Metre as a stylometric feature in Latin hexameter poetry

TL;DR

This study shows that metre alone can reliably identify Latin hexameter poets with high accuracy using small samples, and can also detect stylistic anomalies indicating possible forgery.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using metrical features for authorship attribution and forgery detection in Latin hexameter poetry, achieving high accuracy with minimal data.

Findings

Pairwise classification accuracy of at least 95% with small samples

Metrical features outperform traditional bag-of-words methods in small samples

Potential for detecting stylistic anomalies and forgeries in classical poetry

Abstract

This paper demonstrates that metre is a privileged indicator of authorial style in classical Latin hexameter poetry. Using only metrical features, pairwise classification experiments are performed between 5 first-century authors (10 comparisons) using four different machine-learning models. The results showed a two-label classification accuracy of at least 95% with samples as small as ten lines and no greater than eighty lines (up to around 500 words). These sample sizes are an order of magnitude smaller than those typically recommended for BOW ('bag of words') or n-gram approaches, and the reported accuracy is outstanding. Additionally, this paper explores the potential for novelty (forgery) detection, or 'one-class classification'. An analysis of the disputed Aldine Additamentum (Sil. Ital. Puni. 8:144-225) concludes (p=0.0013) that the metrical style differs significantly from that of the rest of the poem.