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REASSESSING THE APULEIAN CORPUS: A COMPUTATIONAL APPROACH TO AUTHENTICITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2017

Justin Stover  and
Mike Kestemont
Justin Stover*
Affiliation:
All Souls College, Oxford
Mike Kestemont*
Affiliation:
University of Antwerp / Research Foundation of Flanders
*
[email protected]
[email protected]
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Extract

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

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , December 2016 , pp. 645 - 672
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2017 

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References

1 This is not the place to provide a complete bibliography of Apuleius; none the less, a few of the more important monographs should be noted. Contemporary Apuleian studies take off from Winkler's, J.J. monograph, Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’ Golden Ass (Berkeley, 1985)Google Scholar. Recent studies of the Met. include May, R., Apuleius and Drama: The Ass on Stage (Oxford, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Graverini, L., Le Metamorfosi di Apuleio: Letteratura e identità (Pisa, 2007)Google Scholar and Frangoulidis, S.A., Witches, Isis and Narrative: Approaches to Magic in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (Berlin, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the reception of Apuleius, see Carver, R.H.F., The Protean Ass: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gaisser, J.H., The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass: A Study in Transmission and Reception (Princeton, 2008)Google Scholar.

2 These are Tilg, S., Apuleius’ Metamorphoses: A Study in Roman Fiction (Oxford, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fletcher, R., Apuleius’ Platonism: The Impersonation of Philosophy (Cambridge, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lee, B.T. et al. (edd.), Apuleius and Africa (New York, 2014)Google Scholar. Fletcher's monograph appeared too late for us to use it in this study.

3 On the ‘whole Apuleius’, see B.L. Hijmans, Jr., ‘Apuleius philosophus Platonicus’, ANRW 2.36.1 (1987), 395–475; Sandy, G., The Greek World of Apuleius: Apuleius and the Second Sophistic (Leiden, 1997)Google Scholar; Harrison, S.J., Apuleius: A Latin Sophist (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar; and now Fletcher (n. 2). On the opera minora, see Marangoni, C., Il mosaico della memoria: Studi sui Florida e sulle Metamorfosi di Apuleio (Padua, 2000)Google Scholar and Baltes, M. et al. , Apuleius: De deo Socratis. Über den Gott des Sokrates (Darmstadt, 2004)Google Scholar.

4 For a positive view, see Harrison, S.J., ‘Apuleius eroticus: Anth. Lat. 712 Riese’, Hermes 120 (1992), 83–9Google Scholar.

5 On the positive side, see Lytle, E., ‘Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and the spurcum additamentum (10.21)’, CPh 98 (2003), 349–65Google Scholar; for a response, see Hunink, V., ‘The spurcum additamentum (Apul. Met. 10,21) once again’, in Keulen, W.H. et al. (edd.), Lectiones Scrupulosae. Essays On the Text and Interpretation of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses in Honour of Maaike Zimmerman (Groningen, 2006), 266–79Google Scholar. Zimmerman, in the introduction to her OCT (Oxford, 2012), provides a full discussion at xxiii–xxv.

6 On the Herbarius, see Maggiulli, G. and Buffa Giolito, M.F., L'altro Apuleio. Problemi aperti per una nuova edizione dell’ Herbarius (Naples, 1996)Google Scholar, and Hunink, V., ‘Apuleius and the Asclepius ’, VChr 50 (1996), 288–308, at 300–1Google Scholar; for the Physiognomia, see Hunink (this note), 301, considering points raised by Opeku, F., ‘Physiognomy in Apuleius’, in Deroux, C. (ed.), Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History I (Brussels, 1979), 467–74Google Scholar.

7 See Kohl, B. and Siraisi, N., ‘The De monarchia attributed to Apuleius’, Medievalia 7 (1981), 1–39 Google Scholar; and Gaisser (n. 1), 122–4.

8 V. Hunink maintains that the ‘False Preface’, though truncated, is an integral part of the DdS (‘The prologue of Apuleius’ De deo Socratis’, Mnemosyne 48 [1995], 292–312); most other scholars, e.g. Harrison (n. 3), 91–2, have grouped it with the Florida.

