"I sing of arms, and of the man who first from the shores of Troy ..."

The scansion is generally marked as follows, by placing long and short marks above the central vowel of each syllable:
:

In dactylic verse, short syllables always come in pairs, so words such as milites "soldiers" or facilius "more easily" cannot be used in a hexameter, although the substitutes "warrior" and "easier" could be.

Syllables

Unlike English verse, which is based on stress, ancient Greek and Latin poetry is based

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