What Word Embeddings Show About Euripides

Series: Race & Antiquity

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.

Two Readings of the Tragic Barbarian: Hall and Saïd

Series: Race & Antiquity

Hall argues that Greek tragedy invented the Barbarian as a coherent ideological construct serving Athenian democratic self-definition. Saïd argues that Euripides spent his career dismantling that same construct. Both are reading the same corpus. The disagreement is productive.