The Petit Plutarch Project
My passion for classics and ancient history led to pursue a master’s degree in this field after completing my computer science undergraduate degree. In my thesis I investigate how political changes in late-republican Rome are reflected by changes in the characteristics attributed to the goddess Venus. I examine the relationships between political and military leaders, the cults they founded or worshipped, the places they visited, and so on. The large number of relationships that needed to be tracked made me contemplate about using computer science techniques to aid the analysis of historical evidence. Below is a description of a proof-of-concept experiment I conducted. Visualization turned out to be very useful in identifying trends and in raising new questions.
Methodology
The Lives is a series of biographies of famous Romans and Greeks, written by the Greek historian Plutarch (c. AD 46-120). I picked five Roman general and statesmen who lived and acted at the same period (late 2nd century to mid-1st century BC): Marius, Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey, and Caesar. I used A. H. Clough’s translation to English (available at Project Gutenberg), I counted the appearances of 17 major Roman deities in each general’s biographies.
I loaded this data set to NodeXL and used it to create a bi-modal graph. The nodes represent generals and deities, and the weighted edges represent the number of occurrences of a deity’s name in a general's Life (see below). While the data are by no means a representative sample, and word count is a limited technique, this experiment still raises some interesting research questions.
I loaded this data set to NodeXL and used it to create a bi-modal graph. The nodes represent generals and deities, and the weighted edges represent the number of occurrences of a deity’s name in a general's Life (see below). While the data are by no means a representative sample, and word count is a limited technique, this experiment still raises some interesting research questions.
A visualization of the connections between Roman generals and the gods associated with them in Plutarch's Lives.
Findings
Looking at the visualization, I noticed I am already familiar with some of the connections it presents. The graph shows that Sulla’s Life associates him with far more deities than any other general. This supports my own impression from studying the five biographies. Also, according to the graph, Sulla is the only general associated with Bellona, an ancient yet relatively minor goddess of war. This is backed up by the findings of a previous study I conducted on Sullan propaganda.
This experiment also raised some interesting issues I never noticed before. For example, the graph shows that Sulla’s connection to the goddess Fortuna is significantly stronger than anyone else’s. While Sulla seemed to have constantly stressed his good fortune—as indicated by his agnomen Felix (“fortunate”)—his fortune is usually related to other gods, such as Apollo or Venus. The strong connection between Sulla and Fortuna, which is immediately visible thanks to the graph, could be an interesting path for a future study.
This experiment also raised some interesting issues I never noticed before. For example, the graph shows that Sulla’s connection to the goddess Fortuna is significantly stronger than anyone else’s. While Sulla seemed to have constantly stressed his good fortune—as indicated by his agnomen Felix (“fortunate”)—his fortune is usually related to other gods, such as Apollo or Venus. The strong connection between Sulla and Fortuna, which is immediately visible thanks to the graph, could be an interesting path for a future study.
Future work
Future plans include replacing word count with more sophisticated techniques (perhaps some natural-language processing), and running them on larger data sets, such as the concordances and indices that were created in the early 20th century for the ancient texts. I would also like to use the original texts instead of translations. If you have comments or questions, or wish to join forces on a larger-scale experiment, you are welcome to contact me at shahar {underscore} ronen {at} hotmail {dot} com.
Copyright (c) Shahar Ronen, 2010
