

New Research on Plato and Pythagoras - pygy_
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jay.kennedy/

======
tmsh
Ironically, one example of the dangers of bright people staying in the academy
for too long (on twelve different levels). Which is not to knock academia. Or
Plato. Or this paper, exactly.

But I feel kind of sorry for this guy. Throughout my undergraduate years, I
was very into this kind of thing. Because of the Indiana Jones aspect, as
someone mentioned.

Unfortunately, it's so easy to misinterpret patterns. There are many more
dialogues -- which I assume don't fit the model of 35 characters a page or
whatever he's going for. And there are many dialogues where these supposed
synchronous 'concepts' aren't apparent.

Some day if scholarship got a lot more scientific, there'd be control groups
and actual statistical verification.

In the meantime, cognitive dissonance is hard once you go down the numeracy
rabbit hole. Aristotle thought Plato was somewhat Pythagorean because...Plato
went and stayed with a bunch of Pythagoreans in Syracuse for a while.

If anything, 'stichometry' is much more something a monk would do (in the
manner of the Divine Comedy, etc., at the least it seems more Hellenistic and
less Classical). And maybe we do get some of the dialogues abridged and
ordered to meet the pages that they copied. Also, 'one or two percent
accuracy' (top of page 10) when you're counting lines doesn't sound that
convincing.

But maybe I'm wrong. It'd be much more convincing if the text could be
presented visually and the structure clearly was broken up that way.... And
you could show, for instance, that when you break things up with 34 characters
or 33 characters, you get no interesting patterns. But when you align things
perfectly, a preponderance of patterns suddenly emerges. I don't get the sense
that there is a 'preponderence' or whatever. But maybe.

~~~
wazoox
What strikes me at first glance is that he seems to believe that whatever
manuscripts we have somehow respect Plato's text formatting. All of these
manuscripts are between 500 and 1800 years younger than Plato (I suppose that
the picture shows either the Parisii or Vaticani papyrus). Didn't this guy
read all the wonderful commentaries philologists write in the introduction of
modern editions? The treasures of patience needed sometimes to even make sense
of the manuscript?

~~~
pygy_
It has nothing to do with the layout, the "stiches" are groups of about 36
letters or 16 syllables. The author acknowledges the possibility of errors in
transcriptions.

------
BoppreH
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469965>

Yours has a more direct link to the full article, though.

~~~
pygy_
Sorry, I missed it.

Most people here should actually skip the general public explaination and read
the part written for scholars, which is more straightforward.

I haven't read the essay in PDF format, but I expect it to be quite an
insightful read.

Edit: the server ate my upvote. :-/

~~~
Adaptive
This is pretty stunning actually. Wondering, if this is borne out, how it gets
handled in the Loebs.

Just wow. Great post. How did you come across it?

~~~
pygy_
Slashdot

</shame>

;-)

------
rgejman
This reads like an Indiana Jones script. I can just picture a professor
frantically waving his hands in the air and yelling, "if Plato's music fall
into the hands of the Nazis, it could spell the end for Western Civilization
as we know it!!"

~~~
pygy_
You basically described the plot of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis,
the adventure game released in the early 90's.

