Later Republican writers, such as Lucretius, Catullus and even Cicero, wrote their own compositions in the meter and it was at this time that many of the principles of Latin hexameter were firmly established, ones that would govern later writers such as Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Juvenal.

The verse form itself then was little changed as the quality of a poet's hexameter was judged against the standard set by Virgil and the other Augustan poets, a respect for literary precedent encompassed by the Latin word aemulatio.

Petrarch, for example, devoted much time to his Africa, a dactylic hexameter epic on Scipio Africanus, but this work was unappreciated in his time and remains little read today.

It was the first Latin poem to adopt the dactylic hexameter metre used in Greek epic and didactic poetry, leading it to become the standard metre for these genres in Latin poetry.

Hesiod's handling of the dactylic hexameter was not as masterful or fluent as Homer's and one modern scholar refers to his " hobnailed hexameters ".

According to Greek mythology, hexameter was invented by the god Hermes.

In the 17th century the iambic hexameter, also called alexandrine, was used as a substitution in the heroic couplet, and as one of the types of permissible lines in lyrical stanzas and the Pindaric odes of Cowley and Dryden.

In the late 18th century the hexameter was adapted to the Lithuanian language by Kristijonas Donelaitis.

In the second part of the 20th century hexameter was used in the longest ever poem, Savitri ( book ), written in English by Sri Aurobindo.

In dactylic hexameter of Classical Latin and Classical Greek, for example, each of the six feet making up the line was either a dactyl ( long-short-short ) or spondee ( long-long ), where a long syllable was literally one that took longer to pronounce than a short syllable: specifically, a syllable consisting of a long vowel or diphthong or followed by two consonants.

The Odyssey was written in a poetic dialect of Greek — a literary amalgam of Aeolic Greek, Ionic Greek, and other Ancient Greek dialects — and comprises 12, 110 lines of dactylic hexameter.

The Odyssey was written in dactylic hexameter.

Dactylic hexameter was the traditional meter of Greek epic poetry, the earliest extant examples of which are the works of Homer and Hesiod.

The word satura as used by Quintilian, however, was used to denote only Roman verse satire, a strict genre that imposed hexameter form, a narrower genre than what would be later intended as satire.

Quintilian famously said that satura, that is a satire in hexameter verses, was a literary genre of wholly Roman origin ( satura tota nostra est ).

The biographical tradition asserts that Virgil began the hexameter Eclogues ( or Bucolics ) in 42 BC and it is thought that the collection was published around 39 – 38 BC, although this is controversial.

The most important Classical meter as defined by the Alexandrian grammarians was the dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homeric poetry.

In Greek mythology, Enarete () or Aenarete (, Ainarete ), daughter of Deimachus, was the wife of Aeolus and ancestress of the Aeolians .< ref > Enarete is the form found in the manuscripts of Bibliotheca 1. 7. 1, which takes to be a misspelling of Aenarete, the form written in the scholia to Plato, Minos 315c, since Enarete cannot stand in a hexameter line and the Bibliotheca < nowiki >'</ nowiki > s primary source at this point is the epic Hesiodic Catalogue of Women.

He was able to compose in hexameter, hendecasyllable, Alcaic and Sapphic meters, to produce deeply researched and highly refined epic and polished impromptu pieces, and to treat a variety of themes with the dazzling rhetorical and poetic skill that inspired the support of his patrons and the emperor.

It was probably this Icarius whom Clement of Alexandria referred to as husband of Phanothea, a woman who was believed to have invented the hexameter.

She was said to have been the daughter of Apollo, his first priestess at Delphi, and the inventor of the hexameter verses, a type of poetic metre.

In the following example of Ennius's early Latin hexameter composition, metrical weight (" ictus ") falls on the first and last syllables of certabant ; the ictus is therefore opposed to the natural stress on the second syllable when the word is pronouned.

The tradition which ascribed to her the invention of the hexameter, was by no means uniform ; Pausanias, for example, as quoted above, calls her the first who used it, but in another passage he quotes an hexameter distich, which was ascribed to the Pleiades, who lived before Phemonoe: the traditions respecting the invention of the hexameter are collected by Fabricius.

His major extant work is his hexameter poem Phaenomena ( Φαινόμενα " Appearances "), the first half of which is a verse setting of a lost work of the same name by Eudoxus of Cnidus.

An example of dactylic meter is the first line of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Evangeline, which is in dactylic hexameter:

The Seasons ( Metai ) is the first classical piece of fiction written in the Lithuanian language, the first Lithuanian poem as well as the most successful Lithuanian hexameter piece to date.

The three short syllables in reliquias will not fit into dactylic hexameter because of the dactyl's limit of two short syllables, so the first syllable is lengthened by adding another l. However, this pronunciation was often not written with double ll, and may have been the normal way of pronouncing a word starting in rel-rather than a poetic modification.

Also in the 1st century AD, Leonidas of Alexandria created isopsephs, epigrams with equinumeral distichs, where the first hexameter and pentameter equal the next two verses in numerical value.

He was the first to introduce the hexameter into the Swedish language with his epic Hercules in 1658.

The metre of this poem is no less remarkable than its diction ; it is a dactylic hexameter in three sections, devoid of caesura, with tailed rhymes and a feminine leonine rhyme between the two first sections ; the verses are technically known as leonini cristati trilices dactylici, and are so difficult to construct in great numbers that the writer claims Divine inspiration ( the impulse and inflow of the Spirit of Wisdom and Understanding ) as the chief agency in the execution of so long an effort of this kind.

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 wherever it is necessary for the meter.

Iambic pentameter and dactylic hexameter were later used by a number of poets, including William Shakespeare and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, respectively.

* pyrrhic – two unstressed syllables together ( rare, usually used to end dactylic hexameter )

Different traditions and genres of poetry tend to use different meters, ranging from the Shakespearean iambic pentameter and the Homeric dactylic hexameter to the anapestic tetrameter used in many nursery rhymes.

Graves also argues that the names of the Ogham letters in the alphabet used in parts of Gaelic Ireland and Britain contained a calendar that contained the key to an ancient liturgy involving the human sacrifice of a sacred king, and, further, that these letter names concealed lines of Ancient Greek hexameter describing the goddess.

But this accuracy of diction is neglected by many of the subsequent writers, and particularly by the poets, amongst whom balnea is not uncommonly used in the plural number to signify the public baths, since the word balneae could not be introduced in a hexameter verse.

Longfellow used dactylic hexameter, imitated from Greek and Latin classics, though the choice was criticized.

Longfellow wrote in an obscure meter, Greek hexameter, and used medieval vocabulary.

Epithets are used because of the constraints of the dactylic hexameter ( i. e., it is convenient to have a stockpile of metrically fitting phrases to add to a name ) and because of the oral transmission of the poems ; they are mnemonic aids to the poet and the audience alike.

The hexameter is used in the Latin language and is sometimes considered unsuitable for Germanic languages because of the differences in prosody.

The hexameter would later be used by many other Swedish poets.