Evidence of intertextuality: investigating Paul the Deacon's Angustae Vitae

Abstract

In this study, we use computational methods to evaluate and quantify philological evidence that an eighth century CE Latin poem by Paul the Deacon was influenced by the works of the classical Roman poet Catullus. We employ a hybrid feature set composed of n-gram frequencies for linguistic structures of three different kinds—words, characters, and metrical quantities. This feature set is evaluated using a one-class support vector machine approach. While all three classes of features prove to have something to say about poetic style, the character-based features prove most reliable in validating and quantifying the subjective judgments of the practicing Latin philologist. Word-based features were most useful as a secondary refining tool, while metrical data were not yet able to improve classification. As these features are developed in ongoing work, they are simultaneously being incorporated into an existing online tool for allusion detection in Latin poetry.