A Message to Richard Carrier:
Hi Richard …. I hope we can press a re-set button and make a fresh start. Some years back you gave me good advice: you said that when we make mistakes the best thing we can do is admit them, correct them and move on. Earlier this year I was somewhat dismayed at your responses to my criticisms of aspects of your Bayesian approach to history — it was evident to me that you had not had time to read the full discussion and as a result failed to even acknowledge, let alone address, the arguments I was making.
Soon afterwards I sought from you some background to your criticisms of Enrico Tuccinardi’s stylometric analysis of Pliny’s letter about the Christians. I admit my questions were curt — my disillusionment from your responses to my earlier criticisms re Bayes still rankled — but you did not answer any of them and only responded with generalized personal imputations of bad motive and wrong reasoning.
Please let’s do a re-set. Though I have criticisms of your applications of Bayes in historical research I have never advocated a wholesale abandonment of Bayesian reasoning. If you ever read my past or future posts addressing my reservations of your approach, I trust you will read them with care, accepting they are written in good faith and that I seek a respectful and cordial and informed dialogue.
Similarly with respect to this post — about your criticisms of Tuccinardi’s study of Pliny’s letter 10.96. Again, I suspect you failed to do the careful reading required for a fuller understanding of his arguments. You are a busy man. But when it comes to writing publicly about other people’s works we owe it to them and to ourselves to be scrupulously careful to get things right. If we find we have made mistakes, we move on, determined not to repeat them in the future.
P.S.
You have been the target of many personal, even dishonest, criticisms from scholars and lay readers alike. So was Earl Doherty, whom we both highly respect. One of the reasons we admired him was his patience and civility in the face of those sorts of attacks. (In fact, some of my disagreements with you go back many years but because of the “attack Carrier” climate so prevalent on the web at the time I remained silent: I did not want anyone to think I was contributing to fanning personal denigration.)
–o0o–
To Everyone Else:
In July this year I posted a regret that I lacked time to post on certain topics then. Well, here is my catch up with one of those topics: Richard Carrier’s, Statistical Stylometrics: The Good, the Bad, and the Horrid (Part 2: Pliny and Galen).
Before I was able to post my own views of what Richard Carrier (RC) had written Enrico Tuccinardi (ET) posted his detailed response. So that makes it easier. I can conflate some of what I was hoping to say with his remarks. (In brief, ET argues that Pliny’s letter contains anomalies that make it unreliable as a historical source; RC insists that ET has incompetently compared Pliny’s letter with the wrong database and therefore his conclusions are invalid.)
Misreading other scholarship
RC wrote critically that Pliny was known for his stylistic variation and that ET failed to sufficiently consider this fact:
The study on that that Hurtado is calling attention to is Federico Gamberini, Stylistic Theory and Practice in the Younger Pliny, which demonstrates Pliny is particularly known for large style variation across his letters.
That’s not quite what Gamberini wrote and here Hurtado is as much at fault as Carrier. Rather, Gamberini demonstrated “large style variation across” the first nine books of his letters. The tenth book, including 10.96, was monostylistic. Gamberini wrote that the group of letters to which #96 belongs illustrate
a low degree of differentiation, since most letters consist in reports or analyses of a given situation. (333f. Underlining original)
I’ll elaborate on this point in the following section.
Whose hand is waving?
RC continued:
And this is a problem Tuccinardi kind of handwaves off in a way a non-expert reading his study might miss. After reading it [presumably Gamberini’s analysis of Pliny’s style] myself . . . .
On the contrary, ET’s study and assumptions are entirely consistent with the literary analysis we read in Gamberini’s work. Carrier says he read Gamberini’s work — at least that’s how I interpret his words — but if so, then Carrier’s following description of Pliny’s letter contradicts at every point what Gamberini’s study makes explicitly clear (my bolding):
Pliny varies his style tremendously especially in respect to genre, which is why Tuccinardi says he only created an “aggregate profile” of book 10 of Pliny’s correspondence, which contains all his state correspondence (mainly with emperor Trajan). This is distinct from all his personal correspondence in books 1 through 9. . . . . letter 10.96 is more like the letters in Books 1–9, not less. So he is testing it against the wrong base text.
