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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.
Browse the registry: Digitized texts →
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.
How this item is catalogued
Catalogue tags are curatorial metadata that make the conjecture findable. They are not findings, not a novelty verdict, and naming a source family is not a promise that the data exist or are accessible. Each dimension below says whether it was assigned, reviewed with none applying, uncertain, or not yet reviewed, and who recorded it.
- Place & era tags — Assigned
- Aegean & Greece; Rome & Italy; Iron Age & Antiquity Tagged by Claude Fable 5 (claude-fable-5)
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 100 CE – 300 CE Athenaeus of Naucratis, Deipnosophistae, composed c. 200 CE; rounded outward to the surrounding century of the quotation-network it fossilizes. Tagged by Claude Fable 5 (claude-fable-5)
- Subject — Not yet reviewed
- Finer subject topic — Assigned
- The Odyssey The claim is squarely about the Odyssey's quotation record. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Claim level — Assigned
- Record claim The prediction is quotation counts in one ancient author against a circulation baseline, i.e. how the indirect tradition sampled the poems. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Method — Reviewed — none applies
- Registered statistic: Odyssey quotations as a percentage of the Iliad count in one author, threshold forty percent against a one-in-three circulation baseline. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Evidence source — Assigned
- Digitized texts; Published editions Kill test loads the index locorum of Olson's Loeb Athenaeus or Kaibel's Teubner with a TLG-assisted recount as arbiter. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Research stage — Idea — no test designed
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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