Ah, the fun of poetic metre.
In the past, poetry was based upon the arrangement of stresses within the words contained in a line (I'll cover a complication in a little moment). Specific rhythmic arrangements of stresses, and their number, all have their own terms, known as
meters. Rhyme was a much later development, and one that appears to be peculiar to English (unless someone else here knows better).
Possibly the canonical example of ancient poetry relying upon metre is Virgil's
Aeneid, consisting of 12 books written entirely in dactylic hexameter. This form has six stresses arranged in a particular order. Stresses usually (but not always) fall upon long syllables, and so, the arrangement of syllables is important in metric poetry. A long syllable followed by two short syllables is a
dactyl (-..), a
spondee is two long syllables (--), and a trochee is a long syllable followed by a short syllable (-.) Each of these groups of syllables is known as a
metrical foot.
Consequently, hexameter poetry has six metrical feet, and dactylic hexameter has those six feet arranged in a particular pattern. that pattern usually consists of five dactyls, followed by a spondee or trochee for the sixth of the metrical feet, though some works in dactylic hexameter also permit the substitution of spondees in the first four positions.
Strict dactylic hexameter has the following arrangement of metrical feet:
-.. -.. -.. -.. -.. {-- or -.}
Poetry conforming to this specification was possible in Latin, because Latin is a completely inflected language, where meaning is conveyed by spelling changes, and therefore there is considerable freedom of word position in a sentence. You can change the word order in a Latin sentence without destroying meaning, because the precise grammatical function of each word is conveyed explicitly by systematic spelling changes for each different function. There were some rules for word order that applied in Latin, but these rules were pretty fluid as a result of the existence of complete inflection.
Languages that have
lost complete inflection, of which English is a canonical example, make life
much harder for any poet striving to apply metre. Rhyme, on the other hand is uniquely facilitated by English.
Now for a complicating factor. Classical Greek also features metre in its poetry, but in this case, one also has to take into account that Classical Greek placed emphasis upon
musical pitch instead of stress for emphasis. Classical Greek has its own rules for the placement of accents denoting pitch changes in the pronunciation of a word (though these rules were, if one is to be rigorous, invented much later to make life easier for non-native Greek speakers and readers - I've covered the hilarity of how Greek was written in the 5th century BCE in another post). Just to make life harder if you delve into Greek poetry in the original, there are several different systems, not only for different literary genres (comedy, epic poetry, lyric poetry etc) but different systems for varying Greek dialects (the Homeric dialect used in
The Odyssey and
The Iliad stands out as something of an outlier - this was a composite formulated by Homer explicitly for the composition of epic works).
The above should explain why learning to read a wide range of works in the original Greek is a lifetime occupation.
As an aside, it should be noted that Enoch Powell, of "rivers of blood" fame, was, outside of his political life, an extremely diligent Greek scholar. However much you may despise his politics, you cannot subtract from him the effort he expended within the field of Classical Greek scholarship. Indeed, one of the projects he was working on prior to his death, was a complete re-examination from scratch, of the Koiné Greek texts used to compile the New Testament. Though the fun and games involved in the use of Koiné Greek for the New Testament is deserving of its own dedicated encyclopaedia, given the twists and turns that have been uncovered by two millennia of scholarship, including the non-trivial business of determining whether, for example, marks on original documents were simply blemishes in the papyrus medium, or actual iota subscripts intended to be in place by the authors. That one has caused
many headaches over the years.