This is an immediate and enormous problem that single-handedly invalidates all of Tuccinardi’s results. Because letter 10.96 (I’ll call it Tuccinardi’s “disputed” letter) contains an unusual amount of personal thoughts and reflections compared to other letters in book 10. It therefore actually more resembles letters in books 1 through 9. Indeed, 10.96 deviates considerably from most of book 10 in being in a rhetorical style—most of the other letters there are in curt administrative Latin, with a comparative minimum of rhetoric or elaboration. They are, in effect, business letters designed to be as brief and to-the-point as possible. That couldn’t be more different than this letter which is unusually long, elaborate, rhetoric-laden, and on a very unusual subject—indeed, a unique one: Christianity . . . .
You’ll notice it is the only long letter in Book 10, and thus appears to be in a genre unlike most of that volume, and more like letters in the other volumes (e.g., just from the previous three volumes—I didn’t even check volumes 1 through 5 because 6 through 9 already show my point by themselves—compare: 6.2, 6.16, 6.20, 6.29, 6.31, 6.33; 7.6, 7.9, 7.17, 7.19, 7.24, 7.27, 7.33; 8.6, 8.14, 8.18, 8.20, 8.23 and 24; 9.13, 9.26, 9.33—none of which have anything comparable in volume 10 except 10.96).
No work required to check….
Just to comment on that last sentence first ….. Carrier is saying that he was driven to check for himself the earlier volumes of Pliny’s letters to compare their lengths and that he lacked time to compare them all. Again, this puzzled me because if he had read Gamberini he should have simply referred to Gamberin’s list setting out all the lengths of the letters in the first nine books (pp 151f), compared them with the length of the Pliny letter (54-55 lines by the same 1963 O.C.T. measure) and immediately identified a minimum of 34 letters of the same length and longer.
But length is not necessarily the same thing as style.
Carrier & Hurtado versus Gamberini
The more critical problem lies in Carrier’s claim and Hurtado’s inference that the “style” and “genre” of 10.96 more closely align with the letters of books 1 to 9. But any reading of Gamberini flatly contradicts that assessment.
Gamberini classifies 10.96 among 24 letters of the type “requests for advice” (336) and examines its style among the other letters:
- 10.96 contains a standardized ceremonial opening that is common to 31 other letters in book 10 and in common with 10 other “requests for advice” (341f, 347). These features are alien to the letters of books 1 to 9.
- Gamberini further aligns 10.96 with a score of other book 10 letters containing “standardized expressions and formulas of deference” toward the emperor.
- Unlike the letters of book 9, those of book 10, including 10.96, contain few if any instances of figures of speech — though 10.96 does contain one instance of the “stylistic” isocolon (357f).
- Tropes are “extremely rare” in book 10 but Trajan’s letter of reply (10.97) contains one instance of imagery! (371)
In all, 10.96 is part of a book of very “boring” letters with respect to style and is nothing at all like “scintillating”(?) stylistic variants of books 1 to 9 — they all lack the “literary dimension”:
But fundamentally the letters of book 10 reveal to us, by the absence of the features common in books 1-9, the essence of the style of the curatius scriptae, consisting in the symmetry of paratactic sentences and brevity. The analysis of book 10 is a good ’’control” experiment (i.e. an experiment conducted ceteris paribus but with the omission of one factor, being in this case the literary dimension) confirming the results obtained in the analysis of books 1-9. (Gamberini, 374)
Imagining evidence?
Although RC claims that 10.96 “contains an unusual amount of personal thoughts and reflections” and is written in “a rhetorical style” he does not demonstrate these views with any illustrations. Gamberini cited line after line to demonstrate his descriptions of Pliny’s style. RC would help his case if he could single out just one example of “personal thought and reflection” and “rhetorical style” in 10.96 to justify his claim that it is more like letters in the first nine books than others in the tenth.
Let Pliny explain his stylistic variation
Gamberini classifies the letters of the first nine books into three types in order to analyse their style (p. 3).
Three major categories, themselves consisting of a variety of types, can initially be established:
(I) letters occasioned by practical relations or motives;
(II) letters occasioned by social relations or motives;
(III) letters corresponding to the types of oratorical excursuses. (136)
10.96 is thus excluded. But what makes for Pliny’s famous stylistic variation? Gamberini lets Pliny speak for himself:
Nor should lofty and elevated expressions always be sought. For just as in painting nothing sets off the light more than shadow, so in speech it is fitting both to lower and to raise the style.
