As such, it's particularly difficult to adapt to dactylic hexameter, the waltzlike, oom-pah-pah meter of epic poetry, which the Romans inherited from the Greeks.
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The Victory Stele of Naram-Sin, which shows that Mesopotamian king putting some unfortunate mountain men to the spear, dates from 33 BC. The ancient Assyrians in particular excelled at the depiction of combat, doing in limestone what Homer would later do in dactylic hexameter.
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Dactylic hexameter has proved more successful in German than in most modern languages. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock's epic Der Messias popularized accentual dactylic hexameter in German. Subsequent German poets to employ the form include Goethe (notably in his Reineke Fuchs) and Schiller.
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Today, the modern Latin poets who use the dactylic hexameter are generally as faithful to Virgil as Rome's Silver Age poets.
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Indiana University Press. . These madrigal rhythms may themselves derive from the dactylic hexameter of the epic poetry of ancient Greece and Rome.Geoffrey Chew and Owen Jander (2001). Pastoral. Grove Music Online. .
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Courtship of Miles Standish is written in dactylic hexameter, the same meter used in classical epic poetry such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Vergil's Aeneid. Longfellow used the same meter in his poem Evangeline.
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Fyodor Bronnikov, Pythagoreans' Hymn to the Rising Sun, 1869. Oil on canvas. The Golden Verses (, , ; ) are a collection of moral exhortations comprising 71 lines written in dactylic hexameter. They are traditionally but falsely attributed to Pythagoras.
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Dactylic hexameter (also known as "heroic hexameter" and "the meter of epic") is a form of meter or rhythmic scheme in poetry. It is traditionally associated with the quantitative meter of classical epic poetry in both Greek and Latin and was consequently considered to be the grand style of Western classical poetry. Some premier examples of its use are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Hexameters also form part of elegiac poetry in both languages, the elegiac couplet being a dactylic hexameter line paired with a dactylic pentameter line.
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Upon his death in 1934, Smith left a partial translation of Homer's Iliad. This work was completed by his old Tulane colleague Walter Miller and when published in 1944 was the first English translation in the original dactylic hexameter.
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However, the only obvious imperfections are a few lines of verse that are metrically unfinished (i.e. not a complete line of dactylic hexameter). Some scholars have argued that Virgil deliberately left these metrically incomplete lines for dramatic effect.Miller, F. J. 1909.
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Because dactylic hexameter is used throughout epic poetry, and because the elegiac form was always considered "lower style" than epic, elegists, or poets who wrote elegies, frequently wrote with epic poetry in mind and positioned themselves in relation to epic.
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To judge from his larger fragments, Alcman's poetry was normally strophic: Different metres are combined into long stanzas (9-14 lines), which are repeated several times. One popular metre is the dactylic tetrameter (in contrast to the dactylic hexameter of Homer and Hesiod).
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Idyll VI, otherwise known as Bucolic poem 6, was written by Theocritus in dactylic hexameter. The exact date of its composition is unknown. It references characters that have appeared in other works of literature such as Homer's Odyssey, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Theocritus' Idyll XI.
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Samuel Richards's painting "Evangeline Discovering Her Affianced in the Hospital" The poem is written in unrhymed dactylic hexameter, possibly inspired by Greek and Latin classics, including Homer, whose work Longfellow was reading at the time he was writing Evangeline. He also had recently, in 1841, translated "The Children of the Lord's Supper", a poem by Swedish writer Esaias Tegnér, which also used this meter. Evangeline is one of the few nineteenth-century compositions in that meter which is still read today. Some criticized Longfellow's choice of dactylic hexameter, including poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who said the poem would have been better in a prose style similar to Longfellow's Hyperion.
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Throughout the poem Abbo employs a dactylic hexameter, though with the occasional fault. This metre helps to underpin the epic nature of the poem, a conscious aim of Abbo. The purpose of the work was both scholarly and hortative, warning future generations of the Viking menace.MacLean, 55.
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Heroic verse consists of the rhymed iambic line or heroic couplet. The term is used in English exclusively. In ancient literature, heroic verse was synonymous with the dactylic hexameter. It was in this measure that those typically heroic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey and the Aeneid were written.
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Other books cannot be dated with any precision. The poem is divided into 17 books and is composed in dactylic hexameter. It has been thought that the poem was initially planned in hexads and that the original intent was to round off the composition in 18 books.von Albrecht, p.
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The Annales was written by the Roman poet Ennius (likely pictured, Roman bust in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek) in the 2nd century BC. Whereas Ennius's contemporaries like Livius Andronicus and Gnaeus Naevius wrote in Saturnian verse, Ennius eschewed this style. Instead he penned Annales in dactylic hexameter, in imitation of the works of Homer; according to Alison Keith, by doing this, "Ennius acknowledged the importance of Greek culture in contemporary Rome". Because of Ennius's decision, dactylic hexameter became the standard metre for subsequent Latin epic poetry.Keith (2013), p. xiv. But in addition to what Alison Sharrock and Rihannon Ashley call the "Romanisation of Greek poetic sophistication",Sharrock and Ashley (2013), p. 174.
