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I'm John Baxter visiting with professors Scott McGill and Susanna Wright, their new translation of the Aeneid by Virgil, written in the first century BCE in Latin, with Greek in it, is now in English, and therein lies the tales.

Susanna, I come to you, iambic pentameter as opposed to dactylic hexameter.

What is the choice you must make and what are the sacrifices, what are the gains?

Thank you.

Yes, thank you, John.

So, firstly, the major difference is the number of metrical units per line. So when we speak to

dactylic hexameter, the hexameter means we have six metrical feet in iambic pentameter,

we have five metrical feet. And then the difference between dactylic and iambic speaks to

the kind of quality of those feet. So dactylic hexaminer is built around a unit called a dactyl

that is long, short, short. Iambic pentameter is built around a unit that is essentially,

we can think of it as short, long, although in English we're also working with a metrical

system that is based on syllable stress rather than length.

Length was the operative kind of metrical factor in the ancient world.

So dactylic hexameter is the standard meter of epic poetry in both Greek and Latin.

It's a meter that carried a lot of cultural weight and significance.

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