Editing Dactylic hexameter (section)

===Silver Age and Late Empire===

The verse innovations of the Augustan writers were carefully imitated by their successors in the Silver Age of [[Latin literature]]. The verse form itself then was little changed as the quality of a poet's hexameter was judged against the standard set by Virgil and the other Augustan poets, a respect for literary precedent encompassed by the Latin word ''{{lang|la|aemulātiō}}''.<ref>E.g., the younger Pliny, in referring to an orator who prided himself on not attempting to rival Cicero, replied, ''{{lang|la|Est enim ... mihi cum Cicerōne aemulātiō, nec sum contentus ēloquentiā saeculī nostrī; nam stultissimum crēdō ad imitandum nōn optima quaeque prōpōnere.}}'' ("I do attempt to emulate Cicero, as I am not content with the eloquence of our age; I think it's idiotic not to imitate the best examples.") – ''Letters'' I.5.12–3</ref> Deviations were generally regarded as idiosyncrasies or hallmarks of personal style and were not imitated by later poets. [[Juvenal]], for example, was fond of occasionally creating verses that placed a sense break between the fourth and fifth foot (instead of in the usual caesura positions), but this technique—known as the bucolic diaeresis—did not catch on with other poets.

In the late empire, writers experimented again by adding unusual restrictions to the standard hexameter. The rhopalic<ref>from the Greek {{lang|grc|ῥόπᾰλον}} {{grc-transl|ῥόπᾰλον}} "a club", which is narrow at one end and gets wider.</ref> verse of [[Ausonius]] is a good example; besides following the standard hexameter pattern, each word in the line is one syllable longer than the previous, e.g.:

:{{lang|la|Spēs, deus, / aeter/nae stati/ōnis / concili/ātor,}}
:{{lang|la|sī cas/tīs preci/bus veni/ālēs / invigi/lāmus,}}
:{{lang|la|hīs, pater, / ōrā/tis plā/cābili/s adstipu/lāre.}}<ref>Ausonius, {{lang|la|Oratio Consulis Ausonii Versibus Rhopalicis}}.</ref>

:"O God, Hope of Eternal Life, Conciliator,
:if, with chaste entreaties, hoping for pardon, we keep vigil,
:look kindly on us and grant these prayers."

Also notable is the tendency among late grammarians to thoroughly dissect the hexameters of Virgil and earlier poets. A treatise on poetry by [[Diomedes Grammaticus]] is a good example, as this work 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.