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Other epic poets followed Naevius. Quintus Ennius wrote a historical epic, the Annals (soon after 200 BC), describing Roman history from the founding of Rome to his own time. He adopted Greek dactylic hexameter, which became the standard verse form for Roman epics. He also became famous for his tragic dramas.
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The Punica is a Latin epic poem in seventeen books in dactylic hexameter written by Silius Italicus (c. 28 – c. 103 AD) comprising some twelve thousand lines (12,202, to be exact, if one includes a probably spurious passage in book 8). It is the longest surviving Latin poem from antiquity.
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In the 1830s, the novella was translated into Russian dactylic hexameter verse by the Romantic poet Vasily Zhukovsky. This verse translation became a classic in its own right and later provided the basis for the libretto to Tchaikovsky's operatic adaptation. The novella has since inspired numerous similar adaptions in various genres and traditions.
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The Thebaid (; ) is a Latin epic in 12 books written in dactylic hexameter by Publius Papinius Statius (AD c. 45 – c. 96). The poem deals with the Theban cycle and treats the war of the Seven against Thebes, who were seven champions who led an Archive army against the city of Thebes.
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Various Verses (στίχοι διάφοροι) is the title of his collection of 145 poems, which covers a wide range of genres and topics. The collection seems to have been arranged chronologically. The text of many poems is severely damaged. The metre of most poems is the dodecasyllable, but for some Christopher uses the dactylic hexameter.
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Ennius's list appears in poetic form, and the word order may be dictated by the metrical constraints of dactylic hexameter. The Dii Consentes are sometimes seen as the Roman equivalent of the Greek Olympians. The meaning of Consentes is subject to interpretation, but is usually taken to mean that they form a council or consensus of deities.
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The 644-line poem, like all Ovid's extant work except the Metamorphoses,The Metamorphoses is written in dactylic hexameter; the first line of a Latin elegiac couplet is dactylic hexameter, however, so the Metamorphoses itself is not a metrical exception in Ovid's extant work. His lost tragedy Medea presumably used other measures. is written in elegiac couplets. It is thus an unusual, though not unique, example of invective poetry in antiquity written in elegiac form rather than the more common iambics or hendecasyllabics. The incantatory nature of the curses in the Ibis has sometimes led to comparisons with curse tablets (defixiones), though Ovid's are elaborately literary in expression;Gareth D. Williams, "On Ovid's Ibis: A Poem in Context," in Oxford Readings in Ovid (Oxford University Press, 2006), p.
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409 online. In his Life of Terence, Suetonius preserves six lines of dactylic hexameter by Caesar praising the Roman playwright, along with a more lukewarm assessment by Cicero.Suetonius, Life of Terence 7. These two verse passages, with their similarity of purpose and wording, may have resulted from a school assignment, since both men studied with the teacher and grammarian Gnipho.
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Tiresias appears to Odysseus during the nekyia of Odyssey xi, in this watercolor with tempera by the Anglo-Swiss painter Johann Heinrich Füssli, c. 1780-85 Published around 30 BCE, the second book of Satires is a series of poems composed in dactylic hexameter by the Roman poet Horace. Satires 2.5 stands out in the work for its unique analysis of legacy hunting.
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The adjective elegiac has two possible meanings. First, it can refer to something of, relating to, or involving, an elegy or something that expresses similar mournfulness or sorrow. Second, it can refer more specifically to poetry composed in the form of elegiac couplets. An elegiac couplet consists of one line of poetry in dactylic hexameter followed by a line in dactylic pentameter.
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219–226 Because of a reference to a recent political figure, his fifth and final surviving book must date from after 127. Juvenal wrote at least 16 poems in the verse form dactylic hexameter. These poems cover a range of Roman topics. This follows Lucilius--the originator of the Roman satire genre, and it fits within a poetic tradition that also includes Horace and Persius.
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In 1910, he received his doctorate from Otto Crusius in Munich with a thesis on the use of the dactylic hexameter in the ancient Greek comedy.Hermann Unger:Untersuchungen zur altattischen Komödie I. Der Gebrauch des daktylischen Hexameters Noske on WorldCat Borna-Leipzig 1911. In 1913 Unger came to Cologne as editor of the Rheinische Musik- und Theater-Zeitung. During World War I, he first came to Champagne.
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Engraved frontispiece of George Sandys’s 1632 London edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses Englished. The Metamorphoses, Ovid's most ambitious and well-known work, consists of a 15-book catalogue written in dactylic hexameter about transformations in Greek and Roman mythology set within a loose mytho-historical framework. The word "metamorphoses" is of Greek origin and means "transformations". Appropriately, the characters in this work undergo many different transformations.
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In 1944 in his capacity as a professor emeritus at Missouri and at age 80, he completed the translation of Homer's Iliad in the English equivalent of the Greek poet's original dactylic hexameter. It was the first such work ever published. Begun by Tulane colleague William Benjamin Smith this work was hailed as a "triumph of ingenuity." Five years later Miller died in Columbia, Missouri, one of the last of his generation of U.S classicists.
