ…
Dante Alighieri, The Banquet
States what Dactylic hexameter is; the author is tied to Dactylic hexameter in the knowledge graph.
e., it may be either long or short (̲◡). [C] The name “dactyl” or “finger” (Greek δάκτυλος) indicates that, like a finger, it consists of one long and two short members. The dactylic (or, as it is also called, the heroic) hexameter is too long to be read in one breathing, so it is divided into two, sometimes into three parts, and the division is called a _caesura_, i. e., a cut or incision. This division of the line…
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe and Schiller's Xenions
States what Dactylic hexameter is; names Dactylic hexameter twice.
The poems of Homer have the most perfect metre, the hexameter, which is also called heroic. It is called hexameter because each line has six feet: one of these is of two long syllables, called spondee; the other, of three syllables, one long and two short, which is called dactyl. Both are isochronic. These in interchangeable order fill out the hexameter verse. It is called heroic because in it the deeds of the…
Plutarch, Complete Works of Plutarch — Volume 3
States what Dactylic hexameter is.
Philosophers who discussed Dactylic hexameter
Related ideas
- Greek language
- Homer
- Hesiod
- Ars Poetica (Horace)
- Hungarian language
- Satires (Juvenal)
- Latin
- Latin literature
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Odyssey
- Works and Days
- De rerum natura
- Theogony
- Divine Comedy
- Lucretius
- Aeneid
- Ovid
- Catullus
- Cicero
- Friedrich Schiller
- Juvenal
- Lithuanian language
- Dante Alighieri
- Metamorphoses
Place in the tradition
Part of Divine command theory.