This chapter covers the general features of the Homeric hexameter and the most famous debates therein, before asking the more general question as to what was the usefulness of meter for oral-traditional poets. Section 1 introduces the metrical scheme of the hexameter (including incisions and bridges), the principles of scansion and syllabification. Section 2 explores the colometry of the hexameter, and introduces the prosodic hierarchy. It also employs intonational data to argue tha the Homeric hexameter coincided with an intonational phrase, and its cola mostly with phonological phrases, and provides a new prosodic account of enjambement in Homer. Section 3 covers previous attempt at establishing the historical origin of the hexameter, arguing that the account of Kiparsky 2018 is the most promising. Section 4 looks at the speech of professional sportscasters, and argues that it shows several types of prosodic regularization that is akin to a basic type of meter. Extensive prosodic regularization diminishes the options available to a speaker, making it easier to sustain high levels of fluency. Meter arguably fulfilled a similar task in oral-traditional composition in performance.

Against an earlier tendency to separate out the texts of oracles from the literary works that preserve them, recent scholarship on Herodotus has increasingly focused attention on the very tight way in which oracular responses are integrated into the narrative contexts that surround them. In order better to conceptualize such phenomena, scholars are increasingly employing the category of “oracular tales,” that is, stories in which (normally Delphic) oracles form an integral part of the narrative texture. The present contribution seeks to pursue this line of enquiry further in an attempt at determining what the use of oracular responses in metric form can tell us about the tradition of oral narrative that Herodotus’ Histories are based upon.

This chapter deals not with a single form or genre, but with the satiric, invective or humourous use of several. As it happens, the patterns of previous scholarship have proved particularly distorting in relation to Anglo-Latin satiric verse, with neo-Latin scholars tending to focus on Renaissance versions of the classical Roman genre of hexameter satire, typicallyinterpreted in terms of ‘Horatian’ vs ‘Juvenalian’ (less often Persian) style. In England, however, there were almost no examples of this genre of satiric verse until the early eighteenth century. This chapter takes a different approach, attempting to survey the various ways in which Anglo-Latin verse of various genres and formsfunctioned as satire or invective, focusing in particular on satiric epigram, iambic verse, rhyming verse and various kinds of 'free' or experimental poetry. In this way, the chapter offers a guide to the main ways in which Latin verse was used for humourous, satiric and invective purposes in early modern England, with attention to changing patterns over time.

This chapter examines the culture of Homeric reception in the late Hellenistic period through the vehicle of one fascinating, important and under-considered text: the third Sibylline Oracle – a largely Jewish work which contains a fiery attack against Homer, where the Sibyl accuses him of lying about the Trojan war and stealing her verses and metre. After setting this passage in the wider context of local and cosmopolitan traditions concerning both the Sibyl and Homer’s constructed identities, I then use close reading to argue that the critique contained within the Sibyl’s anti-Homeric rant (much more sustained, erudite and witty than the scholarship has previously allowed) has much in common with both Hellenistic and imperial modes of Homeric response: it blends elements familiar from earlier Alexandrian exegesis and later Second Sophistic revisionism. Read in this way, the passage stands as a remarkable witness to the shared concerns and reading practices across different ‘periods’ (Hellenistic and imperial), genres (poetry and prose) and religious cultures (pagan and Jewish) during this pivotal time.

This chapter takes a holistic approach to Xenophanes’ fragments, investigating the responses and interpretations they invite by drawing upon their literary and performative contexts as well as the wider context of Xenophanes’ philosophy. The hexameter and elegiac fragments are analysed against their respective genres and, in particular, the different ways in which the two genres typically construct the authority of the narrator. Against the view that verse was inessential to Xenophanes’ message, it is argued that his metres and other formal features participate in particular generic traditions through which they convey a message in at least three respects. First, they imply certain claims, such as that the single god is worthy of hymnic veneration. Second, they contribute to emotive effects, for instance, in D61=B2, by conjuring a sense of injustice that athletic prowess is valued over wisdom. Third, they invite certain distinctive types of interpretation. Additionally, this chapter discusses the well-known criticisms of Homer and Hesiod, arguing that they are targeted primarily against the pernicious societal influence of the canonical poems rather than their factual inaccuracy.