Metra

To the Greeks, ‘metre’ was a pattern to which the words could naturally be adapted, for there was a fairly clear distinction between long and short syllables in the language. So the Homeric epic could easily be couched in a series of long-short-short patterns (with occasional variations such as long-long), to make a hexameter. The Romans greatly admired Greek poetry, so Classical Latin writers aped this metrical system, despite Latin being less naturally dragooned into such a format. Accordingly, Virgil’s Aeneid was written in hexameters, and many other Greek metrical patterns were imitated by Catullus, Horace and the other poets of the ‘Golden Age’. Yet popular verse was different, and...