The Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists is a compendium of biographies relating to pagan philosophers of late antiquity, perhaps composed in an effort to create an alternative to Christian hagiography. It is characterized throughout by an attitude of traditionalist antiquarianism and hostility towards Christianity, and informed by previous experiments in the genre such as the comparable work of Philostratos. It contains the biographies of Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichos, Alypios, Sosipatra, Aedesios of Cappadocia, Sopater, Ablabios, Eustathios, Maximos, Priskos, Ioulianos of Cappadocia, Prohaeresios, Epiphanios, Diophantos the Arab, Sopolis, Himerios, Parnakios, Libanios, Akakios, Nymphidianos, Zeno of Cyprus, Magnos, Oribasios, Ionikos and Chrysanthios, and, likewise, represents one of the latest biographical sources for Neoplatonic intellectuals before the persecutions carried out under the auspices of the Theodosians. It also contains evidence for the practices of Greco-Roman religion in the fourth century, as well as the reactions of its educated practitioners to marginalization and persecution in a Christianized Roman Empire.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
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".