Hellenistic Literary Prose

This paper analyses the initial paragraphs of patriarch Photius’ commentary on Demosthenes’s corpus in chapter 265 of his Bibliotheca. Its first goal is to demonstrate how Photius understood the style of the most-famous Greek orator. Thus, Photius’ commentary may allow us to understand how a ninth century Byzantine thinker engaged with the language of the most representative personality of fourth century b. C. Attic oratory. Its second aim is to unpick which of Photius’s observations are based on his interpretation of earlier sources and which are the result of his own reading of Demosthenes’s work. Is it really possible that the learned Photius never read Demosthenes’s orations? A close analysis of the language from which he constructed his commentary suggests that this is a question that can be answered. Carefully analysing the Byzantine elements in Photius’ writing and those with classical roots can place the text in a truer context. To do it, it is necessary to find (with the aid of the online TLG) all the attestations of rhetorical terms contained in this chapter, in order to see how many times they occur in Classical, Late Antique and Byzantine Literature, and then classify them according to their meaning. The same procedure could be repeated for other relevant terms. A particular attention is paid to the information given by Dyionisus of Alicarnassus about Demosthenes’ style and language. The following step is to make a statistic about all these data and determining through it, if possible, which paragraphs include an entirely Byzantine language and which do not. Finally, an attempt is made to establish whether a stylistic criterion is to be trusted as a reliable tool in the analysis of a written work. What emerges from this study is how important a combined use of different cultural tools and skills can be in examining an ancient text.

Most of our knowledge of Greek and Roman scientific practice and its place in ancient culture is derived from our study of ancient texts. In the last few decades, this written evidence-ancient technical or specialist literature-has begun to be studied using tools of literary analysis to help answer questions about, for instance, how these works were composed, their authors' intentions and the expectations of their readers.

in M. Asper (ed.), Writing Science: Medical and Mathematical Authorship in Ancient Greece, pp.333–366, 2013

Scientists working today have a number of avenues open for the promulgation of their work. While electronic publishing of articles is now standard, new media, including podcasts and press conferences, are also used to publicize scientific research. Greco-Roman authors writing on scientific, mathematical and medical subjects also had a range of choices available to them as they selected the type of text to convey their ideas and information. Their choices included -but were not limited to -poetry, dialogue, lecture, question-and-answer text, letter, biography, recipe, epitome, encyclopedia, handbook, introduction and commentary. The consideration of the authorial choice of genre offers insights into how these writers regarded their own work, for example, in relation to the work of others. Furthermore, by choosing to write in a specific format, authors may have hoped to reach certain audiences; some texts are presumably more appropriate to students, others to specialists, still others to patrons or potential clients. And some types of texts have elements shaped by broader cultural convention rather than by the individual author. Given the range of options available to ancient writers on scientific, mathematical and medical topics, their choices of genre reflect authorial intention, including, for example, a desire to project a particular identity or image and/or to reach a special readership.

Journal of Modern Greek Studies

The Aeschylean authorship of "Prometheus Bound" and the exodos of "Seven Against Thebes" has long been disputed. To the best of my knowledge, no scholar any longer seriously believes that the final scene of the "Seven" can be the work of Aeschylus, and the cumulative effect of Mark Griffith’s findings about "Prometheus" seems to have convinced the majority of Classicists that this play is also, most likely, spurious. In my dissertation (UoA, 2016), which I now prepare for publication, I applied a series of well- established Automated Authorship Attribution techniques in a carefully sorted and processed corpus of four fifth-century dramatists (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes), concluding that both the dubious pieces could possibly have been composed by the same hand, who cannot be that of Aeschylus –a notion brought to the fore a few years ago by M. L. West on different grounds. The Artificial Intelligence methods (unsupervised and supervised Machine Learning algorithms) employed in my analysis allowed me to detect various macro-scale, unconscious linguistic patterns, which serve as quite accurate differentiating criteria between the dramatists included in my corpus. This quantitative approach indicated that both "Prometheus" the exodos of the "Seven" are strongly tied to the Sophoclean way(s) of writing, and the qualitative evidence of my research led me to believe that the author of these texts could plausibly be Aeschylus’ second son Euaion, who in fact appears to have been a celebrated actor in Sophocles’ dramas. This study, which brings together Classics, Computer Science, and Linguistics, is an attempt to demonstrate the value of the emerging field of Computer Stylistics in the debate about the disputed works of ancient literature, and also to trigger further discussion about the benefits of interdisciplinarity in the area of Classics.

2012

When historians turn to antiquity to consider the place of science and technology in culture, much of the evidence is text-based. When we sit down to read these texts, we find that many authors may be obscure or even unknown. It can be surprisingly difficult to obtain secure biographical information even about some of the most famous figures in the history of ancient science. Not only is our knowledge of these ancient authors sometimes sketchy, the wider contexts in which their work was written and read are impossible to pin down. In many cases, it is difficult to reconstruct the circumstances in which our authors were working, their intended audiences, their motives. In the absence of other historical evidence—which in most instances is sadly the case—we are particularly reliant on our texts. The texts themselves can be pressed into service to answer some of our questions about who was engaging in what we regard as ‘scientific’ and ‘technical’ in Greco-Roman antiquity.

Echos du monde classique: Classical views, 1997

Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 2017