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Monument to Acadians, St. Martinville, Louisiana Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie is an epic poem by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, written in English and published in 1847. The poem follows an Acadian girl named Evangeline and her search for her lost love Gabriel, set during the time of the Expulsion of the Acadians. The idea for the poem came from Longfellow's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Longfellow used dactylic hexameter, imitating Greek and Latin classics.
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The Iliad (;"Iliad". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. , ', ; sometimes referred to as the Song of Ilion or Song of Ilium) is an ancient Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameter, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (Ilium) by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles.
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Ordo Urbium Nobilium is a Latin poem in dactylic hexameter by Decimus Magnus Ausonius.Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, p. 24 It was written after a journey Ausonius took through the Roman Empire between the years 388 and 390 AD. The poem lists brief descriptions of the major cities of the Roman Empire and ranks them from the most important to the least important. The ranking is as follows: 1\. Roma (Rome). 2\.
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Jean-Antoine de Baïf elaborated a system which used original graphemes for regulating French versification by quantity on the Greco-Roman model, a system which came to be known as vers mesurés, or vers mesurés à l'antique, which the French language of the Renaissance permitted. In works like his Étrénes de poézie Franzoęze an vęrs mezurés (1574)See, for example, Au Roi. or Chansonnettes he used dactylic hexameter, Sapphic stanzas, etc., in quantitative meters.
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Paul sees the church as a 'meadow' of many-coloured marbles, and helps us to imagine the church before its many subsequent remodellings. The poem was probably commissioned by Justinian himself, and Paul had to read verses to the emperor through the inauguration. It consists of 1029 verses in Greek, starting with 134 lines of iambic trimeter, with the remainder in the classical meter of epic, dactylic hexameter. He also wrote a poem about the hot springs at Pythia.
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Idyll XI, otherwise known as Bucolic poem 11, was written by Theocritus in dactylic hexameter. Its main character, the Cyclops Polyphemus, has appeared in other works of literature such as Homer's Odyssey, and Theocritus' Idyll VI. Idyll XI is written in the Doric dialect of ancient Greek. In that dialect, the Cyclops' name is "Polyphamos." The more familiar "Polyphemos" is the form in which he is known in the Odyssey, which is written in the Ionic dialect.
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Later Ovid produced his Metamorphoses, written in dactylic hexameter verse, the meter of epic, attempting a complete mythology from the creation of the earth to his own time. He unifies his subject matter through the theme of metamorphosis. It was noted in classical times that Ovid's work lacked the gravitas possessed by traditional epic poetry. Catullus and the associated group of neoteric poets produced poetry following the Alexandrian model, which experimented with poetic forms challenging tradition.
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The metrics of Nonnus have been widely admired by scholars for the poet's careful handling of dactylic hexameter and innovation.See Fornaro, col.813–814 While Homer has 32 varieties of hexameter lines, Nonnus only employs 9 variations, avoids elision, employs mostly weak caesurae, and follows a variety of euphonic and syllabic rules regarding word placement. It is especially remarkable that Nonnus was so exacting with meter because the quantitative meter of classical poetry was giving way in Nonnus' time to stressed meter.
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He argued that there were only two forms of verse capable of achieving the grand style. The first, he said, was heroic couplet or blank verse (The former consists of pairs of rhymed lines, while the latter is unrhymed. Both comprise lines ten syllables long, typically in iambic pentameter.Robert Burns Shaw, Blank Verse: A Guide to its History and Use (Ohio University Press, 2007), page 1) The second form he stated was dactylic hexameter (the form employed by Homer and Virgil).
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In composing this poem Lovato at times experienced difficulties mastering the language in describing his thoughts, which explains why certain passages sounded more like prose. The biblical references used were said to have tainted the classicising character of the poem. The second poem to Campagnino discussing about his plan to marry was in dactylic hexameter. The vocabulary Lovato employed in his poems at this time was generally classical in character, as well as displaying accurate use of metrics coherent with ancient models.
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He identified with, among others, Sappho and Alcaeus of Mytilene, composing Sapphic and Alcaic stanzas, and with Archilochus, composing poetic invectives in the Iambus tradition (in which he adopted the metrical form of the epode or "iambic distich"). Horace also wrote verses in dactylic hexameter, employing a conversational and epistolary style. Virgil, his contemporary, composed dactylic hexameters on light and serious themes and his verses are generally regarded as "the supreme metrical system of Latin literature".Richard F. Thomas, Virgil: Georgics Vol.
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London: Faber & Faber. Virgil worked on the Aeneid during the last eleven years of his life (29–19 BC), commissioned, according to Propertius, by Augustus. The epic poem consists of 12 books in dactylic hexameter verse which describe the journey of Aeneas, a warrior fleeing the sack of Troy, to Italy, his battle with the Italian prince Turnus, and the foundation of a city from which Rome would emerge. The Aeneid's first six books describe the journey of Aeneas from Troy to Rome.
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Horace composed some poems in the Alcmanian strophe or Alcmanian system, a couplet consisting of a dactylic hexameter followed by a dactylic tetrameter a posteriore (so called because it ends with a spondee, thus resembling the last four feet of the hexameter). Examples are Odes I.7 and I.28, and Epode 12 ("Quid tibi vis, mulier nigris dignissima barris? / munera quid mihi quidve tabellas"). Later Latin poets use the dactylic tetrameter a priore as the second verse of the Alcmanian strophe.
