CITAZIONE (Domics @ 26/2/2016, 13:07)
Is it possible to know the main interpolations? Is it a letter that did not refer at all to the Christians or some passages on Christians have been added? Thanks
Dr, Tuccinardi when in your paper on "La tradizione testuale del libro X delle epistole di Plinio: una proposta alternativa" you write that Book X "si distingue nettamente anche per lo stile" what do you mean exactly? What is according to you the reason of such a different style? Thanks
The method for authorship verification that I’ve used was proposed by Potha and Stamatos (2014).
www.icsd.aegean.gr/lecturers/stamatatos/papers/SETN2014.pdfFrom the findings of my analysis Ep.96.10 should be excluded from Book 10, but I’m not an advocate of this extreme solution. Because I’m fully aware that large insertions in the letter might justify the anomaly (the abnormal length of the letter if compared with all other letters of Book 10 pushes in the same direction).
Unfortunately this method doesn’t permit to identify the interpolations.
I will try to explain in plain language, albeit simplifying a bit, how this method works.
First of all, it is useful to read this synthesis by Neil Godfrey from Vridar:
http://vridar.org/2016/02/17/fresh-doubts-...the-christians/From the text of Book 10 the Plinian profile (i.e. Lk the text of known authorship) is created. Lk is the list of the most frequently found n-grams of Book 10, sorted in descending order of frequency. In fact the most frequent character n-grams can give information concerning the stylistic peculiarity of an author. Lk=500 means that only the first 500 most frequent character n-grams are considered in the analysis.
Then PT (The Plinian Testimonium, Ep.96) was isolated from Book 10 and the text of the remainder of Pliny’s letters was divided up into fifteen sections about the same length as the PT. The 15 subsections of Pliny's letters, extracted from what we know to be reliable pieces of Plinian authorship, have been used to see what we must expect from reliable Plinian fragments having the same size of the disputed document, then comparing these results with the ones obtained from PT.
So, the profile of each Plinian subsection (PT and P1-15) is created. These are called Lu, i.e. the text of unknown authorship. Lu is the list of all the n-grams found in the corresponding Plinian subsection. Now it’s rather intuitive that the intersection (i.e. the common n-grams – CNG) between Lk (from Book 10) and each Lu of the Plinian subsections can give information about the authorship of the Plinian subsection. Of course this intersection (i.e. the number of the common n-grams between the two profiles) will be higher if the Plinian subsection has the same author as Book 10.
The parameter “measuring” this intersection is called SPI. The values of SPI for the 15 Plinian subsections and for each considered model are homogeneously distributed in a normal distribution. This is not at all surprising because the stylistic homogeneity of Book 10 have since long been recognized even without stylometric tools.
An exhaustive analysis has been carried out by Gamberini (Stylistic Theory and Practice in the Younger Pliny, pp. 332–376) demonstrating that, in comparison with Books I–IX, Book X is characterized by a lack of figures of speech and that its letters point up a complex hypotactic structure instead of the parataxis and brevity typical of the first nine books. Conformance in genre, in register (all letters written to the Emperor Trajan), and in time of writing—all these highly contribute to the uniformity of Book X.
The problem is PT. In all the considered models it has always the lowest value of SPI and in 4 models out of 6 it is clearly an outlier.
