DactylusLatin verse, one line at a time
Dactylus teaches you to scan: to hear which syllables are long and which are short, and to read a hexameter as verse rather than as a puzzle.
In the browser, free, with nothing to install and no account to make.
How it works
You tap each syllable long or short, mark the elisions, place the feet and find the caesura. The app checks the line against a curated scansion and tells you which rule you missed, not merely that you were wrong.
Twelve lessons take you from syllable quantity through the hexameter, elision, the elegiac couplet and the hendecasyllable. Twelve drills practise one thing at a time.
Real poems
510 lines in three metres, from the Aeneid, the Eclogues and the Metamorphoses; the elegies of Ovid, Propertius and Catullus; and Catullus' hendecasyllables. Every scansion is checked by hand, not generated and shipped.
Nothing about you
No account, no name, no email, no age. The app knows a device, what has been scanned on it and how it went — nothing more. Everything works offline once the lines are downloaded.