Authorship Analysis and the Authenticity of Euripides’ Electra 518–44: Preserving Character Consistency

Abstract

In this interdisciplinary study, a cutting-edge authorship attribution algorithm, highly accurate in testing the authenticity of very short texts, is used to examine the authorship of a passage in Euripides’ Electra, notoriously suspected of inauthenticity. There has been a long debate about the authorial nature of the anagnorisis discussion between Electra and Agamemnon’s old tutor in this Euripidean play. Is it a parody of Aeschylus? Is it, as it has been argued, dramaturgically inconsistent and even tasteless? Was it actually composed by Euripides? And if it is authentic, what was Euripides’ artistic aim in creating the scene? These and other relevant questions make Electra 518–44 possibly the most philologically intriguing passage in the play. On our part, we show that the passage is Euripidean, employing computer-based authorship analysis, also indicating that the textual difficulties/plot incongruities adduced to support the opposite are rather overemphasized pseudo-problems, and we conclude that it has much to do with Electra’s characterization in the play.