Response: Dactylic Hexameter

I already commented on Alyssa's post yesterday, but I also wrote this and was going to post it as another comment, but it got a bit long, so I thought I would put it here. As Alyssa mentioned, Dactylic Hexameter is certainly the meter of epics--Homer, Virgil, and Ovid all wrote in it, as well as many not-as-famous people. I've studied it before (with my mother--I think I've mentioned before that she likes ancient Greek and Roman stuff), but I didn't really remember what it was, so I wanted to look it up. I think it is interesting information, so I am posting it.
"Dactylos" is the Greek word for "finger," and thus the "dactyl" part of dactylic hexameter is a pattern of beats that looks like a finger. It consists of one long beat and two short beats. The website I learned this from had a nice picture showing this. The -- means a long beat, the curved symbol means a short beat. The word on the bottom is "dactylos" written in the Greek alphabet.
Since it is "Hexameter," of course, it has six different dactyls of long-short-short per line. However, it would be difficult to write an entire epic poem that conformed exactly to this rhythm, because epics are really, really long. Because of this, a lot of times dactyls are replaced by something called a "spondee," a Greek word for "libation" (I have no idea why it is called this). A spondee consists of two long syllables, so it is the same length as the dactyl. The last dactyl in each line is almost always replaced by a spondee or even a shortened spondee. The fifth dactyl in the line almost always stays a dactyl. With the others, it depends on the line.

I couldn't find an example from Ovid, so here is the first line of Virgil's Aeneid.
Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
I sing of arms and a man, who first, from the shores Troy...

If we divide this up we get (courtesy of Wikipedia. I don't speak Latin): '
(dactyl, dactyl, spondee, spondee, dactyl, spondee)
Arma vir/umque ca/no, Troi/ae qui /primus ab /oris

Latin poetry doesn't bother with rhyming like English poetry does, since because of how the word endings work (it has case markers, for those of you that know what those are), it is really, really easy to rhyme in Latin, so it is not important to. Meter, on the other hand, is not automatic, so this is why it is so important.

Sources: 1, 2, 3