BERT in Plutarch's Shadows
This addresses a historical and literary problem for scholars of ancient philosophy by providing new insights into authorship, though it is incremental as it applies an existing method to a new domain.
The paper tackles the authorship attribution problem for ancient Greek texts attributed to Pseudo-Plutarch by developing a BERT language model for Ancient Greek, which reveals statistical similarities between these texts and those from an Alexandrian context in the 2nd/3rd century CE.
The extensive surviving corpus of the ancient scholar Plutarch of Chaeronea (ca. 45-120 CE) also contains several texts which, according to current scholarly opinion, did not originate with him and are therefore attributed to an anonymous author Pseudo-Plutarch. These include, in particular, the work Placita Philosophorum (Quotations and Opinions of the Ancient Philosophers), which is extremely important for the history of ancient philosophy. Little is known about the identity of that anonymous author and its relation to other authors from the same period. This paper presents a BERT language model for Ancient Greek. The model discovers previously unknown statistical properties relevant to these literary, philosophical, and historical problems and can shed new light on this authorship question. In particular, the Placita Philosophorum, together with one of the other Pseudo-Plutarch texts, shows similarities with the texts written by authors from an Alexandrian context (2nd/3rd century CE).