A constant problem for the Latin poets was the impossibility of using words with cretic patterns (a long syllable, followed by a short syllable, followed by another long syllable) in hexameter or elegiac verse.
The fact played an important part in determining Latin poetic vocabulary; for instance, such an ordinary word as femina, cretic in its oblique cases, is usually represented through metonymy by such words as nurus and mater.
The basis consists of a cretic or its metrical equivalent.
Cicero preferred the cretic [-u-] which he says is the metrical equivalent of the paean.
Those which he prefers are theCretic and Bacchiac, though Dactylic and Choriambic systems are not wholly unknown.
The Trochaic tetrameter and the Cretic are also favourite rhythms; the former is well suited to the Latin language, its beat being much more easily distinguishable in a rapid dialogue than that of the Iambic.
They were sung to a musical accompaniment, and were composed chiefly in bacchiac, anapaestic, or cretic metres, rapidly interchanging with trochaic lines.
On the other hand, cretic and trochaic metres, from their affinity to the old Saturnian, came most easily to the early dramatists, and are largely employed by Plautus to express lively emotion.
The "Hymn to Apollo" was called a paeon or paean, for the singers danced in Cretic rhythms as they chanted it.
Then again a bacchius or a cretic; last a cretic once more; then the terminal syllable.
For the excessive use in prose of the cretic (as, indeed, of any other distinctly metrical) rhythm cp.
