Sometimes libations were accompanied by hymns in spondaic rhythm, as in the following hymn by the Greek poet Terpander (7th century BC), which consists of 20 long syllables: Ζεῦ πάντων ἀρχά, πάντων ἀγήτωρ, Ζεῦ, σοὶ σπένδω ταύτᾱν ὕμνων ἀρχάν.
However, sometimes he will begin a line with three or four spondees for special effect, such as the following, which describes how Aeneas and his companion made their way slowly down a dark passage into the Underworld.
One is by Ennius: The other is in an elegiac couplet in the last poem of Catullus (116), perhaps mocking the poetic style of his addressee:[5] In Latin and Greek meter spondees are easily identified because the distinction between long and short syllables is unambiguous.
Thus Alexander Pope writes, in a poem illustrating how the sound of the words should imitate their meaning: When Ajax strives, some Rock's vast Weight to throw, The Line too labours, and the Words move slow;[7] In the first line above, most of the syllables, even those in weak positions, are long and heavy: "A-jax strives some Rock's vast weight"; only the last foot, "to throw", is a true iamb.
[9] Another Masefield poem, Sea Fever (1902), which includes spondees contains these lines: And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking, And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.