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Developed over centuries, pastoral elegies mourn a subject by representing the mourner and the subject as shepherds. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were known to imitate some of the conventions of traditional pastoral poetry, and many hundreds of years later, the pastoral elegy was still practiced by 19th- century Romantic and Victorian poets. History of elegies In classic literature, an elegy was simply any poem written in elegiac meter and was not restricted by its subject. Elegiac meter was considered alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and pentameter.
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Biceps is a point in a metrical pattern where a pair of short syllables can freely be replaced by a long one. In Greek and Latin poetry, it is found in the dactylic hexameter and the first half of a dactylic pentameter, and also in anapaestic metres. It is not to be confused with resolution, which is a phenomenon where a normally long syllable in a line is sometimes replaced by two shorts. Resolution is typically found in an iambic metre such as the iambic trimeter.
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The dactyl "out of the..." becomes a pulse that rides through the entire poem, often generating the beginning of each new line, even though the poem as a whole, as is typical for Whitman, is extremely varied and "free" in its use of metrical feet. Dactyls are the metrical foot of Greek and Latin elegiac poetry, which followed a line of dactylic hexameter with dactylic pentameter. In Joyce's Ulysses opening chapter Buck Mulligan quips that his own name is a dactyl. Mull-i-gan.
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Waltharius is a Latin epic poem founded on German popular tradition relating the exploits of the Visigothic hero Walter of Aquitaine. While its subject matter is taken from early medieval Germanic legend, the epic stands firmly in the Latin literary tradition in terms of its form and the stylistic devices used. Thus, its 1456 verses are written in dactylic hexameter (the traditional meter of Latin epic poetry) and the poem includes copious references to (and phrases borrowed from) various Latin epics of antiquity, especially Vergil's Aeneid.
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Theodore Metochites (1270–1332) was a Byzantine author and philosopher. His extant works comprises 20 Poems in dactylic hexameter, 18 orations (Logoi), Commentaries on Aristotle’s writings on natural philosophy, an introduction to the study of Ptolemaic astronomy (Stoicheiosis astronomike), and 120 essays on various subjects, the Semeioseis gnomikai. Mondino de Liuzzi (c. 1270-1326) was an Italian physician, surgeon, and anatomist from Bologna who was one of the first in Medieval Europe to advocate for the public dissection of cadavers for advancing the field of anatomy.
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III, page 133 The dream motif was borrowed by Aeschylus for his own version of the Clytemnestra character in Libation Bearers.G. Massimilla, Un sogno di Giocasta in Stesicoro? The fragment also has implications for our understanding of ancient scholarship, especially the manner in which poetic texts were transmitted. It was usual in ancient times for uniform verses to be written out in lines, as for example lines of dactylic hexameter in epic verse and iambic trimeter in drama, but lyric verses, which feature varying metrical units or cola, were written out like prose.
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Following his initial success with the "Elegy", he was especially admired for his first-rate melodious translations of German and English ballads. Among these, the ballad "Ludmila" (1808) and its companion piece "Svetlana" (1813) are considered landmarks in the Russian poetic tradition. Both are free translations of Gottfried August Burger's well-known German ballad "Lenore", although each renders the original in a completely different way. Characteristically, Zhukovsky later translated "Lenore" yet a third time as part of his lifelong effort to develop a natural-sounding Russian dactylic hexameter.
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The symbol ":" is used as punctuation. The second and third lines are in dactylic hexameter. The form of the first line is less certain: it has been read as prose, iambic trimeter, catalectic trochaic trimeter, or a lyric meter. The interpretation of the inscription depends on a lacuna in the first line: depending on how it is restored, the inscription may be contrasting the cup from Pithekoussai with the legendary cup of Nestor described in the Iliad (Iliad 11.632 ff.), or identifying the cup as one owned by Nestor.
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Joan Webber argues that these lines constitute a poem, in dactylic hexameter; David Novarr disputes this, arguing that Stationes "has none of Donne's customary wit, drama, and imagination". Instead, it represents the Stations of the Cross, or supplicatio stativa. Mary Arshagouni, writing in Modern Philology, argues that the stationes indeed constitute a poem – or, at least, something more than a mere table of contents. The Latin lines play off the English translations, and contain nuanced meaning not found in the English that better represents the sections to which they refer.
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The poem relies heavily on the theme of nostalgia as Catullus reflects on what he believes are better times in Roman history. He wrote the poem during a time of civil war in Rome, even referencing brothers' blood being drenched in brothers' blood in line 399. He looks back on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis as a time where Gods may come to a wedding, unlike the modern times he lived in. The meter of the poem is dactylic hexameter, the meter of epic poetry, such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid.
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The poem is written in 343 lines of dactylic hexameter, a poetic scheme often found in epic poetry of the period. It is written in Homeric Greek, with Christian or vernacular parts in later dialects of Koine Greek and incorporating many Latin loanwords.; Many expressions in the poem are conspicuously borrowed from Homer's own usage in the Illiad and Odyssey, alongside quotations from Hesiod and Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica.; The poetry includes many metric errors (with elongations and depressions in the poem, where the poet incorrectly identified vowel lengths).
