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The strong visual appeal of Ovid's Metamorphoses has long invited comparison with the pleasures of pantomime, most influentially in a publication by Galinsky. In the study of Ovid's references from exile to his poetry being ‘danced in the crowded theatres’, this chapter argues in detail that the obvious text for pantomime realisation is the Metamorphoses, rather than the Heroides (as has occasionally been claimed); through close attention to the detail in Ovid's poetry, it explores how the subject‐matter of that epic, with its compact vignettes of action, emotive rhetoric, exotic settings, and underlying emphasis on bodily transformation, must have been suggestive to pantomime dancers. Furthermore the chapter argues that there is plenty of action which could easily be represented through movement, gesture, and basic stage props. The discussion incorporates the crucial evidence of Jacob of Sarugh about pantomime performances of the myth of Apollo and Daphne. This chapter engages with the issue of pantomime libretti.

There is a possibility that one pantomime libretto based on a canonical tragedy does in fact survive. The candidate is a Latin hexameter poem, preserved only in a Barcelona papyrus, on the theme of Alcestis' death, familiar to the ancient world above all from Euripides' Alcestis. The metre of the poem is shared by the Aeneid, which is known to have been performed by pantomime dancers, and the theme, the death of Alcestis, is known from other sources to have attracted practitioners of the medium. Moreover, the structure of the narrative, which entails five separate sections devoted to five characters in the myth, culminating in the protracted death of the heroine, offers exactly the successive changes of role and emotive vignettes that would facilitate a pantomime performance. The chapter suggests some criteria of style that could be used to assess the suitability of verse for danced realization, and offers a brief account of a modern Italian experiment in recreating the art of the pantomime through a danced realization of this very text.

This chapter draws on two strands of evidence that bear on the form of the dactylic hexameter: one from Plato (Epinomis) and Aristotle (Metaphysics), one from a modern Greek folk dance (the συρτός). When combined with the new theory of the Greek accent, a theory of hexameter form emerges, which accounts for the peculiar features of traditional hexameter structure. It predicts that there will be two kinds of caesura in the third foot, with one of them favoured; and that there will be a bucolic diaeresis. Detailed analyses of emphasis and accentual reinforcement of metre in passages from Homer reveal such a musical richness, and rhythmic and harmonic density and complexity, that the notion of ‘composition-in-performance’ becomes implausible, and suggests that Homer’s texts, like Mozart’s, were scores that needed to be practiced and prepared in order to be performed.

This chapter considers the influence of a performance mode depicted by Homer — Demodocus the singer surrounded by a dancing circle — upon the phonological and semantic features of Homeric verse. A circle dance is a locus of conjuration and chanted noun-and-epithet phrases, delimited metrically by the turning points of the dance, become uniquely evocative ‘choral signifiers’. Paolo Vivante’s aesthetic theory of these phrases thereby receives a grounding in attested performance practice, although ‘choral theory’ is required to account for both the poetics and the aesthetics of Homeric verse. The effects of a non-linguistic dance rhythm upon Homeric and Hesiodic phonology, morphology, and diction are discussed. It is shown that ‘poetic license’ is a necessary component in an honest analysis of epic usage. Gregory Nagy’s derivation of the hexameter from smaller, later lyric metrical segments is critiqued in light of Pierre Chantraine’s observation that the Greek language is demonstrably maladapted to the hexameter, as is not the case with lyric metres. The choral signifier cannot be reduced to a purely linguistic phenomenon.

This chapter investigates the ethos embodied by the hendecasyllable, a favourite metre of the Flavian authors Statius and Martial. Starting from one of Statius' most ambitious hendecasyllabic poems, Silvae 4.3 on the Via Domitiana, it shows that the hendecasyllable was perceived to embody the character of its most celebrated exponent, Catullus, and that the account of the Via Domitiana comes vividly to life when the Catullan quality imparted by the metre is allowed to assert itself. Other aspects of the metre are then considered, especially the polar relationship operative between it and the dactylic hexameter, and its particular aptness for poetic accounts of diminutive topics. Suggestions are made about the character of the metre as it had been encountered by Catullus. These insights are then fed back into a concluding analysis of the metrical dimension of another arresting deployment of hendecasyllables by Statius, the celebration-cum-lament on Lucan's birthday at Silvae 2.7.

