Authorship Analysis and the Ending of Seven Against Thebes: Aeschylus' Antigone or Updating Adaptation?

Abstract

The present paper revisits the discussion concerning the authenticity of a crucial part in Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes: the highly controversial ending of the play. Much has been written on the subject by various scholars, and even though there is now a general consensus that at some point in antiquity the ending of the play was "touched" by an author other than Aeschylus, the problem still remains unresolved in its devilish details. The question is of critical importance for classicists and theatre practitioners but also for anyone interested in classical literature, since, if the ending in the manuscripts is in fact Aeschylean, then Aeschylus could have been the first dramatist—long before Sophocles—to put on stage a defiant Antigone, eager to bury her brother Polyneices despite the civic prohibition. If the ending is spurious, then this will decisively affect how the play in question is read, studied, and staged. To address the problem, we used various tried and tested computer authorship attribution methods: Common n-grams, Support Vector Machines, and n-gram tracing. Thus, this study sheds new, interdisciplinary light on an old and perplexing philological question.