When Aristophanes talks about playwriting in Frogs the word he uses for playwright is poiētēs. Because it has the same root as ‘poet’ it belongs with what translators call ‘false friends’, homonyms which sound as though they will transfer smoothly from source to target but have rather different meanings. Steiner's example is the French habit and the English ‘habit’. Greek and Latin are full of such words if only because so much of the English language (and indeed the language of translation theory) is rooted in the classical languages. Poiētēs is something of a special case. All Greek drama is in verse. The dialogue of tragedy and comedy is for the most part in iambic trimeters, the twelve-syllable Alexandrine. This is the standard speech rhythm with a progression to greater flexibility of resolution as the fifth century proceeds, two short syllables being used for a single long.

The lyric metres used in choral odes, or in formal passages such as a kommos, are varied and almost impenetrably intricate. They involve the regular use of trochee, anapaest, dactyl, spondee and dochmiac, amongst others, with a complexity that would be impossible to replicate in translation, even were it desirable. In a not untypical Introduction to his edition of the Oedipus Tyrannus (1887) Richard Jebb devoted no fewer than thirty-three pages out of ninety-five to metrical analysis.