On the point of pentameter and other ancient writing quirks. It’s because writing was expensive and not really that common. Ink, paper, quill. It all had to be painstakingly made by hand. Then all the training on reading and writing was a huge time investment as well. So it was relegated to the high classes. And slaves, they used slaves as scribes and basically as personal computers.

So, most of culturally relevant works were actually poems. Lacking writing tools, long passages of texts are hard to memorize. But, poems in regular rhyme and accompanied by structured melodies are actually very easy to memorize. The Odyssey was one such a song.

A master could teach his disciples the words and melody of extraordinarily long passages of information. Names, history, dates, myths, moral essays, by teaching the song. Performing the different passages several times allowed memorization and then they could perform this either for entertainment or for study and analysis via rethorical discussion. This oral tradition is how we have theater plays, stories and songs from 5 thousand years ago. We are pretty certain today that Homer didn’t wholly originally wrote the Illiad and the Odyssey. He belonged to this oral tradition and put it down into writing. Something that might have been seen as unnecessary at the time, for text was relegated to legal documents and treatises and court proceedings.

EDIT: Here’s a practical demonstration. Write down the lyrics for Mr. Brightside. Chances are that you know them by heart.

I apologise for the incoming off-topic… it’s just that you mentioned Latin works, I fucking love it.

Two, the Roman’s also hated writing normally, expect lines and wacky rhyming schemes.

It’s less that they “hated writing normally”, and more that texts were made for a specific purpose and target audience, and the ones written “normally” didn’t catch much attention. But they do exist - and we have surviving counter-examples, like

• Caesar’s De Bello Gallico - he was being concise and clear. It’s a military report, not fancy pants poetry.
• anything Cicero - he wrote a spaghetti, but he wasn’t writing something catchy-sounding so the masses would remember and follow it, it was mostly philosophy geared towards educated speakers. The content mattered more than the form.

But not even for poetry the Romans used wacky rhyming schemes. Rhymes in Latin sound boring, because most words will end with a handful of sounds - it’s too easy to pick a word that rhymes with another. Instead they did some fancy stuff with the metrics, capitalising on short vs. long syllables to create aesthetic effects. I’ll exemplify it with one of my favourite poems. Bolded syllables are long, the others are short:

All verses have exactly 11 metric syllables, even if a few of them require you to elide an ⟨e⟩ before another vowel. Note the general pattern (L = long, S = short):

• All verses start with LLLS (spondee, then trochee).
• Most verses follow it with either SLSL (two iambs) or LLSL (spondee, then iamb).
• Most verses end in SLL (iamb, then a “dangling” long).

Why “most”? Because there are exceptions. And they’re likely there because the author was playing with the rhythm alongside what the “lyric I” is saying:

• the first verse is trying to get Lesbia’s attention, so the middle uses SLSL (two trochees) because they sound faster and more playful.
• the third verse ends with LLL (spondee+long). It’s like someone saying emphatically “screeeeww thooose guuuys”. It makes sense when you look at what the verse says - that the opinion of those old guys shouldn’t matter a single as/“penny”.
• in the sixth verse, instead of a “dangling” long syllable, you got a short one. It ends abruptly - just like our lives, and that’s exactly what the verse talks about.

You’ll also see this sort of attention to the metric foot in other Roman works, like the Aeneid; except that the effect that Virgil was seeking was completely different from Catullus above, it was more like a “shut up, I’m going to tell you something important and profound”. But still no rhymes.

deleted by creator