Some writers have avoided the problem by denying that Latin verse has any inherent stress or beat (‘ictus’), and assuming that the rhythem is a matter solely of time-ratios, which need not interfere with the stress-pattern of speech—the hypothesis of ‘the delicate ear of the ancients’, as one critic has called it. But there are various difficulties inherent in this view. In general is seems doubtful whether a language in which stress was related to duration would have maintained a purely temporal verse-rhythm without any beat; and in particular it is hard to see why poets should have sought agreement in the coda of the verse if verse-rhythm and stress were quite unrelated factors. Moreover, if only duration is relevant to classical verse, there would be nothing to distinguish the first from the second heavy syllable of a spondaic foot, and so there seems no reason why only the second syllable, and not the first also, may be resolved into to light syllables. These difficulties do not arise if we asume the first syllable of the foot to have received a stress (at least in the ‘ideal’ pattern)—which was appropriate primarily to heavy syllables and so would not permit the substitution of two light.