One Homer, or Two? Some Suggested Stylistic Separators in the Homeric Poems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How many Homers (if any)? This is a question that has bedevilled professional Hellenists since the Alexandrian period. Luckily, such misgivings have not, in general, disquieted students or casual readers, who simply read, study, and enjoy the two lengthy epic poems traditionally ascribed to a composer or, if you lower the date a little, an author, to whom generations have given the name “Homer.” In 1955 the distinguished British Classicist D. L. Page delivered a set of lectures at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, entitled The Homeric Odyssey whose main thesis was that the two epics were composed in separate places ( a fortiori by different authors), independently of each other. My project in the study that follows is to examine more closely the stylistic features called into court by Page to attest to the separateness of the two works in respect of authorship. My ulterior motive is to look for explanations of the discrepancies Page claims to have found on a hypothesis other than separate authorship. Page’s linguistic “separators,” as they might be termed, fall into several categories: dialectal, the words used and especially those with the intensifying prefix ἐρι- “exceedingly”; morphological, e.g. datives plural with the short termination -οις vs. the long -οισι; metrical, the lengthening (or not) of naturally short vowels before mute + liquid or nasal; lexical, words, phrases and formular expressions that are favoured by the Iliad and which might be expected to occur also in the Odyssey but don’t, and vice versa, words and formular phrases found exclusively or predominantly in the Odyssey but which are rare in or totally absent from the Iliad.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".