In the past several decades, many authorship attribution studies have used computational methods to determine the authors of disputed texts. Disputed authorship is a common problem in Classics, since little information about ancient documents has survived the centuries. Many scholars have questioned the authenticity of the final chapter of Xenophon's Cyropaedia, a 4th century B.C. historical text. In this study, we use N-grams frequency vectors with a cosine similarity function and word frequency vectors with Naive Bayes Classifiers (NBC) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) to analyze the authorship of the Cyropaedia. Although the N-gram analysis shows that the epilogue of the Cyropaedia differs slightly from the rest of the work, comparing the analysis of Xenophon with analyses of Aristotle and Plato suggests that this difference is not significant. Both NBC and SVM analyses of word frequencies show that the final chapter of the Cyropaedia is closely related to the other chapters of the Cyropaedia. Therefore, this analysis suggests that the disputed chapter was written by Xenophon. This information can help scholars better understand the Cyropaedia and also demonstrates the usefulness of applying modern authorship analysis techniques to classical literature.
A 1982 study of the Corpus Lysiacum did use word frequencies as one of the features to distinguish texts attributed to Lysias. This method used chi-squared tests to provide a distance measure. Chi-squared tests assume that features are independent, but independence is often not true in grammar. The study of the Corpus Lysiacum additionally involved parsing the text by hand, which is extremely time consuming and error prone @cite_2 .
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Thirty-five speeches, fragments and abstracts of speeches' comprise the corpus that has survived from a body of over four hundred attributed in ancient times to the Greek orator Lysias2. All three of the genres of oratory recognised by ancient critics are represented deliberative, epideictic and forensic. Most belong to the last category, being products of the profession which he practized during the latter part of his life, composing speeches for litigants to deliver in their own persons, as they were required to do in Athenian law-courts. Lysias, a Syracusan whose father Cephalus settled in Athens before the Peloponnesian War, conducted his own case against Eratosthenes, who had murdered his brother and despoiled his estate as one of the Thirty Tyrants who ruled Athens briefly in 404 3 B.C. The speech which he wrote for this prosecution survives as 12 in the Corpus (Oxford Text numbering, which is used in this article), and was probably the only speech that he made on his own behalf. But his name occurs