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Her Books of Legends or Carmina liber primus was written in the 950s or 960s and was written in honor of Abbess Gerberga. It contains eight legends written in dactylic hexameter. Her most popular work was The Book of Drama, or Liber Secundus, which offered a Christian alternative to the work of the Roman playwright Terence. In contrast to Terence, who told stories about women who were weak and morally corrupt, Hrothsvitha stories were about virtuous virgins with a strong connection to God and who persevered through adversity.
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Annales (; Annals) is the name of a fragmentary Latin epic poem written by the Roman poet Ennius in the 2nd century BC. While only snippets of the work survive today, the poem's influence on Latin literature was significant. Although written in Latin, stylistically it borrows from the Greek poetic tradition, particularly the works of Homer, and is written in dactylic hexameter. The poem was significantly larger than others from the period, and eventually comprised 18 books. The subject of the poem is the early history of the Roman state.
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These works form the basis of the epic genre in Western literature. Nearly all of Western epic (including Virgil's Aeneid and Dante's Divine Comedy) self- consciously presents itself as a continuation of the tradition begun by these poems. Classical epic poetry employs a meter called dactylic hexameter and recounts a journey, either physical (as typified by Odysseus in the Odyssey) or mental (as typified by Achilles in the Iliad) or both. Epics also tend to highlight cultural norms and to define or call into question cultural values, particularly as they pertain to heroism.
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Many verse forms have been used in epic poems through the ages, but each language's literature typically gravitates to one form, or at least to a very limited set. Ancient Sumerian epic poems did not use any kind of poetic meter and lines did not have consistent lengths; instead, Sumerian poems derived their rhythm solely through constant repetition, with subtle variations between lines. Indo- European epic poetry, by contrast, usually places strong emphasis on the importance of line consistency and poetic meter. Ancient Greek and Latin poems were written in dactylic hexameter.
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A dactyl (; , dáktylos, “finger”) is a foot in poetic meter. In quantitative verse, often used in Greek or Latin, a dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables, as determined by syllable weight. In accentual verse, often used in English, it is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables—the opposite is the anapaest (two unstressed followed by a stressed syllable). An example of dactylic meter is the first line of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Evangeline, which is in dactylic hexameter: :This is the / forest prim- / eval.
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He wrote in the Doric dialect but the metre he chose was the dactylic hexameter associated with the most prestigious form of Greek poetry, epic. This blend of simplicity and sophistication would play a major part in later pastoral verse. Theocritus was imitated by the Greek poets Bion and Moschus. The Roman poet Virgil adapted pastoral into Latin with his highly influential Eclogues. Virgil introduces two very important uses of pastoral, the contrast between urban and rural lifestyles and political allegoryArticle on "Bucolic poetry" in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (1989) most notably in Eclogues 1 and 4 respectively.
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The source is attributed to the letter written by a father of an English soldier and politician Algernon Sidney: "It is said that the University of Copenhagen brought their album unto you, desiring you to write something therein; and that you did scribere in albo these words: 'Manus haec inimica tyrannis ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem'". (Translated, this means "This hand of mine, which is hostile to tyrants, seeks by the sword quiet peace under liberty.") The last words were then written in Sidney's "Book of Mottoes", particularly favored by some in the American colonies. Metrically, the motto is dactylic hexameter.
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The diverse body types, races, and sexualities are partly because of Fraction wanting to write characters his daughter could look up to, but they also function to ground the fanciful story in humanity. While doing research for the book, Fraction was most influenced by Odysseus in America by Jonathan Shay, Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, and Herodotus's The Histories. Other influences on the development of the comic include Barbarella, Jodorowsky, Heavy Metal comics, Cirque du Soleil, burlesque, and fetish. Most of the comic is written in dactylic hexameter like the original, but two issues are written entirely in limerick.
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His forceful version is freer, with shorter lines that increase the sense of swiftness and energy. Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, 1990) and Stanley Lombardo (1997) are bolder than Lattimore in adding dramatic significance to Homer's conventional and formulaic language. Rodney Merrill's translation (University of Michigan Press, 2007) not only renders the work in English verse like the dactylic hexameter of the original, but also conveys the oral- formulaic nature of the epic song, to which that musical meter gives full value. Barry B. Powell's translation (Oxford University Press, 2014) renders the Homeric Greek with a simplicity and dignity reminiscent of the original.
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Homeric Greek is the form of the Greek language that was used by Homer in the Iliad and Odyssey and in the Homeric Hymns. It is a literary dialect of Ancient Greek consisting mainly of Ionic and Aeolic, with a few forms from Arcadocypriot, and a written form influenced by Attic. It was later named Epic Greek because it was used as the language of epic poetry, typically in dactylic hexameter, by poets such as Hesiod and Theognis of Megara. Compositions in Epic Greek may date from as late as the 3rd century BC, but it disappeared with the rise of Koine Greek.
