Rhyme in classical Latin poetry: Stylistic or stochastic?

Abstract

Abstract This study offers the first broad quantitative analysis of the use of rhyme in classical Latin hexameter and elegiac verse. The data and tools developed for the analysis are released under a permissive open source license. These include software to create an accurate phonetic transcription of Latin verse from the Musisque Deoque corpus; a system for scoring rhyme via phonetic similarity; and a system for generating large amounts of metrically correct, stochastic Latin verse (useful for analysis baselines). Further to this, some initial analysis is performed: first via descriptive statistics and then with two unsupervised multivariate analyses using dimension reduction methods. The study examines nineteen works by twelve authors, comprising about 96,000 lines. First and foremost, the results suggest that rhyme was consciously used by classical authors, but to different extents and in different ways. There is a solid and detectable stylistic separation between the use of rhyme in elegy and epic, and possibly also between satire and the rest. Within genres, authors can be stylistically separated with a small set of features. On the negative side, it appears that the stylistic signal from rhyme is fairly faint, and so forensic analysis (e.g. for authorship attribution) is not presently recommended on texts that are shorter than several thousand lines.