thoughts, experiments, and projects
Compliled by Al Boroto
An interactive tool for exploring word2vec models trained on century-sliced ancient Greek corpora — browse nearest neighbours, probe cosine similarities, and plot conceptual trajectories across eight centuries of text.
In Xenophon, βάρβαρος reverts to a military-operational category — but differently from Herodotus. Tyranny disappears entirely from the barbarian’s semantic field, γένος becomes its strongest association, and the Cyropaedia’s admired Persian king dismantles the barbarian/tyranny equivalence that tragedy and Plato constructed.
In Plato, βάρβαρος and Ἕλλην have become each other’s nearest neighbors — the dyad consolidated into a standing formula. But the philosophical vocabulary of soul, virtue, and reason is kept separate from the ethnic label, running in a parallel register that barely intersects with it.
A fastText model trained on Herodotus reveals that βάρβαρος is primarily a military term, not a philosophical one — and that the conceptual elaboration of group difference happens at the level of specific peoples, not the generic label.
A fastText model trained on Euripides shows that βάρβαρος has moved: from a military category in Herodotus to a political-social one in tragedy. The exception — φύσις barely changes — is the analytically important finding.