Late Greek Poetry: a Computational Approach

Late antiquity (c. 300-600 CE) saw the rise of classically inspired Greek poetry, leaving behind a large corpus of texts that has hardly received the scholarly attention it merits. This article presents a work in progress that aims to introduce new digital tools in the analysis of Greek poetry. To evaluate the benefits of a computational approach, I have chosen a relevant case study in late Greek literary history: the question whether, and how, explicitly Christian hexameter verses differed from those with non-Christian content in terms of metrics and diction. A major methodological challenge is posed by the fact that few texts from late antiquity are available in open source digital format. This article presents a number of features that may be legally extracted from licensed texts available online, as well as some preliminary remarks on how to make use of the collected datasets in a large-scale statistical analysis