Hearing Homer's rhythm: the hexameter ἑξάμετρος

Greek poetry does not rhyme, and its rhythm is not a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, as in English verse. It is a pattern of long and short syllables. Ancient writers on metre counted a long syllable as two units of time and a short one as one.

Which syllables are long? A syllable is long by nature if its vowel is long: η and ω, any diphthong (αι, ει, οι, ου, αυ, ευ…), and any vowel with a circumflex ῆ or an iota subscript ῳ. It is long by position if its vowel is followed by two consonants, even when one of them begins the next word; ζ, ξ and ψ count as two. Every other syllable is short: ε and ο always, and α, ι, υ when they are short vowels.

The hexameter ("six-measure") is the metre of Homer, Hesiod and all Greek epic, and of oracles too. A line has six feet. Each of the first five is a dactyl (– ˘ ˘) or a spondee (– –); the fifth is nearly always a dactyl. The sixth foot has two syllables, and the last may be long or short. Say a long for two beats and a short for one: DUM-da-da DUM-da-da… and the rhythm appears.

Most lines have a pause, the caesura (‖), where a word ends inside the third foot: after its long syllable, or after its first short. Poets also bend the rules in regular ways. A long vowel or diphthong at the end of a word can count as short before a vowel (correption), and two vowels can run together as one syllable (synizesis).