Hexameter in the context of "Metrical foot"

Aratus (/əˈreɪtəs/; Ancient Greek: Ἄρατος ὁ Σολεύς; c. 315/310  – 240 BC) was a Greek didactic poet. His major extant work is his hexameter poem Phenomena (Ancient Greek: Φαινόμενα, Phainómena, "Appearances"; Latin: Phaenomena), the first half of which is a verse setting of a lost work of the same name by Eudoxus of Cnidus. It describes the constellations and other celestial phenomena. The second half is called the Diosemeia (Διοσημεῖα "Forecasts"), and is chiefly about weather lore. Although Aratus was somewhat ignorant of Greek astronomy, his poem was very popular in the Greek and Roman world, as is proven by the large number of commentaries and Latin translations, some of which survive.

Hermann and Dorothea is an epic poem, an idyll, written by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe between 1796 and 1797, and was to some extent suggested by Johann Heinrich Voss's Luise, an idyll in hexameters, which was first published in 1782–1784. Goethe's work is set around 1792 at the beginning of the French Revolutionary Wars, when French forces under General Custine invaded and briefly occupied parts of the Palatinate. The hexameters of the nine cantos are at times irregular.

With the poem as his source, Robert Schumann composed an overture in B minor entitled Hermann and Dorothea, his Op. 136. The overture dates from 1851.

Saturnian meter or verse is an old Latin and Italic poetic form, of which the principles of versification have become obscure. Only 132 complete uncontroversial verses survive. 95 literary verses and partial fragments have been preserved as quotations in later grammatical writings, as well as 37 verses in funerary or dedicatory inscriptions. The majority of literary Saturnians come from the Odysseia (more commonly known as the Odissia or Odyssia), a translation/paraphrase of Homer's Odyssey by Livius Andronicus (c. 3rd century BC), and the Bellum Poenicum, an epic on the First Punic War by Gnaeus Naevius (c. 3rd century BC).

The meter was moribund by the time of the literary verses and forgotten altogether by classical times, falling out of use with the adoption of the hexameter and other Greek verse forms. Quintus Ennius is the poet who is generally credited with introducing the Greek hexameter in Latin, and dramatic meters seem to have been well on their way to domestic adoption in the works of his approximate contemporary Plautus. These Greek verse forms were considered more sophisticated than the native tradition; Horace called the Saturnian horridus ('rude'). Consequently, the poetry in this meter was not preserved. Cicero regretted the loss in his Brutus:

The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590–96). Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is${\displaystyle \mathrm {ABABBCBCC} }$.

Aedesia (Ancient Greek: Αἰδεσία) was a philosopher of the Neoplatonic school who lived in Alexandria in the fifth century AD. She was a relation of Syrianus and the wife of Hermias, and was equally celebrated for her beauty and her virtues. After the death of her husband, she devoted herself to relieving the wants of the distressed and the education of her children, Ammonius and Heliodorus. She accompanied the latter to Athens, where they went to study philosophy, and was received with great distinction by all the philosophers there, and especially by Proclus, to whom she had been betrothed by Syrianus, when she was quite young. She lived to a considerable age, and her funeral oration was pronounced by Damascius, who was then a young man, in hexameter verses.

The Sibylline Books (Latin: Libri Sibyllini) were a collection of oracular utterances, set out in Greek hexameter verses, that, according to tradition, were purchased from a sibyl by the last king of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, and consulted at momentous crises through the history of the Roman Republic and the Empire.

Only fragments have survived, the rest being lost or deliberately destroyed. The Sibylline Books are not the same as the Sibylline Oracles, which are fourteen books and eight fragments of prophecies thought to be of Judaeo-Christian origin.

Dionysius Periegetes (Ancient Greek: Διονύσιος ὁ Περιηγητής, literally Dionysius the Voyager or Traveller, often Latinized to Dionysius Periegeta), also known as Dionysius of Alexandria or Dionysius the African, was the author of a description of the then-known world in Greek hexameter verse. He is believed to have been from Alexandria and to have lived around the time of Hadrian (r. 117–138), though some date his lifetime as late as the end of the 3rd century.

The work enjoyed popularity in ancient times as a schoolbook. It was translated into Latin by Rufius Festus Avienius, and by the grammarian Priscian. Archbishop Eustathius of Thessalonica wrote a commentary on his work for John Doukas.

The Liber maiolichinus de gestis pisanorum illustribus ("Majorcan Book of the Deeds of the Illustrious Pisans") is a Medieval Latin epic chronicle in 3,500 hexameters, written between 1117 and 1125, detailing the Pisan-led joint military expedition of Italians, Catalans, and Occitans against the taifa of the Balearic Islands, in particular Majorca and Ibiza, in 1113–5. The commune of Pisa commissioned it, and its anonymous author was probably a cleric. It survives in three manuscripts. The Liber is notable for containing the earliest known reference to "Catalans" (Catalanenses), treated as an ethnicity, and to "Catalonia" (Catalania), as their homeland.

The Liber, which is the most important primary source for the brief conquest of the Balearics, portrays the expedition as motivated by a desire to free Christian captives held as slaves by the Muslims and to curtail Muslim piracy "from Spain to Greece." Christian zeal is stressed no less than civic pride, and the account of the 1113 expedition is prefaced by a history of Pisan–Muslim conflicts in the eleventh century. The Liber is also the earliest source for the raid of the Norwegian king Sigurd Jorsalfar on Formentera, one of the Balearic islands and a hotbed of piracy.

Anders Sunesen (also Andreas, Suneson, Sunesøn, Latin: Andreas Sunonis) (c. 1167 – 1228) was a Danish archbishop of Lund, Scania, from 21 March 1201, at the death of Absalon, to his own death in 1228.

He is the author of the Latin translation of the Scanian Law and was throughout his life engaged in integrating a Christian worldview into the old legislature. He managed to introduce tithe (taxation benefiting the church) despite the resistance this measure had met from the population of Scania during Absalon's time, but his efforts to convince the priests of his day about the merits of celibacy was based mostly on his own example and relied on oratory rather than legal maneuvering. To educate the priests and to forward his ideas, especially about the integration between church and state, he wrote a didactic poem, Hexaëmon, consisting of 8,040 verses of Latin hexameter.