9 The bibliography on this question is vast: for orientation, see Harrison (n. 3), 174–80. The most substantial analyses remain those of J. Redfors, Echtheitskritische Untersuchungen der apuleischen Schriften De Platone und De mundo (Lund, 1960), who concludes that the problem is insoluble, and A. Marchetta, L'autenticità apuleiana del De Mundo (Rome, 1991), who favours authenticity for the De mundo and (by extension) for the De Platone. Doubts as to the authenticity of these works, while more muted than in decades past, have been raised as recently as 2007 by Holmes, N., ‘False quantities in Vegetius and others’, CQ 57 (2007), 668–86, at 684–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 The question was reopened after decades of consensus by Hunink (n. 6); his arguments were responded to by Horsfall Scotti, M., ‘The Asclepius: thoughts on a reopened debate’, VChr 54 (2000), 396–416 Google Scholar.

11 The case was put forward most vigorously by Londey, D. and Johanson, C., The Logic of Apuleius (Leiden, 1987), 8–15 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. B.T. Lee cautiously accepts the authenticity of the text, and provides the relevant bibliography in his commentary on the Florida (Berlin, 2005), 10–11; Harrison (n. 3), 11 rejects it.

12 See the Proceedings of the British Academy. Annual Report, 1948–1949 (London 1949), 8. The manuscript is Vatican City, Reg. lat. 1572. For a full discussion of this text, an editio princeps and arguments in favour of its authenticity, see Stover, J.A., A New Work by Apuleius: The Lost Third Book of the De Platone (Oxford, 2015)Google Scholar.

13 McGann, M.J., CR 25 (1975), 226–7, at 227Google Scholar.

14 Londey and Johanson (n. 11), 17.

15 See Hockey, S., ‘An agenda for electronic text technology in the Humanities’, CW 91 (1998), 521–42, esp. 524–5Google Scholar. The studies on the Historia Augusta include Marriott, I., ‘The authorship of the Historia Augusta: two computer studies,’ JRS 69 (1979), 65–77 Google Scholar; Meissner, B., ‘Computergestützte Untersuchungen zur stilistischen Einheitlichkeit der Historia Augusta ’, in Bonamente, G. and Rosen, K. (edd.), Historiae Augustae colloquium Bonnense (Bari 1997), 175–215 Google Scholar; and Tse, E., Tweedie, F.J. and Frischer, B., ‘Unravelling the purple thread: function word variability and the Scriptores Historiae Augustae ’, Literary and Linguistic Computing 13 (1998), 141–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Holmes, D., ‘The evolution of stylometry in Humanities scholarship’, Literary and Linguistic Computing 13 (1998), 111–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Digital Humanities in general, see, inter alia, Schreibman, S., Siemens, R. and Unsworth, J. (edd.), A Companion to Digital Humanities (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar.

17 Brandwood, L., Stylometric Method and the Chronology of Plato's Works (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar. For stylochronometry in general, consult the survey in Stamou, C., ‘Stylochronometry: stylistic development, sequence of composition, and relative dating’, Literary and Linguistic Computing 23 (2008), 181–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Recent surveys of the field include: Juola, P., ‘Authorship attribution’, Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval 1 (2006), 233–334 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Koppel, M., Schler, J. and Argamon, S., ‘Computational methods in authorship attribution’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60 (2009), 9–26 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stamatatos, E., ‘A survey of modern authorship attribution methods’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60 (2009), 538–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An inspiring recent contribution is Burrows, J., ‘A second opinion on Shakespeare and authorship studies in the twenty-first century’, Shakespeare Quarterly 63 (2012), 355–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Stamatatos (n. 18), 538.

20 van Halteren, H., Baayen, H., Tweedie, F., Haverkort, M. and Neijt, A., ‘New machine learning methods demonstrate the existence of a human stylome’, Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 12 (2005), 65–77 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 A good methodological survey is offered by Stamatatos (n. 18).

