The aim of the project Quantitative Analysis for Latin Poetry: Style Beyond Lexis is to fill a somewhat puzzling lacuna by combining the study of Latin poetry with state-of-the-art techniques in computational stylometry. As with many projects in computational stylometry, the project sits between disciplines—in this case, on the border between Classical Philology and Computational Linguistics.

The importance of Latin poetry to the modern literary tradition (in many languages!) hardly needs to be rehearsed—nor indeed its impact on art, philosophy and popular culture. Indeed, many of the standard stories of ‘Greek’ mythology are, in fact, known only through Ovid’s version in the Metamorphoses. It has long been accepted that reasonably large samples are required to perform meaningful stylometry. Poetry, however, is more stylistically dense than prose when considering all of the available stylistic markers (metrical features, sound, line patterning, …). This, logically, should mean that meaningful stylometric results are achievable with much smaller samples, provided that we explore areas beyond lexical features. It is these extra-lexical features that will be the main subject of research. With this in mind, this project identifies three focus areas for investigation. Area 1 aims to consider ‘sonic style’. By transforming the texts to a phonetic representation, the intention is to explore stylistic markers that may be present in features such as rhyme (or assonance, consonance etc) and alliteration. Area 2 aims to explore the stylistic implications of the graph that is defined by quotation and allusive re-use between a set of n texts. Area 3 is focused on what we might broadly call ‘grammatical style’. Beginning with the simplest ideas, the project explores some simple multivariate statistics (which tenses, cases or declensions do the authors prefer? How complex are their clauses?). From there we plan to extend to more complex (and difficult to identify) structural questions like hyperbaton, tmesis, chiasmus and so forth. These three areas will lay out a broad foundation for the study of extra-lexical style, although additional concepts may be investigated as time and opportunity permit.

Project’s details

  • founded by the National Science Centre
  • Preludium BIS 2020/39/O/HS2/02931
  • Start Date: October 1, 2021
  • Duration: 48 months

Preliminary outcomes

Nagy, B. (2022). Rhyme in classical Latin poetry: Stylistic or stochastic?. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 37(4): 1097–1118, doi:10.1093/llc/fqab105.

Nagy, B. (2023). Some stylometric remarks on Ovid’s Heroides and the Epistula Sapphus. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, doi:10.1093/llc/fqac098.