“Hexameter” is one of more than 19,000 hexameters from Friedrich Klopstock’s epic poem ‘The Messiah’ – a line from the last, the ‘Twentieth Canto’: “Praise, o nature, yet to Him who created you!” It is a line from one of the hymns of praise to the new creation.

The Greek ‘hexa’ is the link between the ancient meter (Greek ‘hexa’ = six and ‘metron’ = measure) and the transformation of a line with this meter into hexadecimal notation (Greek ‘hexa’ = six and Latin ‘decem’ = ten, base-16 numeral system).

 

The content of the hexameter is more or less arbitrary. This work is an exemplary fusion of old literary techniques (Klopstock wrote “The Messiah” in the 18th century) with a digital coding technique of the 20th century.

 

 

Hexadecimal notation allows us to write each byte with only two digits, and since 16 is a power of 2, it is easy to convert between hexadecimal and binary notation.