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The Annales was an epic poem in fifteen books, later expanded to eighteen, covering Roman history from the fall of Troy in 1184 BC down to the censorship of Cato the Elder in 184 BC. It was the first Latin poem to adopt the dactylic hexameter metre used in Greek epic and didactic poetry, leading it to become the standard metre for these genres in Latin poetry. The Annals became a school text for Roman schoolchildren, eventually supplanted by Virgil's Aeneid. About 600 lines survive. A copy of the work is among the Latin rolls of the Herculaneum library.
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A treatise on poetry by Diomedes Grammaticus is a good example, as this work (among other things) categorizes dactylic hexameter verses in ways that were later interpreted under the golden line rubric. Independently, these two trends show the form becoming highly artificial—more like a puzzle to solve than a medium for personal poetic expression. By the Middle Ages, some writers adopted more relaxed versions of the meter. Bernard of Cluny, for example, employs it in his De Contemptu Mundi, but ignores classical conventions in favor of accentual effects and predictable rhyme both within and between verses, e.g.
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Nonnus of Panopolis (, Nónnos ho Panopolítēs) was a Greek epic poet of Hellenized Egypt in the Imperial Roman era. He was a native of Panopolis (Akhmim) in the Egyptian Thebaid and probably lived in the 5th century AD. He is known as the composer of the Dionysiaca, an epic tale of the god Dionysus, and of the Metabole, a paraphrase of the Gospel of John. The epic Dionysiaca describes the life of Dionysus, his expedition to India, and his triumphant return to the west, it was written in Homeric dialect and in dactylic hexameter, and it consists of 48 books at 20,426 lines.
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BC) further refined the borrowings from the Greek stage and the prosody of their verse is substantially the same as for classical Latin verse.R.H. Martin, Terence: Adelphoe, Cambridge University Press (1976), pages 1 and 32. Ennius (239-169 BC), virtually a contemporary of Livius, introduced the traditional meter of Greek epic, the dactylic hexameter, into Latin literature; he substituted it for the jerky Saturnian meter in which Livius had been composing epic verses. Ennius moulded a poetic diction and style suited to the imported hexameter, providing a model for "classical" poets such as Virgil and Ovid.
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In Greek sources, the noun is mostly attested as (Makedôn) with two exceptions: the poetic form (Makêdôn) in Hesiod with long medial vowel serving the metrical feet of dactylic hexameter and (Mákednos) or latinicized Macednus with barytonesis and apophony in Apollodorus. The recessive accent is reminiscent of two Macedonian barytonized personal names, (Koînos) and (Bálakros) (Attic/Greek adjectives:koinós, phalakrós), but whether Makedôn or Mákednos is the original spelling presumably cannot be proven. Moreover, the suffix -dnos, either as the "Dorian Makednón ethnos" of Herodotus or makednós, a rare poetic epithet denoting tall, seems not to be attested in epigraphy, or used by Macedonians themselves. In Latin sources the noun is Macedo.
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The Homeric poems were composed in unrhymed dactylic hexameter; ancient Greek metre was quantity-based rather than stress-based. Homer frequently uses set phrases such as epithets ('crafty Odysseus', 'rosy-fingered Dawn', 'owl-eyed Athena', etc.), Homeric formulae ('and then answered [him/her], Agamemnon, king of men', 'when the early-born rose-fingered Dawn came to light', 'thus he/she spoke'), simile, type scenes, ring composition and repetition. These habits aid the extemporizing bard, and are characteristic of oral poetry. For instance, the main words of a Homeric sentence are generally placed towards the beginning, whereas literate poets like Virgil or Milton use longer and more complicated syntactical structures.
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Imminet imminet, ut mala terminet, æqua coronet, Recta remuneret, anxia liberet, æthera donet. ::(These current days are the worst of times: let us keep watch. Behold the menacing arrival of the Supreme Judge. He is coming, He is coming to end evil, crown the just, reward the right, set the worried free and grant eternal life.) As this example of tripartiti dactylici caudati (dactylic hexameter rhyming couplets divided into three) shows, the internal rhymes of leonine verse may be based on tripartition of the line (as opposed to a caesura in the center of the verse) and do not necessarily involve the end of the line at all.
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In Hesiod's Theogony, kings and poets receive their powers of authoritative speech from their possession of Mnemosyne and their special relationship with the Muses. Zeus, in a form of a mortal shepherd, and Mnemosyne slept together for nine consecutive nights, thus conceiving the nine Muses. Mnemosyne also presided over a poolRichard Janko, "Forgetfulness in the Golden Tablets of Memory", Classical Quarterly 34 (1984) 89–100; see article "Totenpass" for the reconstructed devotional which instructs the initiated soul through the landscape of Hades, including the pool of Memory. in Hades, counterpart to the river Lethe, according to a series of 4th-century BC Greek funerary inscriptions in dactylic hexameter.
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Polyxena Sarcophagus in Troy Museum, named after the depiction of the sacrifice of Polyxena, the last act of the Greeks at Troy. Map of the Troad, including the site of Troy Homeric Troy refers primarily to the city described in the Iliad, one of the earliest literary works in Europe. This is a long originally oral poem in its own dialect of ancient Greek in dactylic hexameter, in tradition composed by a blind poet of the Anatolian Greek coast, Homer. It covers the 10th year of a war against Troy conducted by a coalition of Achaean, or Greek, states under the leadership of a high king, Agamemnon of Mycenae.
