Practice the art of scanning lines of ancient poetry.
Hexameter is the standard pattern of long and short syllables used by the Romans and Greeks for writing epic poetry. Learning the proper metrical structure of a line (and there are 16 different possibilities) is key to understanding the poetry, because ancient poetry was meant to be heard, not just read. In classical hexameter, the six feet follow somewhat standard rules. Click here to learn more about them.
This site helps you learn, practice, and master this skill.
We have a variety of different authors that is only growing, from Vergil to Ovid to Lucretius, and more to come.
And if you are an AP Latin student, you can also practice just those lines that you'll see on the exam.
Learn more about the authors we have available.
It's not enough to just scan, it's more important to scan lines of Latin appropriate to you and at your level. We have lines at all levels, and our database will only grow as more and more people use this site.
If you'd like to learn more about how we measure the strength of lines and users, visit our page on Rating and RD.
It's one thing to tout the benefits of an unproven model, but it's another to show that it works. To the right you will see the progression of a student from just learning the rules to having hundreds of lines of practice. The two major benefits of this site are repetition and feedback, along with adapting as you grow.
This graph shows the rating progression of a user of our site as they learn how to scan harder and harder lines.
We have powerful tools to help you learn better, easier, and quicker:
(70 - 19 BCE) Commonly known as Rome's greatest poet, Vergil wrote three works, the Eclogues, Georgics, and the Aeneid, Rome's national epic, all in hexameter.
(43 BCE - 17/18 CE) Publius Ovidius Naso is most famous for his mythological epic, the Metamorphoses. "My mind compels me to speak of forms changed into new bodies."
(99 - 55 BCE) A poet and philosopher, Lucretius wrote De Rerum Natura in order to transmit the ideas of Epicurean philosophy to the Roman elite.
(8th or 7th century BCE) The author of the Iliad and Odyssey, two of the greatest epics in the history of the world and likely oral, rather than written, works of poetry.
The poetry part of the AP syllabus consists of 844 lines from Vergil's Aeneid, Books 1, 2, 4, and 6.
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