Some Considerations on the Attribution of the 'New Apuleius'

Classical Quarterly. 2021. Vol. 71. No. 2. P. 819–848.

Nikolaev D., Shumilin M.

The ‘New Apuleius’ is a set of Latin summaries of Plato's works first published in 2016 by Justin Stover, who attributed it to Apuleius. The present article attempts to assess two key aspects of Stover's argument, viz. his reconstruction of the manuscript transmission of the new text and his use of computer-assisted stylometric techniques. The authors suggest that both strands of his argument are inconclusive. First, it is argued that the transposition of gatherings in the archetype of the Apuleian philosophica as envisaged by Stover is highly unrealistic. Second, replications of Stover's stylometric experiments show that their results are highly dependent on the particular algorithm settings and on the composition of the corpus. It is further shown that Stover's choice of highly specialized stylometric techniques is suboptimal, because popular generalist methods for statistical data analysis are demonstrably more successful in correctly identifying authors of Latin text fragments and do not support the case for Apuleius’ authorship of the new text. The authors conclude that there are no solid grounds to conclude that the ‘New Apuleius’ was indeed written by Apuleius.

Keywords: transmission, атрибуция, Apuleius, Апулей, attribution, 'New Apuleius', "Новый Апулей", трансмиссия, computer-assisted stylometry, Burrows's Delta, компьютерная стилометрия, "Дельта" Барроуза