A rhopalic verse is a form of restricted poetry in the antiquity. It was noticed that in one hexameter verse, Homer used a sequence of words that consisted of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 syllables. After that some poets tried to write whole poems in this style. The term derives from the Greek word ῥόπᾰλον rhópalon "a club", which gets progressively wider from the handle to the head. The most famous verse of this kind is Oratio by Ausonius, of which these are the first three lines: