The fact that they copied the form in which the heathen revelations were conveyed (Greek hexameter verses) and the Homeric language is evidence of a degree of external Hellenization, which is an important fact in the history of post-exilic Judaism.
Ennius prided himself especially on being the first to form the strong speech of Latium into the mould of the Homeric hexameter in place of the old Saturnian metre.
The longest, Theriaca, is an hexameter poem (958 lines) on the nature of venomous animals and the wounds which they inflict.
His oracles, of which specimens are extant in Herodotus and Pausanias, were written in hexameter verse, and were considered to have been strikingly fulfilled.
Varro was also the author of a Cosmographia, or Chorographia, a geographical poem imitated from the Greek of Eratosthenes or of Alexander of Ephesus, surnamed Lychnus; and of an Ephemeris, a hexameter poem on weather-signs after Aratus, from which Virgil has borrowed.
If either premise is particular, the conclusion must be particular .3 2 The following mnemonic hexameter verses are generally given (first apparently in Aldrich's Artis logicae rudimenta) to aid in remembering these moods.
There is a well-known hexameter summing up this division: Judex, judicium, clerus, connubia, crimen.
Yet he could not have been insensible to the immense superiority in rhythmical smoothness which the hexameter of Lucretius has over that of Ennius and Lucilius.
In his translation he discarded the native Saturnian metre, and adopted the iambic, trochaic and cretic metres, to which Latin more easily adapted itself than either to the hexameter or to the lyrical measures of a later time.
Even the metre - the hexameter verse - may be assigned to them.