That neither Bede nor Alcuin specifically defines _grammatica_ in the traditional terms as including the study of Latin poetry may mean no more than that neither wrote comprehensively on the whole subject. The _prælectio_ can hardly have been neglected by the _Scoti_, or by Bede himself. The definition of Rabanus in the ninth century[8] not only resumes the whole ancient scope, but puts the interpretation of the poets first. That Boethius was added to the list of classics[9] is significant of the influence of his _metra_ even on the hymns. When Bede tells his boys to look at all the first syllables[10] of a manuscript page of hexameters, because these syllables must be long, he is not precluding either nicer points of metric or wiser consideration of poetry; he is very practically teaching Latin quantities. His book offers much more; and though its subject is only metric, it takes pains to distinguish rhythmic,[11] and closes with that classification of poetry by Diomedes which was to be often repeated. Since we have discussed at length poems and meters, it is to be observed finally that the kinds of poetry are three. For it is active, or imitative, what the Greeks entitle _dramaticon_ or _mimeticon_; or narrative, what the Greeks style _exegematicon_ or _apangelticon_; or common, i.e. mixed, what the Greeks call _cœnon_ or _micton_. That is _dramaticon_, or active, in which the _personæ_ are presented as speaking without the intervention of the poet, as in tragedies and fables, for drama is called in Latin _fabula_. In this kind is written “Quo te Moeri pedes? an quo via ducit, in urbem?” as also among ourselves the Song of Songs, where the voice of Christ and of the Church are clearly found to alternate without the writer’s intervention. That is _exegematicon_, or narrative, in which the poet himself speaks without the intervention of any _persona_, as three books of the Georgics and the first part of the fourth, as well as the poems of Lucretius and others like them. In this kind our literature shows Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, which are composed metrically in their own language. _Cœnon_ or mixed, is the kind in which the poet himself speaks and also the _personæ_ are presented as speaking. So are written the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, the Æneid of Vergil, and with us the story of blessed Job, though this in its own language is written not entirely as poetry, but partly as prose, partly in _metra_ or in _rhythmi_.[12] Far as this is not only from Aristotle, but from Vergil, the shift of emphasis from composition to style remained for centuries characteristic of medieval Latin poetic, and opened the way for the confusion of poetic with rhetoric. 2. LATIN HYMNS (1) Iambic The best known hymn of this period is by Rabanus (ninth century).