This chapter focuses on the benchmark metre in ancient poetry, the heroic hexameter. Three poetic forms embodying a contradiction of the epic ethos embodied by the hexameter are considered: saturnians, satirical hexameters, and elegiacs. Saturnians, the celebratory medium displaced by hexameters by Ennius, are probed for their capacity to convey resistance to the hellenization represented by hexameters, and similar implications attach to Lucilius' decision to adopt the hexameter as the default form for satire, but a hexameter which is a travesty of the magnificent vehicle of epic: later satirists offer interesting twists to this combative relationship with their own form. Finally, elegy has an ambivalent relationship with epic hard-wired into it by the uneasy combination of a dactylic hexameter and pentameter in the elegiac couplet, and poetry by a range of elegiac poets is used to show the creative potential of this metrical combination.

After summarizing the evidence for the oral performance of early Greek poetry in general, Chapter 1 represents an initial investigation into the possibilities that existed for the employment of traditional and formulaic phraseology within archaic elegy. Within Homeric epic, oral‐formulaic phraseology existed in symbiosis with a flexible partitioning system in which each stichic hexameter was separable into four recognizable units (or cola) which could then be combined to produce composite verses consisting of regularized and traditional content. In the hexameter portion of early elegiac couplets, this same four‐part division can also be observed, while the so‐called pentameter line within each couplet also regularly divides into four integral units. In the end analysis, it is clear that archaic Greek elegy possessed a metrical partitioning scheme that would have allowed for the possibility of employing formulaic phraseology.

The formulaic language of the early hexameter poets grew up over time designed to produce good hexameters, verses that sounded agreeable. A poet composing with these preformed blocks would be unlikely to strive after special effects. Yet the temptation to detect deliberate onomatopoeia in 598 is strong. Dionysius subjects the verse to close scrutiny in order to define how the rhythmic effect that he feels has been produced. He observes that there are no monosyllables and only two disyllables. No long vowel or diphthong is followed by more than one consonant, and pairs of consonants appear only where needed to ‘make position’ following a short vowel. In fact, to his way of thinking, all the syllables are as short as possible. Then, the words are nowhere ‘forced apart’ by (apparent) hiatus, or final semivowel meeting initial semivowel. But finally, and ‘most surprising of all’, all the ‘feet’, except the last, are dactylic. This chapter argues that unlike most ancient theorists, Dionysius shows himself genuinely interested in the sound of verse, but his surprise here does no credit to the sensitivity of his ear. Nearly one fifth of Homeric hexameters are holodactylic. Moreover, he failed to notice one really remarkable fact about the verse in question: all the bicipitia except one are split by word-end.

This chapter focuses on Ovid's Book XIII—XV of Metamorphoses, which is a long narrative poem in the form of a highly idiosyncratic history of the world from Creation to the death and deification of Julius Caesar. It describes the revelation of ultimate truth about the victim as the recurrent motif of metamorphosis. It also mentions the mediaeval writers who treated the poems in Metamorpheses as a storehouse of paradigms for moral instruction. The chapter explains how Ovid turned to the dactylic hexameter to produce a mythological tour de force of epic scale in his Metamorphoses that wholly transcended anything he had produced before. It explores the strong moral and humane theme throughout the Metamorphoses as one of the most popular of classical works during the Middle Ages.

This chapter focuses on the structure of the Hamartigenia. The poem appears in the manuscripts under a Greek title and features a preface written in a different meter—iambic preface followed by a hexameter poem—from that of the poem itself. The main topic of the poem is the origin of sin in the universe and its consequences; it is framed as a refutation of the heresy of Marcion of Sinope, a second-century-CE thinker who preached a dualistic theology. The poem proper begins with an apostrophe to Cain, who was castigated as a “divider of God” and accused of having double vision. The chapter further addresses how the poem illustrates the effects of sin on the universe, the central concept of free will, and the like.

Some of the so-called Homeric Hymns, dating from the seventh century bc, provide evidence of poetic performance at festivals in Greece. Alongside the sung hexameter epics, two other verse traditions appear to have been recited without music: iambics and elegiacs, both of which were used in public performances. We hear of a new kind of recited performance in the sixth century, that of the rhapsode, the fullest account of which (admittedly from a hostile perspective) is that given by Plato in the Ion. This chapter discusses the figure of the rhapsode, and the significance of a performance tradition in which a fixed text is used, perhaps with the aid of a written script. The chapter ends with a consideration of Plato’s hostility to poetry and Aristotle’s response to his arguments.

