The elegiac metre is, in form, a simple variation on the epic metre, obtained by docking the second of two hexameters so as to make it a verse of five feet or measures. But the poetical capabilities of the elegiac couplet are of a wholly different kind from those of heroic verse. [Greek: elegos] seems to be the Greek form of a name given by the Carians and Lydians to a lament for the dead. This was accompanied by the soft music of the Lydian flute, which continued to be associated with Greek elegy. The non-Hellenic origin of elegy is indicated by this very fact. The flute was to the Greeks an Asiatic instrument--string instruments were those which they made their own--and it would hardly have been wedded by them to a species of poetry which had arisen among themselves. The early elegiac poetry of Greece was by no means confined to mourning for the dead. War, love, politics, proverbial philosophy, were in turn its themes; it dealt, in fact, with the chief interest of the poet and his friends, whatever that might be at the time. It is the direct expression of the poet's own thoughts, addressed to a sympathizing society. This is its first characteristic. The second is that, even when most pathetic or most spirited, it still preserves, on the whole, the tone of conversation or of narrative. Greek elegy stops short of lyric passion. English elegy, whether funereal as in Dryden and Pope, or reflective as in Gray, is usually true to the same normal type. Roman elegy is not equally true to it, but sometimes tends to trench on the lyric province. For Roman elegy is mainly amatory or sentimental; and its masters imitated, as a rule, not the early Greek elegists, not Tyrtaeus or Theognis, but the later Alexandrian elegists, such as Callimachus or Philetas. Catullus introduced the metre to Latin literature, and used it with more fidelity than his followers to its genuine Greek inspiration. Iambic verse.