Computational Authorship Analysis of Homeric Language

Iliad and Odyssey are products of a collective effort involving numerous authors, each contributing unknown portions of text, and it still cannot be determined whether a single individual (or distinct group of poets) contributed larger chunks of such additional verses, or even whole Books. In this work, we employed character-level statistical language modeling to analyse the computational authorship of Homeric text and study the linguistic proximity and divergence between the books of Iliad and Odyssey. We show that some pairs of books are much closer than others and that some books are linguistically far from the rest. Furthermore, we investigated the linguistic association between the Homeric poems and four Homeric hymns, showing that “To Aphrodite” is linguistically close and that “To Hermes” is linguistically far from both, Iliad and Odyssey. In a final experiment, we show that statistical language models can be used to classify excerpts between Iliad and Odyssey similarly to the average human expert.