Like Two Pis in a Pod: Author Similarity Across Time in the Ancient Greek Corpus

Abstract

One commonly recognized feature of the Ancient Greek corpus is that later texts frequently imitate and allude to model texts from earlier time periods, but analysis of this phenomenon is mostly done for specific author pairs based on close reading and highly visible instances of imitation. In this work, we use computational techniques to examine the similarity of a wide range of Ancient Greek authors, with a focus on similarity between authors writing many centuries apart. We represent texts and authors based on their usage of high-frequency words to capture author signatures rather than document topics and measure similarity using Jensen-Shannon Divergence. We then analyze author similarity across centuries, finding high similarity between specific authors and across the corpus that is not common to all languages.