The Greek fades when Cicero breaks

Claim (verbatim)

Cicero's code-switching into Greek with Atticus was not erudition but play — the register of a self with energy left over to perform for the one reader who could grade the performance. Switching languages mid-sentence is cognitively expensive showmanship; it spends a surplus of self-command. The interiority claim: Greek was Cicero's signal of spare capacity, and in the months when events crushed him — the exile, the miserable Brundisium year after Pharsalus, the weeks after Tullia's death — the performing self shut down and the letters went flat, monolingual Latin, even though Greek consolation literature was the obvious resource for a grieving philhellene. Prediction: in the Letters to Atticus, Greek-script tokens per 1,000 words in letters dated to his three collapse windows (March 58 to August 57 BCE, June 48 to September 47 BCE, and March to June 45 BCE) run at least 50% below the rate in his letters of 61-59 and 54-51 BCE pooled; primary clause: the pooled collapse-window rate against the pooled baseline rate, and the verdict follows it whatever any single window does. Kill: the Perseus Digital Library TEI text of Cicero's Epistulae ad Atticum, where Greek stands in Greek script and the letters carry standard dates; the exact computation is a per-letter count of Unicode Greek-range tokens per 1,000 words, bucketed by the stated date windows.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the Letters to Atticus, Greek-script tokens per 1,000 words in letters dated to his three collapse windows (March 58 to August 57 BCE, June 48 to September 47 BCE, and March to June 45 BCE) run at least 50% below the rate in his letters of 61-59 and 54-51 BCE pooled; primary clause: the pooled collapse-window rate against the pooled baseline rate, and the verdict follows it whatever any single window does.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Perseus Digital Library TEI text of Cicero's Epistulae ad Atticum, where Greek stands in Greek script and the letters carry standard dates; the exact computation is a per-letter count of Unicode Greek-range tokens per 1,000 words, bucketed by the stated date windows.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Cicero's Greek code-switching with Atticus as an intimate/playful register is well studied, but the specific claim that Greek DROPS in his emotional-collapse windows (exile, post-Pharsalus, post-Tullia) as a marker of spent self-command was not located.

• J.N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge, 2003), ch. on Cicero's letters
• S. Swain, 'Bilingualism in Cicero?', in Bilingualism in Ancient Society (Oxford, 2002)

Predictions

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