The topography of Pylos and Sphakteria and Thucydides' measurements of distance
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article has two purposes. First, it proposes a more satisfactory solution to an old problem: the apparently serious inaccuracy of Thucydides' measurements for the length of Sphakteria island and the width of the channels dividing it from the mainland. Second, it offers some more general observations on Thucydides' measures of distance and the light they can shed on an important aspect of his historiographic method. The solution proposed by R. Bauslaugh (‘The text of Thucydides IV 8.6 and the south channel at Pylos’, JHS 99 (1979) 1-6) to the problem of measurements is rejected. Bauslaugh had emended two of the three figures on the ground that they were so seriously inaccurate as to require assumption of manuscript corruption. It is here contended that his argument is misconceived, and the emendations unnecessary. The counter-argument is based on a close study of Thucydides' idiom and practice in giving measurements of distance, particularly his use of qualifying expressions with numbers of this kind. The second half of the article uses data compiled in an ongoing study of the use of numbers by Greek historians to make some comparisons between Thucydides' practice and that of several other historians in giving measurements of distance. It is suggested that careful attention to the nuances of Thucydides' practice, especially his use of different qualifying expressions with these numbers, may enable one to draw some interesting inferences about his sources of information and how he used them
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it