This book includes two works: 1. Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, translated by Thomas Medwin & Percy Bysshe Shellsy, and 2. Prometheus Unbound by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Prometheus Bound was accepted without question in antiquity as the work of Aeschylus, and most modern authorities endorse this ascription. But since the nineteenth century several leading scholars have come to doubt Aeschylean authorship. Dr Griffith here provides a thorough and wide-ranging study of this problem, and concludes: 'Had Prometheus Bound been newly dug up from the sands of Oxyrhynchus... few scholars would regard it as the work of Aeschylus.' After a preliminary assessment of the external evidence, Dr Griffith examines minutely the idiosyncrasies of metre, dramatic technique, vocabulary, syntax and expression to be found in the play, applying the same tests to other plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in order to provide a control for his methods. In his final chapter he discusses how the conditions surrounding the ancient transmission and cataloguing of texts may have led to the ascription to Aeschylus.
Classics, Computer Science, and Linguistics are brought together in this book, in an attempt to provide an answer to the authorship question concerning Prometheus Bound, a disputed play in the Aeschylean corpus, by applying some well-established Computer Stylistics methods. One of the main objectives of Stylometry, which, broadly speaking, is the study of quantified style, is Authorship Attribution. In its traditional form it can range from manually calculating descriptive statistics to the use of computer-assisted methodologies. However, non-traditional Authorship Attribution drastically changed the field. It brought together modern Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence applications (machine learning, natural language processing), and its key characteristic is that it aims at developing fully-automated systems for the attribution of texts of unknown authorship. In this book the author employs a series of supervised and unsupervised techniques used in non-traditional Authorship Attribution–applied here for the first time in ancient drama. The outcome of the analysis indicates a significant distance between the disputed text and the secure plays of Aeschylus, but also various interesting (micro-linguistic) ties of affinity with other authors, especially Sophocles and Euripides.
A searching critique of the structural changes currently taking place in the scientific community, showing that managerial considerations now threaten to crowd out the creative element in science.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
For readers accustomed to the relatively undramatic standard translations of Prometheus Bound, this version by James Scully, a poet and winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize, and C. John Herington, one of the world's foremost Aeschylean scholars, will come as a revelation. Scully and Herington accentuate the play's true power, drama, and relevance to modern times. Aeschylus originally wrote Prometheus Bound as part of a tragic trilogy, and this translation is unique in including the extant fragments of the companion plays.