Virgil’s and Ovid’s versions of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice are written in dactylic hexameter. This is the traditional meter of epic Greek or Latin verse. In Latin, a dactylic foot consists of a long syllable followed by two short syllables, and a hexameter comprises six feet. In addition to dactylic feet, the hexameter contains spondees, which are two long syllables. The first four feet may be either dactyls or spondees; the fifth foot is almost always a dactyl. The last foot can be a spondee or a trochee (long-short). These are the first two lines of Ovid’s version in Latin:

Inde per inmensum croceo velatus amictu (dactyl, spondee, dactyl, spondee, dactyl, spondee)



aethera digreditur Ciconumque Hymenaeus ad oras (dactyl, dactyl, dactyl, dactyl, dactyl, spondee)

Most people today read Virgil and Ovid in translation. Verse translations are not made in dactylic hexameter, since that is not a meter that works well in English. (One of the few English-language poets to attempt dactylic hexameter is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in his epic poem Evangeline [1847].) The translation of Ovid used in this study guide, by A. D. Melville, is in

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