Rethinking Authorship in Classics

Authorship as a concept remains controversial: death of the author, return of the author, authorial function, collective authorship, are just a few highlights of the discussion, which continues with undiminished acuteness. In the Classics, the question of the author arises in a very extreme form in view of the numerous fragment editions (text corpora of authors whose works are lost or only fragmentarily preserved) and the almost equally numerous attributions of works to "pseudo" authors. Here, computational approaches, operating on a path independent of the classical hermeneutic method, offer the humanities a completely new perspective. Using a striking example (Pseudo-Xenophon's Athenaion Politeia, which is considered the first completely preserved prose writing of antiquity), it will be shown how a new approach can be gained for the controversial topic of authorship.