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Quoted by the plateful
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).
“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)
Papyrus finds and manuscript counts put Odyssey circulation at a fraction of the Iliad's — a third or less by most tallies. Quotation, this conjecture claims, obeys a different law: content-indexing. Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae, the largest quotation-machine surviving from antiquity, needed feasts, wine, fish, sacrifice, hospitality, and table manners — and the Odyssey is the epic of the table as the Iliad is of the field. Where a work's subject matter matches a poem's furniture, excerpting overrides the curriculum's rank-order. So the Odyssey should punch far above its circulation weight in Athenaeus: not parity necessarily, but a ratio much closer than one-to-three. The broader stake: the indirect tradition — the quotation network through which lost readings and variant lines reach us — is not a mirror of ancient readership but a content-addressed index, and every reconstruction that treats quotation frequency as a popularity proxy inherits that distortion.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause: in the Deipnosophistae, Odyssey quotations and verbatim allusions number at least forty percent of the Iliad's count — above the roughly one-in-three circulation baseline suggested by the papyri.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
The index locorum of S. D. Olson's Loeb Athenaeus (or Kaibel's Teubner), with a TLG-assisted recount as arbiter.
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.
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
Homer's saturation of Athenaeus is documented and the Deipnosophistae's index locorum makes counting mechanical, but I know of no published Iliad:Odyssey quotation ratio set against the circulation baseline, nor of the content-indexing framing as a measured claim. Caution: 'quotation and verbatim allusion' must be operationalized ex ante (index-locorum entries vs TLG line-matches give different counts; pin one as primary).
Sources cited by the triage
- D. Braund & J. Wilkins (eds.), Athenaeus and his World, 2000.
- S. D. Olson, Athenaeus: The Learned Banqueters, Loeb Classical Library, 2006-2012. — Index locorum as the named counting instrument.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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