 Stephens.Similar laws which have been discovered in the dactylic hexameter are that if a word ends the fifth or fourth foot it is almost never, or only rarely, a spondee (– –).The philologist W. Sidney Allen suggested an explanation for all these laws in that it is possible that the last long syllable in any Greek word had a slight stress; if so, then to put a stress on the first element of the last iambic metron, or the second element of the 4th or fifth dactylic foot in a hexameter, would create an undesirable conflict of ictus and accent near the end of the line.