Authorship Analysis of Xenophon's Cyropaedia

TL;DR

This study employs computational methods like N-grams, Naive Bayes, and SVM to analyze the authorship of Xenophon's Cyropaedia, providing evidence that the disputed final chapter was likely written by Xenophon himself.

Contribution

It applies modern authorship attribution techniques to classical texts, specifically analyzing the disputed chapter of Cyropaedia to determine authorship.

Findings

N-gram analysis shows slight differences in the epilogue.

Word frequency analysis indicates the final chapter is consistent with Xenophon.

The disputed chapter is likely authored by Xenophon.

Abstract

In the past several decades, many authorship attribution studies have used computational methods to determine the authors of disputed texts. Disputed authorship is a common problem in Classics, since little information about ancient documents has survived the centuries. Many scholars have questioned the authenticity of the final chapter of Xenophon's Cyropaedia, a 4th century B.C. historical text. In this study, we use N-grams frequency vectors with a cosine similarity function and word frequency vectors with Naive Bayes Classifiers (NBC) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) to analyze the authorship of the Cyropaedia. Although the N-gram analysis shows that the epilogue of the Cyropaedia differs slightly from the rest of the work, comparing the analysis of Xenophon with analyses of Aristotle and Plato suggests that this difference is not significant. Both NBC and SVM analyses of word frequencies show that the final chapter of the Cyropaedia is closely related to the other chapters of the Cyropaedia. Therefore, this analysis suggests that the disputed chapter was written by Xenophon. This information can help scholars better understand the Cyropaedia and also demonstrates the usefulness of applying modern authorship analysis techniques to classical literature.