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Updated: June 19, 2025
Besides the large and continuous volume of its prose production, the Latin Church of the third century also made its first essays in poetry. They are both rude and scanty; it was not till late in the fourth century that Christian poetry reached its full development in the hymns of Ambrose and Prudentius, and the hexameter poems of Paulinus of Nola.
"Paradise Lost" seems to us far more akin to the Greek tragedy than to the Homeric poems or the "AEneid." In the form of a Greek drama it was first conceived. Its verse is the counterpart of the Greek iambic, not of the Greek or Latin hexameter. Had the laborious Dobson turned it into Greek iambics instead of turning it into Latin hexameters, we suspect the real affinity would have appeared.
Aulus Gellius has preserved a translation of one of Plato's epigrams, which he calls ouk amousos, by a contemporary author, whose name he does not give. It is written in dimeter iambics, an easier measure than the hexameter, and therefore more within the reduced capacity of the time.
With the Georgics they are ranked as the most perfect examples of the modulation of hexameter verse. Their movement is rippling rather than flowing, and satisfies the mind rather than the ear, but it is a delicious movement, full of suggestive grace. The diction, though classical, admits occasional colloquialisms.
Thus in 1585 he published a work in Latin hexameter verse with the title 'Amyntas Thomae Watsoni Londinensis I. V. studiosi, divided into eleven 'Querelae, which was 'paraphrastically translated' by Abraham Fraunce into English hexameters, and published under the title 'The Lamentations of Amyntas for the death of Phillis' in 1587.
The only poem thus left unaccounted for, the Atys, is inserted in the centre of the volume, between the two hexameter poems, as though to make its wild metre and rapid movement the more striking by contrast with their smooth and languid rhythms. Whether the arrangement of the whole book comes from the poet's own hand is very doubtful.
'This amiable youth, it said to the others, 'has miraculously been able to put the whole meaning of the seven thousand lines of Greek invocation into one English hexameter a little misplaced some of the words but 'Oh, come along, come along, good old beautiful Phoenix! 'Not perfect, I admit but not bad for a boy of his age.
Moreover, in a hapless moment, at least for us moderns, he invented Greek accents; thereby, I fear, so complicating and confusing our notions of Greek rhythm, that we shall never, to the end of time, be able to guess what any Greek verse, saving the old Homeric Hexameter, sounded like.
It is not a real world; it is hardly even a world conceived as real; but it is a world so plausible, so directly appealing to simple instincts and unclouded senses, above all so completely taken for granted, that the illusion is, for the time, all but complete. For the metre of the Metamorphoses Ovid chose the heroic hexameter, but used it in a strikingly new and original way.
Whence it comes to pass also that it delights not only by the striking and attractive parts, but easily persuades by the parts tending to virtue. The poems of Homer have the most perfect metre, the hexameter, which is also called heroic.
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