Short-Circuiting Heroism: Suicidal Achilles(Es) in Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Quintus’ Posthomerica includes no fewer than three episodes in which Achillean characters bring about their own deaths: Achilles himself, Ajax, and Oenone. The last episode, coming soon after the successful resolution of Philoctetes’ wrath in Book 9, suggests that this Achillean type of heroism irrevocably leads to (self-)destruction but also that an epic poem written in the traditional mold cannot entirely dispense with this type of short-circuiting heroism. Les Posthomériques de Quintus de Smyrne ne comprennent pas moins de trois épisodes dans lesquels des personnages achilléens causent leur propre mort : Achille lui-même, Ajax, et Œnone. Le dernier épisode, qui a lieu peu après que la colère de Philoctète a trouvé une issue favorable au chant IX, suggère que ce type d’héroïsme achilléen mène inexorablement à l’(auto)destruction mais aussi qu’un poème épique composé dans le moule traditionnel ne peut totalement se passer de ce type d’héroïsme qui cause un court-circuit chez le héros.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 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 | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".