Getting Inspired by Epic Hexameter

Ancient Greek drama and poetry was originally sung and accompanied by dance and music. Unfortunately a lot of this rhythm is lost in translation and transmission of texts to the modern day, but we do know quite a lot about it.

A poet painted on a vaseThe other side of the vase with a flute player

Neck amphora by the Kleophrades painter circa 485BC

© The Trustees of the British Museum via The British Museum

Here’s a nice video of @lotos.lab and @stefconnerssong on Instagram doing a Roman practice routine designed to get you limber for performance of Greek tragic plays - this is the oktokaidekasemos (an eighteen-beat rhythm):

Greek metrical structures

  • A line is like a cycle - it is made of a set number of feet
  • A foot is like a step - it is made of several mora
  • A mora is like a sub-step - short syllables take up one mora, long syllables take up two

Some feet:

Short syllables: U
Long syllables:  -
3 morae:		4 morae:		5 morae:		6 morae:
U-		        --		        -U-		        -UU-
-U		        -UU		        U--		        UU--
UUU		        UU-		        (but not other combinations…)

Epic hexamater

This is the metre found in Homeric Epic

  • In general epic hexamater has 6 feet of 4 morae each line
  • Feet are usually -UU (a dactyl) but can be -- (a spondee)
  • We don’t usually get a spondee in the 6th foot
  • The 6th foot can also be shortened to -U, which is only 3 morae, giving our rhythm a bump
  • The third foot can have a caesura (pause) in between the second and 3rd or 3rd and 4th morae

The first line of the Iliad with metrical markings The first line of the Iliad with metrical markings from: Lamar, Annie & Chambers, America. (2019). Generating Homeric Poetry with Deep Neural Networks. 68-75. 10.1109/TransAI46475.2019.00020.