22 See e.g. Luyckx, K. and Daelemans, W., ‘The effect of author set size and data size in authorship attribution’, Literary and Linguistic Computing 26 (2011), 35–55 CrossRefGoogle Scholar or Eder, M., ‘Does size matter? Authorship attribution, small samples, big problem’, Literary and Linguistic Computing 30 (2015), 167–82 (doi:10.1093/llc/fqt066)Google Scholar.

23 Eder, M. and Rybicki, J., ‘Deeper Delta across genres and languages: do we really need the most frequent words?’, Literary and Linguistic Computing 26 (2011), 315–21Google Scholar.

24 See respectively Jannidis, F. and Lauer, G., ‘Burrows's Delta and its use in German literary history’, in Erlin, M. and Tatlock, L. (edd.), Distant Readings. Topologies of German Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2014), 29–54 Google Scholar; Schöch, C., ‘Fine tuning our stylometric tools: investigating authorship, genre, and form in French classical theatre’, in Digital Humanities 2013: Conference Abstracts (Lincoln, NE, 2013), 383–6Google Scholar; Kestemont, M., Moens, S. and Deploige, J., ‘Collaborative authorship in the twelfth century. A stylometric study of Hildegard of Bingen and Guibert of Gembloux’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30 (2015), 199–224 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 The broad field of authorship attribution has been surveyed by Love, H., Attributing Authorship. An Introduction (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Mosteller, F. and Wallace, D., Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist (Cambridge, MA, 1964)Google Scholar.

27 Accessible surveys of this idea can be found in Binongo, J., ‘Who wrote the 15th book of Oz? An application of multivariate analysis to authorship attribution’, Chance 16 (2003), 9–17 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kestemont, M., ‘Function words in authorship attribution: from black magic to theory?’, in Feldman, A., Kazantseva, A. and Szpakowicz, S. (edd.), Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature Workshop, co-located with the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Gothenburg, 2014), 59–66 Google Scholar.

28 Cf. Juola (n. 18), 264–5.

29 Highly relevant in this respect are Hoover, D., ‘Frequent collocations and authorial style’, Literary and Linguistic Computing 18 (2003), 261–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hoover, D., ‘Multivariate analysis and the study of style variation’, Literary and Linguistic Computing 18 (2003), 341–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 This aspect as well as other potential shortcomings of function words are discussed by Kestemont (n. 27).

31 All our experiments reported in this paper can be easily replicated using the ‘Stylometry with R’ package, a suite of software scripts for the popular statistical R program (http://www.r-project.org/). This package is freely available online in the public domain and is presented by the suite's main developers (the Computational Stylistics Group) in Eder, M., Kestemont, M. and Rybicki, J., ‘Stylometry with R: a suite of tools’, in Digital Humanities 2013: Conference Abstracts (Lincoln, NE, 2013), 487–9Google Scholar. A manual for the package can be found on the group's website: https://sites.google.com/site/computationalstylistics/. We have shared a version of our corpus in an online repository (https://github.com/mikekestemont/Apuleius), excluding the texts by Tertullian and Cyprian, which are proprietary data owned by Brepols Publishers (Library of Latin Texts). We wish to acknowledge Brepols Publishers for the use of this proprietary material.

32 Manning, C., Raghavan, P. and Schütze, H., An Introduction to Information Retrieval (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 See e.g. Stamatatos (n. 18) and Koppel, Schler and Argamon (n. 18), but also Daelemans, W., ‘Explanation in computational stylometry’, in Gelbukh, A. (ed.), Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (Berlin and Heidelberg, 2013), 451–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 A good introduction to the advantages and disadvantages of cluster analyses in stylometry can be found in Eder, M., ‘Computational stylistics and Biblical translation: how reliable can a dendrogram be?’, in Piotrowski, T. and Grabowski, Ł. (edd.), The Translator and the Computer (Wrocław, 2013), 155–70Google Scholar.

