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The Roman Pronunciation of Latin, by Frances E. Lord, contains a relevant Priscian quote. (It's from 1894, so I don't know if Lord's statements are outdated.)

The Roman Pronunciation of Latin, by Frances E. Lord, contains a relevant Priscian (in fact, it seems to be a "Pseudo-Priscian") quote. (It's from 1894, so I don't know if Lord's statements are outdated.)

And Quintilian's description of the position of the accent in Latin words mentions only one exception to the general rule that the accent does not fall on the ultima in Latin words (the exception is for monosyllabic words):

For in every word the acute accent is restricted to three syllables, whether these be the only syllables in the word or the three last, and will fall either on the penultimate or the antepenultimate. The middle of the three syllables of which I speak will be acute or circumflexed, if long, while if it be short, it will have a grave accent and the acute will be thrown back to the preceding syllable, that is to say the antepenultimate. [31] Every word has an acute accent, but never more than one. Further the acute never falls on the last syllable and therefore in dissyllabic words marks the first syllable. Moreover the acute accent and the circumflex are never found in one and the same word, since the circumflex itself contains an acute accent. Neither the circumflex nor the acute, therefore, will ever be found in the last syllable of a Latin word, with this exception, that monosyllables must either be acute or circumflexed; otherwise we should find words without an acute accent at all.

##How did this pattern of accentuation originate?

And Quintilian's description of the position of the accent in Latin words only mentions monosyllables as an exception to the general rule that the ultima is unaccented in Latin words. (It could be argued though that Quintilian's description was incomplete, since many modern scholars say that ultimate stress may have occurred in words like produc or Samnis.)

##How did this pattern of accentuation originate? (if it was real)

###Descriptions of Latin accent in ancient grammarians There are apparently a number of descriptions of Latin accent in ancient grammarians, but sources I have read often suggest that these are unreliable because they may have been overly influenced by the traditional terminology and description of Greek accentuation. For example, a number of Latin authors describe Latin syllables as being able to be pronounced with either an "acute" or "circumflex" accent, as in Greek, although there doesn't actually seem to have been a contrast in any context between acute and circumflex accentuation in Latin the way that there could be in Greek ultima syllables with long vowels. Rather, the described distribution of acute and circumflex accents in Latin is apparently predictable based on the vowel length and the position of the accent: supposedly, short accented vowels were pronounced with the acute accent (as in Greek), while long accented vowels were pronounced with an acute accent in antepenultimate syllables (again as in Greek), and with a circumflex accent in penultimate syllables or in monosyllabic words. Mainstream modern scholarship on Latin seems to reject this account of Latin accent, which casts a bit of a shadow on anything else that the ancient grammarians have to say about the subject. (This kind of concern also seems to be part of the reason for the controversy mentioned in C. M. Weimer's answer to the linked question about the rule that a light syllable was stressed (or according to the traditional account, took an acute accent) before a monosyllabic enclitic.)

###Descriptions of Latin accent in ancient grammarians There are apparently a number of descriptions of Latin accent in ancient grammarians, but sources I have read often suggest that these are unreliable because they may have been overly influenced by the traditional terminology and description of Greek accentuation. For example, they describe a supposed difference between "acute" and "circumflex" accentuation (which I describe in more detail here), but mainstream modern scholarship on Latin rejects the applicability of those terms to Latin accent, which casts a bit of a shadow on anything else that the ancient grammarians have to say about the subject. Concern about the unreliability of these kinds of sources also seems to be part of the reason for the controversy that C. M. Weimer mentioned about the rule that a light syllable was stressed (or according to the traditional account, took an "acute accent") before a monosyllabic enclitic.