The package provides classicists with some of the tools that are needed for typesetting scholarly publications dealing with Greek and Latin texts, with special emphasis on Greek verse.

As the package's name suggests, its core is a comprehensive set of commands for generating metrical schemes and for placing prosodical marks on text set in the Latin or the Greek alphabet. The rest of the package provides a miscellany of commands for symbols (most of them not directly related to metre) that are often used in critical editions of classical texts.

The package does not require any special font: all symbols are taken from the Computer Modern fonts (which are included in all TeX distributions) and the package's commands are based on TeX primitives.