Early appearance of stress poetry

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-classical-journal/article/less-care-more-stress-a-rhythmic-poem-from-the-roman-empire/B5A03C3981F21E885228D3C3184109E9

Whitmarsh argues learnedly that the following pushes the earliest evidence of stress poetry back to the early centuries AD:

λέγουσιν
ἃ θέλουσιν
λεγέτωσαν
οὐ μέλι μοι
σὺ φίλι με
συνφέρι σοι

I, less learnedly, was less convinced by his arguments (which seem to be freely available at the link). As long as you ditch the classical quantitative categories, it looks more like a Babrius-style quantitative/accent mix to me, with responsion appearing in the first three lines, and then again in the last three.

1-3:
.(/.)
..(/.)
..(/.)

(Either taking the line endings as forcing a regular _ responsion, or that the final shorts responded across, it doesn’t matter.)

4-6:
._
..(/.)
._

Here regular _ responsion is forced.

It would seem obvious to me that responsion is occurring across that .(/.) in the first lines, and then again .__, but also that the accent placement in the quantitative line is just as careful (always at the beginning of the responding section). Similar to Babrius with his consistent penultimate accent placed in quantitative lines. (The paroxytonesis mentioned in the article. Here, we clearly have proparoxytonesis.)

Anyway, my unlearned response aside, it’s a great article and well worth reading.