[Original: Nec vero adfectanda sunt semper elata et excelsa. Nam ut in pictura lumen non alia res magis quam umbra commendat, ita orationem tam summittere quam attollere decet] (44)
Again,
To conclude, Pliny claims that he has followed the principle of variety of styles in an effort to please the various types of reader, so that although particular sections may not appeal to individual taste the finished whole will be appreciated by all . . . (41)
As for some of Pliny’s letters being long and others short, Pliny had his reasons:
Pliny will bolster his case for lengthiness with another argument . . . The pleader can never know what particular point will be most persuasive to the judges; different minds are affected by different arguments: hence the best policy is to bring into play as many arguments as possible in the hope that something may be gathered therefrom. This is in keeping with Pliny’s emphasis on variety . . . (29f)
The main point to be remembered with regard to Pliny’s view of amplitude of treatment is that substance must correspond to words. It is a matter pertaining to inventio, namely, the discovery of arguments which will be advantageous to the issue which one must prove. (36)
All of the above explains Pliny’s stylistic variation in the first nine books. It also explains why 10.96 does not belong in that particular collection.
The temptation of the merry-go-round
The temptation here will be to read 10.96 and interpret its details as illustrations of just what Pliny himself said should be a reason for a longer set of words. But that would be a circular argument. We need first to analyse what might be the functions of each of the details in 10.96. Are they really justified according to Pliny’s “rules”? Or do they violate the over-riding rule of the need for brevity in imperial correspondence?
RC attempts to argue that the letter is unlike others in book 10 because the subject is a unique one — Christianity. But this is an ad hoc explanation that simply ignores everything we (and Gamberini) know about why Pliny said he sometimes chose to write long letters. Nor does it explain why details are added that contribute nothing to the main point needed for Trajan to make a decision — after all, the letter acknowledges that trials of Christians were known to the emperor.
A bigger problem if Hurtado/RC are right
If 10.96 were of a comparable style (not just length) as any of the letters in Books 1 to 9, we would have a major problem on our hands. How could we explain why Pliny would at that one time decide to violate all his stated principles and style, rhetoric, oratory and lengths of letters in that one letter — especially given the simple fact that a brief letter was absolutely essential — according to his own advice stated elsewhere? Trying to excuse the anomaly by saying it was about a “unique” topic, Christianity (or religion etc), is only special pleading. Other topics (e.g. a request for a fire brigade was potentially more threatening to imperial peace) are also one-off administrative inquiries.
Understanding the method used
RC:
Tuccinardi uses only a character n-gram method. And if you read my Part 1, you’ll know why that’s a problem. Latin, like Greek, is not sufficiently like modern languages for that method to work.
On the contrary. Carrier evidently has not read basic references cited by ET that demonstrate the n-gram method is the most suitable method to apply to Latin and Greek and other highly inflected languages. Greek and Latin inflections are marked by rules of letter combinations, after all. Interested readers will find more benefit reading ET’s response than anything I could add here.
An old canard returns
RC:
Tertullian corroborates essentially the letter we have, which requires it to not only have been forged within seventy years of the original, but within the manuscripts of Pliny, which would be an incredible accomplishment for 2nd century Christians who in no way had that kind of control over pagan literature . . . Moreover, the market would be awash with independent copies of Pliny’s ten volumes then, so for Tertullian to have based an argument on a forged copy . . . he’d be outed as an easily duped joke).
Every classicist and student of Latin literature knows that Book 10 was not published along with the other books and that it was far from being of widespread renown. Its history is unclear. Tertullian is the first to witness its existence, but his remarks only confirm a part of what we have in Pliny’s letter today. (This is similar to the tradition of the Christian martyr Perpetua; Tertullian makes some remarks about her but they are insufficient to establish the authenticity of a diary of hers known later to Augustine.) There is no evidence to indicate it was widely known. Our oldest manuscript comes from ecclesiastical pens in the middle ages.
Dear RC, you have surely responded in haste and not done careful homework on this occasion. It would not hurt your reputation if you were not so quick to impute incompetence and worse to others. Take it slow. Be thorough. The results will be better for both your readers and you.
ET’s original article: An application of a profile-based method for authorship verification: Investigating the authenticity of Pliny the Younger’s letter to Trajan concerning the Christians
RC’s response: Statistical Stylometrics: The Good, the Bad, and the Horrid (Part 2: Pliny and Galen)
ET’s response (far more extensive and critical than mine – in particular with the question of peer review and RC’s choice to respond on a personal blog): Stylometry, Method and Misrepresentation: a Response to Richard Carrier on Pliny’s Ep. 10.96
And an online text of the letters of Pliny the Younger: https://archive.org/details/lettersofplinyyo0000plin/mode/2up
