The school epic leaks downstream

Cross-period Dated c. 300 BCE – 1500 CE Aegean & Greece

Status: Anticipated in print · untested

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a conjecture imagined by a language model — drawn from its trained weights and held to falsifiability, novelty, and plausibility, not to any one method: it may join two or more fields, or none. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.

Claim (verbatim)

Byzantine scribes carried the Iliad in their heads — it was the school epic, its first books memorized by generations — and memory leaks into copying. At any formulaic junction where the two epics share a hemistich, a copyist's inner voice can complete the line the Iliadic way, or append the Iliadic follow-on verse the exemplar never had. The mechanism predicts an asymmetric flow of concordance-interpolations: Iliad lines intruding into Odyssey manuscripts more often than Odyssey lines intrude into the Iliad, because the contaminating reservoir — deep memory of the Iliad — was fuller than the reverse. George Melville Bolling's The External Evidence for Interpolation in Homer (1925) catalogued concordance plus-verses; what it did not do is weigh the two directions against each other. This conjecture claims the scale tips Iliad-to-Odyssey, and that the tilt is visible in the medieval paradosis, not only in early papyri — a fingerprint of the curriculum pressing on the copying hand.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: counting plus-verses in each epic's critical apparatus whose wording has a verbatim source-parallel in the other epic, Iliad-sourced intrusions into the Odyssey outnumber Odyssey-sourced intrusions into the Iliad, with at least five clear Iliad-to-Odyssey cases attested in medieval manuscripts.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The apparatus of M. L. West's Teubner Iliad and Odyssey, cross-checked against Bolling's 1925 catalogue of externally attested interpolations.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.

On Inferpedia

This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.

The Odyssey

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5 on 2026-07-21 for the Odyssey wave (run_key 'odyssey'): posed from model weights only, with no repository reads, no searches, and no web access; every named papyrus, manuscript, edition, catalogue, and dataset is cited from memory in good faith with no fabricated references.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Concordance-interpolation as a class is documented since Bolling, and curriculum-driven memory contamination is a recognized mechanism. The directional asymmetry — Iliad-sourced intrusions into the Odyssey outnumbering the reverse, weighed across both apparatuses — is to my knowledge an unrun census. Caution: for shared formulaic lines the 'source' epic is often undecidable; registration must pre-pin the attribution rule (e.g., verbatim multi-line parallels only, unique-context anchors) or the count will be arbitrary.

Sources cited by the triage

G. M. Bolling, The External Evidence for Interpolation in Homer, 1925.
M. L. West, Homeri Odyssea, Bibliotheca Teubneriana, 2017. — Apparatus and praefatio on interpolation classes in the Odyssey's paradosis.
M. Haslam, 'Homeric Papyri and Transmission of the Text', in A New Companion to Homer, 1997.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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