Eclectic mimēsis in Imperial Greek oratory: Topological metrics for syntactical quantification using wavelets

Abstract

Abstract This article presents a novel method to determine particular syntactical attributes of Ancient Greek oratory to quantitatively compare the orators of the Classical to those of the Imperial era based on their style of writing. The study first provides a philological overview of Classical Atticism and its Imperial counterpart and argues that the latter is the product of creative mimēsis and not a mere reproduction of archetypes. Then the article briefly explains a node-based metric method that was developed to quantify the morphology of a syntactically annotated Treebank that led to a more thorough weighting scheme using Haar Wavelets. Wavelets were then used to capture both the linear topology of a sentence and the tree network topology of the corresponding syntactical tree. The results were subsequently processed using principal component analysis to analyze and visualize the data. The method is demonstrated using a database of syntactically annotated sentences from six Attic orators.