Justin Stover

Computational authorship verification method attributes a new work to a major 2nd century African author

We discuss a real‐world application of a recently proposed machine learning method for authorship verification. Authorship verification is considered an extremely difficult task in computational text classification, because it does not assume that the correct author of an anonymous text is included in the candidate authors available. To determine whether 2 documents have been written by the same author, the verification method discussed uses repeated feature subsampling and a pool of impostor authors. We use this technique to attribute a newly discovered Latin text from antiquity (the Compendiosa expositio) to Apuleius. This North African writer was one of the most important authors of the Roman Empire in the 2nd century and authored one of the worlds first novels. This attribution has profound and wide‐reaching cultural value, because it has been over a century since a new text by a major author from antiquity was discovered. This research therefore illustrates the rapidly growing potential of computational methods for studying the global textual heritage.

Authenticating the writings of Julius Caesar

We shed new light on the authenticity of the writings of Julius Caesar.Hirtius, one of Caesars generals, must have contributed to Caesars writings.We benchmark two authorship verification systems on publicly available data sets.We test on both modern data sets, and Latin texts from Antiquity.We show how computational methods inform traditional authentication studies. In this paper, we shed new light on the authenticity of the Corpus Caesarianum, a group of five commentaries describing the campaigns of Julius Caesar (100-44 BC), the founder of the Roman empire. While Caesar himself has authored at least part of these commentaries, the authorship of the rest of the texts remains a puzzle that has persisted for nineteen centuries. In particular, the role of Caesars general Aulus Hirtius, who has claimed a role in shaping the corpus, has remained in contention. Determining the authorship of documents is an increasingly important authentication problem in information and computer science, with valuable applications, ranging from the domain of art history to counter-terrorism research. We describe two state-of-the-art authorship verification systems and benchmark them on 6 present-day evaluation corpora, as well as a Latin benchmark dataset. Regarding Caesars writings, our analyses allow us to establish that Hirtiuss claims to part of the corpus must be considered legitimate. We thus demonstrate how computational methods constitute a valuable methodological complement to traditional, expert-based approaches to document authentication.

Epitome de Caesaribus 1.24 and Ovid’s Exile

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Reassessing the Apuleian corpus

The renaissance of Apuleian studies of the past few decades shows no signs of abating. 1 The summer of 2014 may well be the highest watermark yet recorded in the tide of interest in Apuleius: June and July alone saw the release of two monographs, one each from Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, and one edited conference volume, from Routledge. 2 The clearest sign that the sophist of Madauros has come into his own is his admission into the exclusive club of the Oxford Classical Texts: the first volume of his complete works containing the Metamorphoses edited by Maaike Zimmerman came out in 2012. One of the most salutary effects of this renewed interest has been the reappraisal of the ‘whole Apuleius’: Apuleius has more to offer than just the Metamorphoses , and recent scholarship on the rhetorica and the philosophica have shown not only how these opera minora can help us understand the opus maius , but also how they are important and interesting documents in their own right. 3

Reassessing the Apuleian corpus: Constructing and enacting normality online across generations: The case of social networking sites

The renaissance of Apuleian studies of the past few decades shows no signs of abating. 1 The summer of 2014 may well be the highest watermark yet recorded in the tide of interest in Apuleius: June and July alone saw the release of two monographs, one each from Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, and one edited conference volume, from Routledge. 2 The clearest sign that the sophist of Madauros has come into his own is his admission into the exclusive club of the Oxford Classical Texts: the first volume of his complete works containing the Metamorphoses edited by Maaike Zimmerman came out in 2012. One of the most salutary effects of this renewed interest has been the reappraisal of the ‘whole Apuleius’: Apuleius has more to offer than just the Metamorphoses , and recent scholarship on the rhetorica and the philosophica have shown not only how these opera minora can help us understand the opus maius , but also how they are important and interesting documents in their own right. 3

REASSESSING THE APULEIAN CORPUS: A COMPUTATIONAL APPROACH TO AUTHENTICITY

The renaissance of Apuleian studies of the past few decades shows no signs of abating. 1 The summer of 2014 may well be the highest watermark yet recorded in the tide of interest in Apuleius: June and July alone saw the release of two monographs, one each from Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, and one edited conference volume, from Routledge. 2 The clearest sign that the sophist of Madauros has come into his own is his admission into the exclusive club of the Oxford Classical Texts: the first volume of his complete works containing the Metamorphoses edited by Maaike Zimmerman came out in 2012. One of the most salutary effects of this renewed interest has been the reappraisal of the ‘whole Apuleius’: Apuleius has more to offer than just the Metamorphoses , and recent scholarship on the rhetorica and the philosophica have shown not only how these opera minora can help us understand the opus maius , but also how they are important and interesting documents in their own right. 3

The Hersfeldensis and the Fuldensis of Ammianus Marcellinus: A reconsideration

The only two authoritative manuscripts of Ammianus Marcellinus to survive to the present day were produced in Germany in the first half of the ninth century: Vaticanus Latinus 1873 from Fulda (V), and a fragmentary manuscript from Hersfeld now preserved in Kassel (M). This article challenges the consensus that V is a copy of M; taking into account recently uncovered fragments of M (new transcriptions of which are offered in the appendix), we argue that both are copies of the same damaged original, and discuss the implications for the editing of Ammianus and for our understanding of Carolingian scholarship.

An Encyclopedia in the Margins: Catena Commentaries, Marginal Glosses, and the Decline of Platonic Studies

Few texts in the Western Canon are as badly in need of a commentary as Plato’s Timaeus. Geometry, arithmology, biology, astronomy, harmonics—these represent only a sampling of the number of disciplines Plato touches upon in the terse and densely packed monologue he puts into the mouth of Socrates’ interlocutor Timaeus. So in 1363, an anonymous scholar, writing perhaps in France, but more probably in Italy, set down to compose a commentary on Plato. No Latin scholar, he complained, since Calcidius himself, had bothered to compose an exposition of the Timaeus. Why? Because Plato’s enigmatic style dissuaded them.1 This is a very strange claim. No fewer than