The Contribution of Computational Stichometry Software to the Study of Plato’s Works

This work describes a software application of computational stichometry, created to investigate the possible influence of the Pythagorean School of mathematics in the construction of Plato’s works. That is, whether Plato wrote his works in such a way that their parts present quantitative proportions in terms of their extent, both among themselves and with the whole of each work. The number of syllables, in combination with the lines of the text, is used here as a criterion of length. It has been observed that the number of syllables per line of text in ancient scrolls is the same as that of the dactylic hexameter, i.e., from 12 to 17 syllables, probably due to the horizontal dimension (width) of the scroll. Yet, the works of Plato, as well as of all ancient writers, are not in such a form today. The software presented here converts the texts into numbered lines of a certain number of syllables, a number which is defined each time by the researcher, thus simulating the form of text in ancient scrolls. This makes it possible to measure the extent of both the work as a whole and its parts, as a prerequisite for capturing the relevant proportions. In order to compare the results of the present work with other similar ones, the structure of Plato’s Symposium was measured in terms of its structure. The measurement did not verify the original hypothesis about the Pythagorean mathematical structure of the Symposium, based on the number of syllables, but it demonstrated the ease with which mass quantitative data are obtained for a work, with the help of computational linguistics, thus saving time and effort on the part of the researchers.