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Aeneas Flees Burning Troy, by Federico Barocci (1598). Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy Map of Aeneas's journey The Aeneid ( ; ) is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It comprises 9,896 lines in dactylic hexameter. The first six of the poem's twelve books tell the story of Aeneas's wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem's second half tells of the Trojans' ultimately victorious war upon the Latins, under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed.
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Gerrit Engelke is best known for his anti-war poem An die Soldaten Des Grossen Krieges ("To the Soldiers of the Great War"), a poem in rhymed dactylic hexameter modeled after the Neo- Classical odes of Friedrich Hölderlin. In the ode, Engelke urges the soldiers of all the combatant nations to join hands together in universal brotherhood. An English translation exists by Patrick Bridgwater. Walter Flex Walter Flex, who is best known as the author of the war poem Wildgänse rauschen durch die Nacht and the novella Der Wanderer zwischen Beiden Welten, was a native of Eisenach, in the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and had attended the University of Erlangen.
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Iamblicus also attributes to Abaris a special expertise at extispicy, the art of predicting future events through the examination of anomalies in the entrails of animals."... and instead of divining by the entrails of beasts, he [Pythagoras] revealed to him the art of prognosticating by numbers conceiving this to be a method purer, more divine and more kindred to the celestial numbers of the Gods." from Iamblichus' Vita Pythagorica (trans. K. S. Guthrie). The Suda attributes a number of books to Abaris, including a volume of Scythian Oracles in dactylic hexameter, a prose theogony, a poem on the marriage of the river Hebrus, a work on purifications, and an account of Apollo's visit to the Hyperboreans.
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The metre of this poem is no less remarkable than its diction; it is a dactylic hexameter in three sections, with mostly bucolic caesura alone, with tailed rhymes and a feminine leonine rhyme between the two first sections; the verses are technically known as leonini cristati trilices dactylici, and are so difficult to construct in great numbers that the writer claims divine inspiration (the impulse and inflow of the Spirit of Wisdom and Understanding) as the chief agency in the execution of so long an effort of this kind. The poem begins: :Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt -- vigilemus. Ecce minaciter imminet arbiter ille supremus. Imminet imminet ut mala terminet, æqua coronet, Recta remuneret, anxia liberet, æthera donet.
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Petrarch, for example, devoted much time to his Africa, a dactylic hexameter epic on Scipio Africanus, but this work was unappreciated in his time and remains little read today. In contrast, Dante decided to write his epic, the Divine Comedy in Italian—a choice that defied the traditional epic choice of Latin dactylic hexameters—and produced a masterpiece beloved both then and now. With the New Latin period, the language itself came to be regarded as a medium only for "serious" and learned expression, a view that left little room for Latin poetry. The emergence of Recent Latin in the 20th century restored classical orthodoxy among Latinists and sparked a general (if still academic) interest in the beauty of Latin poetry.
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That agrees with metrical evidence in the Iliad that the name ᾽Ιλιον (Ilion) for Troy was formerly Ϝιλιον (Wilion) with a digamma."Metrical evidence" is a specialized term from the study of Greek poetry. Where English poetry constructs its metric feet from emphasized and unemphasized syllables:"Listen my children and you shall hear ...," ancient Greek uses long and short syllables, the length being determined according to the sequence of long and short vowels and clusters of consonants. Homer wrote his poetry in dactylic hexameter: "Menin aeide thea ...." From the fact that some syllables are treated as long when they should be short leads the linguists to conclude that an initial "w" was dropped at some time after composition: Ilion for former Wilion.
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R. H. Martin, Terence: Adelphoe, Cambridge University Press (1976), page 1 The principles of scansion observed by Plautus and Terence (i.e. the rules for identifying short and long syllables, the basis of Greek and Latin meter) are mostly the same as for classical Latin verses.Two significant differences are that word-final s may not be counted as making a heavy syllable, and mute-plus-liquid combinations never make a syllable heavy. R. H. Martin, Terence: Adelphoe, Cambridge University Press (1976), page 32 Livius, a versatile author, also translated Homer's Odyssey into a rugged native meter known as Saturnian, but it was his near contemporary, Ennius (239–169 BC), who introduced the traditional meter of Greek epic, the dactylic hexameter, into Latin literature.
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The Epic Cycle (, Epikos Kyklos) was a collection of Ancient Greek epic poems, composed in dactylic hexameter and related to the story of the Trojan War, including the Cypria, the Aethiopis, the so-called Little Iliad, the Iliupersis, the Nostoi, and the Telegony. Scholars sometimes include the two Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, among the poems of the Epic Cycle, but the term is more often used to specify the non-Homeric poems as distinct from the Homeric ones. Unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, the cyclic epics survive only in fragments and summaries from Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period. The Epic Cycle was the distillation in literary form of an oral tradition that had developed during the Greek Dark Age, which was based in part on localised hero cults.
