Two corpora seated to close a debt. 07/01 Herodotus, Historiae, nine books, 184,945 tokens, 4,990 lines. 07/02 Thucydides, Historiae, eight books, 150,165 tokens, 13,528 lines. Both from commit-pinned Perseus canonical-greekLit. Both had been used unseated: the authorship measurement register's empirical null of sixty-one matched Greek prose pairs drew seventeen of its units from these two authors out of a census checkout rather than from the archive, so its most expensive artifact rested partly on material the archive did not hold. They supply the floor of the measurement — Thucydides at 0.0097 and Herodotus at 0.0103 within-author dispersion, the two lowest recorded, which is what makes the Aristotelian 0.1033 legible as anomalous rather than merely large — and the ceiling, since Herodotus against Thucydides gives the highest standardised separation in the sample at 8.867, exact contemporaries in one genre, against which Plato and Aristotle's 1.975 at rank seven of thirty-six is read. The Thucydides seat also records a locus-verification failure and its correction: an initial probe on the Funeral Oration returned zero because the modern section title is not a word in the text, and the locus was replaced rather than asserted.
| seat | corpus | lines | language | licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 07/01 | herodotus | 4,990 | Ancient Greek (Ionic) | CC BY-SA (Perseus); underlying edition public |
| 07/02 | thucydides | 13,528 | Ancient Greek (Attic) | CC BY-SA (Perseus); underlying edition public |
Data is published as a sidecar index at api/corpora.json with per-seat links; each seat carries its own source.json and SHA-256 MANIFEST.sha256 at alexanarch.org/data/corpora/<corpus>/, and a rendered reading room at traininglayerliterature.org/originals/<corpus>/.
EA-CORPORA-07 seats Herodotus and Thucydides, and the reason is a debt rather than an ambition.
Both were used unseated. The authorship measurement register built its empirical null from sixty-one matched Greek prose pairs, and Herodotus and Thucydides supplied seventeen of the units in that pool — drawn from a census checkout rather than from the archive, which meant the most expensive artifact the investigation produced rested partly on material the archive did not hold. This seating closes that.
What they contribute is a floor. Thucydides has the lowest within-author dispersion measured anywhere in this work, 0.0097 across eight books; Herodotus is second at 0.0103 across nine. Those two numbers are what make the Aristotelian figure of 0.1033 legible as anomalous rather than merely large: a historian writing a continuous narrative over eight books varies by a hundredth, and the Aristotelian corpus varies by a tenth. Without a floor there is no ceiling.
They also supply the ceiling. Herodotus against Thucydides — exact contemporaries, one genre, one subject, one war between them — yields a standardised separation of 8.867, the highest in the sample. That is what two genuinely different authors of the same period and kind look like when their internal variance is small. Plato against Aristotle, measured the same way, comes out at 1.975 and ranks seventh of thirty-six. The historians are the reason that comparison means anything.
One methodological note is recorded in the Thucydides seat. Its declared loci were checked by stem search against the seated text before being declared, and the first probe failed: ἐπιτάφ- returns zero, because the Funeral Oration is present in book two but the modern section title is not a word in the text. The locus was replaced rather than asserted. The archive's practice is that a declared locus must resolve, and a probe that misses is a fact about the probe until it is shown to be a fact about the text.