35 This metric was introduced in Burrows, J., ‘“Delta”: a measure of stylistic difference and a guide to likely authorship’, Literary and Linguistic Computing 17 (2002), 267–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An interesting theoretical discussion is: Argamon, S., ‘Interpreting Burrows's Delta: geometric and probabilistic foundations’, Literary and Linguistic Computing 23 (2008), 131–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Argamon showed in this paper that Burrows's original distance formula can be greatly simplified, both mathematically and conceptually: we have based our discussion of Burrows's Delta in the main text on Argamon's simplified interpretation.

36 See e.g. Burrows, J., ‘Textual analysis’, in Schreibman, S., Siemens, R. and Unsworth, J. (edd.), A Companion to Digital Humanities (Oxford, 2004), 323–47, at 326CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 See Eder (n. 34).

38 A seminal application of this technique can be found in J. Burrows, Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels (Oxford, 1987). Accessible introductions to the application of PCA to authorship attribution include Binongo (n. 27), but also Binongo, J. and Smith, W., ‘The application of principal components analysis to stylometry’, Literary and Linguistic Computing 14 (1999), 445–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Here, we will restrict the PCA scatterplots to the first two dimensions (or principal components), which is common in present-day stylometry. Because only so much information can be captured in a two-dimensional analysis, including more than three œuvres in a PCA should be generally avoided. The underlying theoretical assumption is that, because of this restriction, each dimension has the potential to contrast one author with the other authors included.

40 Kestemont (n. 27) provides relevant references to studies of function words in relation to genre in the field of computational linguistics. A short, yet highly relevant, contribution on this topic is: C. Schöch, ‘Validating and interpreting Principal Component Analysis: a case-study from the analysis of French Enlightenment plays’, in Digital Humanities 2014: Conference Abstracts (Lausanne, 2014), 136–7.

41 See Horsfall Scotti (n. 10).

42 Here we used the same sampling settings (3,000-word samples) as in Figure 3. In a separate, much more technical study we have worked together with Yaron Winter and Moshe Koppel (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan) on the specific topic of the authorship of the Expositio: see Stover, J., Winter, Y., Koppel, M. and Kestemont, M., ‘Computational authorship verification method attributes a new work to a major 2nd-century African author’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 67 (2016), 239–42, DOI: 10.1002/asi.23460 Google Scholar. The method described in this paper applies an iterative procedure to verify the authorship of texts: in each iteration, a random set of features is selected to make the algorithm less sensitive to topic-related vocabulary. Texts are only attributed to the same author, if they prove more similar to each other than to a set of similar texts by impostor authors. The results of this approach also demonstrated that the Expositio was in all likelihood written by Apuleius.

43 This measure has been proposed in Craig, H. and Kinney, A., Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship (Cambridge, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Studies of Latin particles have developed significantly in recent years, especially since Kroon's, C. Discourse Particles in Latin: A Study of Nam, Enim, Autem, Vero, and At (Amsterdam, 1995)Google Scholar; see also her updated discussion in ‘Latin particles and the grammar of discourse’, in Clackson, J. (ed.), A Companion to the Latin Language (Malden, MA, 2011), 176–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. With considerable detail, Kroon lays out how nam and enim differ, concluding in the latter study that ‘enim is not, or not primarily, a connective-particle that is more or less synonymous with nam, but rather a conversation-management particle which seeks to establish a bond between speaker and hearer’ (192). Without denying the validity of Kroon's arguments, which are many and persuasive, there is still a sense in which the interchangeability of nam and enim can be maintained. Take two roughly contemporaneous historians, Livy and Velleius Paterculus; the former uses nam to enim at a rate of about 7:10 (0.695), the latter at 14:10 (1.375), and if we push back to the previous generation, we find Sallust at a rate of 12:1 (11.7). Whatever one might say about individual cases, it cannot simply be true that semantics demanded Velleius use nam twice as often as Livy, or Sallust seventeen times more often. Rather, it is the unique emotional and rhetorical tenor of each word—the features which Kroon has identified—that makes an author favour one over another.

45 Redfors (n. 9), 39–46.

46 Redfors (n. 9), 115–17.

47 On at, see Kroon (n. 42 [2011]).