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The poem consists of six untitled books, in dactylic hexameter. The first three books provide a fundamental account of being and nothingness, matter and space, the atoms and their movement, the infinity of the universe both as regards time and space, the regularity of reproduction (no prodigies, everything in its proper habitat), the nature of mind (animus, directing thought) and spirit (anima, sentience) as material bodily entities, and their mortality, since, according to Lucretius, they and their functions (consciousness, pain) end with the bodies that contain them and with which they are interwoven. The last three books give an atomic and materialist explanation of phenomena preoccupying human reflection, such as vision and the senses, sex and reproduction, natural forces and agriculture, the heavens, and disease. Venus (center), urging her to pacify her lover, Mars (right).
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Similar laws which have been discovered in the dactylic hexameter are that if a word ends the fifth or fourth foot it is almost never, or only rarely, a spondee (– –). The philologist W. Sidney Allen suggested an explanation for all these laws in that it is possible that the last long syllable in any Greek word had a slight stress; if so, then to put a stress on the first element of the last iambic metron, or the second element of the 4th or fifth dactylic foot in a hexameter, would create an undesirable conflict of ictus and accent near the end of the line.W. Sidney Allen (1974) Vox Graeca (2nd edition), pp. 120-123. An alternative hypothesis, supported by Devine and Stephens in their book The Prosody of Greek Speech,A.
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Bodmer dubbed the Nibelungenlied the "German Iliad" ("deutsche Ilias"), a comparison that skewed the reception of the poem by comparing it to the poetics of classical epic. Bodmer attempted to make the Nibelungenlied conform more closely to these principles in his own reworkings of the poem, leaving off the first part in his edition, titled Chriemhilden Rache, in order to imitate the in medias res technique of Homer. He later rewrote the second part in dactylic hexameter under the title Die Rache der Schwester (1767). Bodmer's placement of the Nibelungenlied in the tradition of classical epic had a detrimental effect on its early reception: when presented with a full edition of the medieval poem by Christoph Heinrich Myller, King Frederick II famously called the Nibelungenlied "not worth a shot of powder" ("nicht einen Schuß Pulver werth").
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First page of the Bodmer Papyrus of the Vision of Dorotheus, containing lines 1–41 The Vision of Dorotheus or Dorotheos () is an autobiographical Homeric Greek poem, composed in 343 lines of dactylic hexameter and attributed to "Dorotheus, son of Quintus the Poet". The poem chronicles a vision, wherein the author is transported to the Kingdom of Heaven and finds himself in its military hierarchy. He is conscripted into and deserts his post, only to receive punishment, be forgiven, and rediscover his Christian faith. The poem, penned sometime in the 4th-century, depicts the Kingdom of Heaven in an Imperial fashion; Christ is enthroned as emperor, surrounded by angels bearing Roman military and official titles (such as domestikos, praipositos, primikerios, and ostiarios), with the military structures of the Kingdom of Heaven modelled on those of Rome.
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The Political verse characterizes traditional Greek poetry, especially between 1100 and 1850. It is the verse in which most Greek folk songs are written, including such temporally distant works as the medieval Cretan romance "Erotokritos" and the 3rd draft of Dionysios Solomos' "The Free Besieged", considered the masterpiece of modern Greek poetry. It is thought that the political verse replaced, in popularity and also in use, the famous dactylic hexameter of the ancient Greeks (also known as "heroic hexameter") in later Greek poetry, from the time of the early modern Greek, following the loss of ancient prosody and pitch accent, being ideally suited to its replacement, stress accent. This metric form comes "natural" in modern Greek (that is the common Greek, spoken after the 9th or 10th century to the present day), and it is extremely easy to form a "poem" or a "distich" in political verse, almost without a thought.
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The inscription is composed in dactylic hexameters (lines 1-6), with scriptio plena (line 3 δὲ ἐπάτησα Ἀπολλωνίαν = δ' ἐπάτησ' Ἀπολλωνίαν) and containing some awkward or missing features (particularly in line 3, where apparent short υ is to be read in Δυρράχιν unless emended as below to omit καὶ and read Δυρράχιον; and short o with long ι in Ἀπολλωνίαν, so emended below to Ἀπολωνίαν). There are missing syllables in line 5 (either u u - immediately before or after τὸ φάος, or at the end of the line as shown below). There is an apparent attempt at ending the verse with an elegiac couplet (6-7, dactylic hexameter followed by dactylic pentameter), but this would only be metrically successful and preserve the intended sense with deletions as shown below; as it stands the dactylic pentameter is distorted by the addition of a medial choriamb (τῷ θανάτῳ). With metrical division of the lines, the inscription may be laid out as follows: χοῖρος ὁ πᾶσι φίλος, τετράπους νέος, ἐνθάδε κεῖμαι Δαλματίης δάπεδον προλιπὼν δῶρον προσενεχθείς, [καὶ] Δυρράχιν δ' ἐπάτησ' Ἀπολ[λ]ωνίαν τε ποθήσας καὶ πᾶσαν γαίην διέβην ποσὶ μοῦνος ἄλιπτος νῦν δὲ τροχοῖο βίῃ τὸ φάος προλέλοιπα < u - -> (5) Ἠμαθίην δὲ ποθῶν κατιδεῖν φαλλοῖο δὲ ἅρμα [ἐνθάδε] νῦν κεῖμαι [τῷ] θανάτῳ μηκέτ’ ὀφειλόμενος.
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