Hexameter should be recognized as a super-genre, which is not the same as calling all hexameter poetry ‘epic’. The genres within the super-genre differ greatly in their grounds; these are derived from Greek poetry, and Latin and Greek are compared. The basic ground of narrative hexameter poetry is typically an account of the past addressed to no one, and marked by ironic knowledge; it typically contrasts with the inset grounds of speeches, marked by emotion. The basic ground of didactic poetry is an account of things which obtain generally, addressed to a pupil; there are few other characters. Latin and Greek are here close in phrasing. Pastoral, especially in Latin, minimizes narrative, and emphasizes fictional speech and song. Satire emphasizes a first-person narrator, but has considerable connections with Theocritus and pastoral in ground. Occasional and inscriptional poetry is also discussed.

The two types of narrative hexameter poetry — on Greek myth and Roman history — stand at a different distance from Greek poetry; and even within the type on Greek myth there are different distances from Greek models. The various subjects of didactic poetry, intrinsically general, are localized to different degrees, and involve different degrees of proximity to Greek poetic models; Greek prose is also important. Pastoral uses names to bring a Greek world into different places. Placing and proximity to Greek are connected but Calpurnius makes considerable use of non-bucolic Theocritus. Satire is less separate from the lower kinds of Greek hexameter poetry than might appear. Theocritus is again important, as is the Italian country. Occasional poetry is connected with Greek occasional hexameters, but has a different spatial focus. Greek and Latin inscriptional poetry come together particularly at Rome.

This chapter turns its attention to the shilling monthly as represented by the originators of the genre: Macmillan’sMagazine and the Cornhill. These periodicals represent a particular moment in literary history in which the shilling monthly explicitly functioned to reinforce and define middle-class cultural tastes and traditions. This chapter thus considers how the editors of Macmillan’s and the Cornhill used poetry to support the cultural and literary aims of their respective periodicals, shaping the poetic landscape of the 1860s through their editorial decisions (e.g. each periodical took a side in the era’s debate over hexameters). The first third of the chapter traces Alexander Macmillan’s influence on the poetry of Macmillan’s through the work of Alfred Tennyson, Dinah Mulock Craik, and Christina Rossetti. The remainder of the chapter focuses on William Thackeray’s role as paterfamilias of the Cornhill through an examination of poems by Matthew Arnold, Adelaide Anne Procter, Owen Meredith, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (among others).

The Getty hexameters from Selinus, which antedate 409 bc, are a copy of a semi-official paean addressed to Paean, Heracles, and Asclepius, which also incorporates the spell of the Idaean Dactyls (Ephesia grammata). The incantation asks these gods to protect the city from the witchcraft, poisoning, and disease associated with Hecate and the Hydra. It was probably composed in the last quarter of the fifth century by an itinerant religious expert like those whom Aristophanes mocks in the Birds. Close analysis of its metre and language, and of parallel texts from elsewhere, shows that the archetype was in the version of the Homeric dialect that was used in the fifth century bc, but under the influence of tragedy (Aeschylus’ Psychostasia, Sophocles’ Rhizotomoi, and Euripides’ Hecuba). The Dorisms are superficial. A reconstruction and translation of the archetype is included. The paradosis suggests both written and oral transmission.

The Getty Hexameters are marked by an astounding array of boasts about the power of song and the efficacy of writing. The more numerous allusions to speech frequently stress both the skill and the knowledge of the inventor or performer. The one long boast about the efficacy of the writing out of the spell, on the other hand, emphasizes the automatic power of the inscribed object, with no mention of the skill or knowledge of the maker. This chapter describes the boasts in the Getty Hexameters and shows how other early Greek incantations (or the earliest literary references to them) can broaden our understanding of the different kinds of claims made for speech and text in the Getty Hexameters. It closes by speculating about the historical position of the Getty tablet on the cusp between an orally composed charm and an inscribed text.

Clemens and Hesychius transmit a powerful spell, called Ephesia grammata, composed of six nonsense words. ἄσκι, κατάσκι, λίξ/αἶξ, τϵτράξ, δαμναμϵνϵύς, αἴσιον/αἴσια. The Getty Hexameters and other hexametric spells contain words of the formula, which have sense in their context. Two tendencies can be established in the evolution of the spells: (a) the tendency to shorten them, and (b) the tendency to make the phonic devices predominant, to the detriment of the semantic ones, in such a way that formerly meaningful words become nonsense voces magicae. At the end of such a process only six words were chosen, either because they were keywords of the original spells or because they were phonetically charming for magic purposes. Some data allow relating the Ephesia grammata to Orphic circles and to Parmenides.