Except for the early Saturnian poetry, which may have been accentual, Latin poets borrowed all their verse forms from the Greeks, despite significant differences between the two languages.
Ennius employed a poetic diction and style well suited to the Greek model, thus providing a foundation for later poets such as Lucretius and Virgil to build on.
[5] The Alexandrians' preference for short poems influenced Catullus to experiment with a variety of meters borrowed from Greece, including Aeolian forms such as hendecasyllabic verse, the Sapphic stanza and Greater Asclepiad, as well as iambic verses such as the choliamb and the iambic tetrameter catalectic (a dialogue meter borrowed from Old Comedy).
[6] Horace, whose career spanned both republic and empire, followed Catullus' lead in employing Greek lyrical forms, though he calls himself the first to bring Aeolic verse to Rome.
Virgil, his contemporary, used dactylic hexameters for both light and serious themes, and his verses are generally regarded as "the supreme metrical system of Latin literature".
[11] English-speaking, as opposed to e.g. German-speaking, readers of Latin tend to observe the natural word stress, whose interplay with the quantitative rhythm can be a source of aesthetic effects.
Verses were divided into "feet" by ancient grammarians and poets, such as Ovid, who called the elegiac couplet "eleven-footed poetry" (Amores 1.30).
In Greek, these terms were applied to the movement of human feet in dancing and/or marching, Arsis signifying the lifting of a foot, and Thesis its placement.
Thus a more straightforward analysis, favoured by recent scholarship, is by cola, considered to be the actual building blocks of the verse.
There are two kinds of caesura: The dividing of verse into long and short syllables and analysis of the metrical family or pattern is called 'scanning' or 'scansion.'
The two short syllables (called a biceps element) may generally be contracted, but never in the second half of a pentameter, and only rarely in the fifth foot of a hexameter.
Influenced by Homer's Greek epics, it was considered the best meter for weighty and important matters, and long narrative or discursive poems generally.
Thus it was used in Ennius's Annals, Lucretius's On The Nature of Things, Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses; also in Juvenal's caustic satires and Horace's genial Talks and Letters.
[nb 2] Since Latin was richer in long syllables than was Greek, contraction of biceps elements (producing the so-called spondee) was more common among Roman poets.
Venit and iram at the ends of lines 2 and 4 count as spondees by brevis in longo, despite their naturally short second syllables.
By Ovid's time there was a rule, with very few exceptions, that the last word should be of two syllables, and it was almost always a noun, verb, personal pronoun (mihi, tibi or sibi) or pronominal adjective (meus etc.).
If only one hemiepes is employed, instead of a full pentameter, the elegiac couplet takes the form known as the First Archilochian, named after the Greek poet Archilochus.
[22] Note that the plosive + liquid combination pr in 'capreaeque', syllabified ca.pre.ae.que, leaves the first open syllable (ca) metrically short.
Iambic meters are made of "metra" or "dipodies" of which the basic shape is | x – u – | (here x represents an anceps element which can be short or long).
[24] The grammarian Terentianus Maurus has this to say about the iambic trimeter:[25][26] He also says that teachers of metre beat time with their pollex ("thumb or big toe") or their foot to help their pupils.
); and occasionally a short-long sequence (as in ĕt ǐllam above) could be scanned as two short syllables, especially when a pronoun was involved, a process known as brevis breviāns.
Except occasionally at the end of a line, the word-accents correspond entirely to the rhythm of the meter: Another style again is seen in the tragedies of the emperor Nero's tutor and prime minister Seneca the Younger.
The iambic distich is the basis of many poems of a genre known as Iambus, in which the poet abuses and censures individuals or even communities, whether real or imaginary.
The following is the opening of Horace's Epode 2: Usually associated with the comic theatre, it consists of seven feet with an extra syllable at the end instead of a full iambic foot.
It is intended to be graceless and awkward "...in order to mirror in symbolically appropriate fashion the vices and crippled perversions of mankind.
The iambic dimeter keeps the elements of a line-end, i.e. it is marked off from the hemiepes by a pause through brevis in longo, or through a hiatus.
An example of this system is found in Horace's Epode 13, lines 9–10: The 5th foot in this example is a spondee—this is rare for Horace and it is meant to evoke the affectation of Neoteric poets like Catullus, thus complementing the sense of being suffused with perfume while listening to the lyre at a drinking party (the Greek word Cyllēnaeā,[32] which creates the double spondee, adds to the exotic aura).
After the classical period, the pronunciation of Latin changed and the distinction between long and short vowels was lost in the popular language.
Some authors continued writing verse in the classical meters, but this way of pronouncing long and short vowels was not natural to them; they used it only in poetry.
Two Christian Latin poems which can be found on Wikipedia, both dating from the 13th century, are the Stabat Mater and Dies Irae.