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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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I apologise for the incoming off-topic... it's just that you mentioned Latin works, I fucking love it.
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
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:
Catullus V
Translation, copypasted from Wikipedia:
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):
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:
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.
Even tying sound with movement, on itself, is surprisingly insightful. If they thought that Earth didn't make a sound because it was fixed, this means that they were aware that movement creates sound. (Later on we'd discover that sound is movement.)
I'm a bit clueless on Greek but I gave it a check, and it was the Odyssey indeed - the "lyric I" starts right off the bat asking the Muse about Odysseus. And since Virgil crafted the Aeneid as a continuation of the Odyssey, he most likely took a lot of the poetic resources from it, kind of like a fan game ripping off assets from the original.
Note however that Ancient Greek poetry had another resource at hand, that Latin didn't - tone. And the authors of the past used it quite a bit, so the poem had a melody by itself, by just reading it aloud. Like this:
Those are the two first verses of the Odyssey. Here H/bold = rising or high, L/italics = low or falling, and dash/unmarked = unstressed.
I usually follow it in Portuguese (my L1), so I can't help you much with that. That said I'd recommend you to avoid translations flowering the text too much (it goes against the "spirit" of the text), or insistently keeping Latin word order intact (e.g. "Gallia is wholly divided in parts three" or junk like this, it sounds awful in English).
For the Odyssey the nearest in spirit that you'll get in Latin would be the already mentioned Aeneid. Past that you'd probably need to either go back to Greek works (like Argonautica) or even modern languages (like Os Lusíadas, same "we're out, to the unknown world, to do something great" vibe).
Things like the Golden Ass are easier to find, though. Anything Plautus will give you a good laugh: Aulularia (The Pot of Gold), Miles Gloriosus (The Proud Soldier), Bacchides. Often there are "moral messages" in them but they're mostly slapstick comedy.
You might also like some of Catullus' poems. The one from my example is well-behaved, but check poems 16, 39, 58 and 84 for some fun. 16 in special is quoted often due to the profanity.
I often compare Martial's Epigrams to the Roman version of shitposting.