Hexameter Workshop: scanning Latin verse
About this app
Twelve real lines from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid as a wave band of syllables above six bridge arches. You work out elision, quantity, feet and caesura with reasoned feedback, tap the beat and hear why the line stumbles when read by word accent. Dactyls and spondees side by side.
With explain mode: an AI tutor walks you through the app, points out what matters in the scene and answers your questions.
How a hexameter is built
The hexameter has six feet. The first five are dactyls (long, short, short) or spondees (long, long), the fifth nearly always a dactyl, and the sixth a long plus a free syllable. The basis is syllable length: a long lasts two morae, a short one. So every foot fills four morae. A syllable is long if its vowel is long by nature, if it has a diphthong, or if its vowel stands before two consonants.
What the app shows
A line appears as a wave band of syllables. Long syllables are wide and sit high, short ones are narrow and lie lower. Once the quantities are set, the syllables glide onto a bridge with six equally wide arches. The caesura cuts through the band as a strip of light. In the word-accent reading all syllables become equal, the beats move to the word accent and the arches become uneven.
What you can try
In Scan mode you mark elisions, quantities, foot boundaries and caesurae yourself on ten lines of Ovid and two of Virgil, and each error comes with its reason. In Listen mode the line runs in time and you tap along while the app measures your deviation. Compare mode stacks five dactyls above four spondees.
Frequently asked questions
- How do you scan a hexameter?
- First strike the elisions. Then mark the certain longs: diphthongs, vowels long by nature and vowels before two consonants. From the end of the line, cut off the close long, short, short, long, free, and fill the feet before it with dactyls or spondees. Finally look for the caesura.
- What is the difference between long by nature and long by position?
- A vowel long by nature is long in itself, such as the u in mutare. In length by position the vowel is short but two consonants follow, even across a word boundary, so the syllable counts as long. Muta cum liquida, such as tr, may make position but need not.
- What is a penthemimeral caesura?
- It is the most common caesura of the hexameter. It falls after the first long of the third foot, that is after the fifth half-foot. The trithemimeral lies in the second foot, the hephthemimeral in the fourth. The bucolic diaeresis is a word end after the fourth foot.
- What can I do in the Hexameter Workshop app?
- You scan twelve real lines step by step with feedback, hear the rhythm as tones, tap the beat, compare the reading by metre with the reading by word accent, and set dactyls against spondees.
Subject: Latin
More from Latin
- AcI Stage: the accusative that acts
- Participle Time Machine: time relation and sense
- Sentence X-ray: seeing through Latin sentences
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