One poet to use it for literary compositions was Commodian, who is thought to have lived in North Africa in the 3rd century AD.
Over the centuries the style of the rhythmic hexameter underwent various changes; for example, in some early versions it had six stresses in each line, whereas later it had five.
One of the first scholars to make the distinction between rhythmic and metrical poetry was the English monk Bede in his book On Metre.
Dag Norberg writes: "The study of quite complicated rhythmic verse forms, which we have dealt with so far, has taught us that these forms were created in the following way: the poet read the quantitative models while noticing, not the quantity or the ictus, but the prose accent and the distribution of the different types of words; and in the new poetry he tried to render these accents and this structure in a more or less exact way without caring about the quantity or the ictus.
Apart from such inscriptions, the earliest surviving hexameter poetry in the rhythmic style is believed to be that of Commodian, whom one of the manuscripts of his Carmen Apologeticum describes as Episcopus Africanus "African Bishop".
The lack of attention to the length or shortness of vowels in the Urbanilla epitaph and in Commodian's poetry may in fact be a North African feature, since St Augustine tells us, in the 4th book of his On Christian Doctrine, published in 426, that the people of the region made no distinction between long and short vowels, pronouncing ōs "mouth" and os "bone" identically.
[24] The grammarian Consentius (5th century) agreed that it was a characteristic of African pronunciation to say pīper and ŏrātor instead of piper and ōrātor.
He only rarely finishes a verse with a word like iter or bibant which in classical Latin has a short accented syllable.
[31][32] Because of this, Dag Norberg, a specialist in medieval versification, wrote: "We also do not agree with those who consider Commodian to be representative of the new rhythmic poetry.
The many traces of quantity that we find in his verses indicate that he intended to write in ordinary hexameters but that he failed in his undertaking.
Commodian was evidently a well-read man: in his writings there are possible echoes of no fewer than 56 pagan authors, especially Virgil,[36] and it is generally thought that he wrote in accentual hexameters not from lack of skill but because he wished to communicate his message more effectively to his relatively less well educated audience.
One advantage which rhythmic hexameters gave Commodian, as R. Browning pointed out,[38] is that it enabled him to include various words such as diabolus, occisio, nativitas, spiritalis, suscitare, archisynagoga, concupiscentia, saeculum which would be difficult to fit into conventional metre.
This loss of knowledge of length of syllables seems to have been not just confined to north African speakers but even in Rome, where about A. D. 300 an epitaph was composed for a ten-year-old girl, Severa.
In this there are numerous false quantities in the vowels, such as cūbiculum – u u –, lǔminare u u – u, sībi – u, Sēvērā – – – (instead of Sevēra), Papăe sui – u u –, membrā – –, pārentibus – – u u; and even some closed syllables are counted as short, e.g. arcisoliis u u – u u, Marcellini u u – u.
Interesting for linguists are the confusion of b and v, typical of Spanish (devitum/debitum, labacri/lavacri), the reduction of double consonants (ges(s)i, com(m)unem, ae pronounced e (seculo, and the simplification of cunctis to cuntis.
In some lines there seems to be assonance between the two halves: dulcem ... vitam; vixi ... gessi; debitum ... unum; meos ... proles; vocabit ... lavacri.
In Villafranca near Córdoba in Spain is the following epitaph made for Oppila (or Oppilanus),[40] a Visigothic nobleman of the seventh century.
One characteristic of this poem is that in several lines there are more than two unstressed syllables between the last two accents and for this reason some scholars have questioned whether they are in fact hexameters.
[43] The first line recalls the inscription on Bede's tomb in Durham Cathedral, except that Bede's inscription is a metrical hexameter: The 9th and 11th line are similar in construction to the Leonine verses in Bernard of Cluny's 12th-century poem De contemptu mundi: Also from the 7th century is the following poem which is quoted in a work by Virgilius Maro Grammaticus.
[44] The lines also rhyme in couplets: Virgilius informs us that he was an Aquitanian, from the Basque-speaking region of Bigorre in south-west France.
Written in simple Latin rhythmic hexameters is a work of 174 lines called Exhortatio poenitendi ("An exhortation to repent").
[57] Thurneysen suggests that the third line has a threefold division:[58] The following epitaph of a certain Thomas was recorded by the Cardinal Caesar Baronius in the 16th century, but without any indication of its date or place.
Charles Troya (1853) believes it was written for a certain deacon Thomas c. 700, and refers it to the ending of the schismatic Patriarchate of Old Aquileia in 698.
The pre-caesura accent comes not on the 5th syllable as in several of the other examples here, but on the 4th; thus the first half-line resembles Virgil's síc fatur lácrimans[60] rather than última Cumaéi.
Thurneysen notes that one feature of this poem which is mostly absent from Commodian is that the poet doesn't avoid making the fifth foot end with a closed syllable, such as Cumiani solvuntur.
Another epitaph, found in the city of Pavia about 20 miles south of Milan, of uncertain date, but probably 763,[65] is that of Audoald Duke of Liguria, who died on the feast day of St Thomas the Apostle.
It begins as follows: The Duchess Dhuoda, wife of the Duke of Septimania in the south of France, wrote a book of advice for her elder son, finishing it in A.D. 843.
Most of the book is in prose, but at the end she finishes with two lines of rhythmic hexameter verse, of a form which unlike the poems quoted above has an accent on the 4th syllable of the first half as well as the usual dactyl + spondee ending:[71] The rhythm of these lines resembles those quoted by the 7th-century grammarian Virgilius Maro (see Bella consurgunt above), who like Dhuoda also came from the Basque region of France.
It was Thurneysen's view that with the changes of pronunciation as vernacular Latin turned into French, the dactylic rhythm would automatically be reduced to iambic.
For example, (late) Latin debemus bene morire would become in French devum nus bien murir (Rol.