Editing Dactylic hexameter (section)

====Hyperbaton====
It is common in poetry for adjectives to be widely separated from their nouns, and quite often one adjective–noun pair is interleaved with another. This feature is known as [[hyperbaton]] "stepping over". An example is the opening line of Lucan's epic on the Civil War:

:{{lang|la|<u>bella</u> per Emathios – plus quam <u>civilia</u> – campos}}
:"Wars through the Emathian – more than civil – plains"

Another example is the opening of Ovid's mythological poem [[Metamorphoses]] where the word {{lang|la|nova}} "new" is in a different line from {{lang|la|corpora}} "bodies" which it describes:

:{{lang|la|in <u>nova</u> fert animus mutatas dicere formas / <u>corpora</u>}} (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.1)
:"My spirit leads me to tell of forms transformed into new bodies."

One particular arrangement of words that seems to have been particularly admired is the [[golden line]],<ref>The term {{lang|la|aureus versus}} was first used in print in 1612: John Owen, epigram 5.51.</ref> a line which contains two adjectives, a verb, and two nouns, with the first adjective corresponding to the first noun such as:

:{{lang|la|<u>barbara</u>qu(e) horribili stridebat <u>tibia</u> cantu}}<ref>Catullus, 64.265.</ref>
:"and the barbarian pipe was strident with horrible music"

Catullus was the first to use this kind of line, as in the above example. Later authors used it rarely (1% of lines in Ovid), but in silver Latin it became increasingly popular.<ref>Heikkinen (2015), p. 61.</ref>