Some Stylometric Remarks on Ovid's Heroides and the Epistula Sapphus

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to two well-worn areas of debate in classical Latin philology, relating to Ovid's Heroides. The first is the question of the authenticity (and, to a lesser extent the correct position) of the letter placed fifteenth by almost every editor -- the so-called Epistula Sapphus (henceforth ES). The secondary question, although perhaps now less fervently debated, is the authenticity of the 'Double Heroides', placed by those who accept them as letters 16-21. I employ a variety of methods drawn from the domain of computational stylometry to consider the poetics and the lexico-grammatical features of these elegiac poems in the broader context of a corpus of 'shorter' (from 20 to 546 lines) elegiac works from five authors (266 poems in all) comprising more or less all of the non-fragmentary classical corpus. Based on a variety of techniques, every measure gives clear indication that the poetic style of the Heroides is Ovidian, but distinctive; they can be accurately isolated from Ovid more broadly. The Single and Double Heroides split into two clear groups, with the ES grouped consistently with the single letters. Furthermore, by comparing the style of the letters with the 'early' (although there are complications in this label) works of the Amores and the late works of the Ex Ponto, the evidence supports sequential composition -- meaning that the ES is correctly placed -- and, further, supports the growing consensus that the double letters were composed significantly later, in exile.