Homogeneous Homer

To compile his Concordance to Euripides, Classicist James T. Allen spent 43 years arranging 250,000 index cards in a nightmare game of "philological solitaire." Had he used a computer, Allen could have done the job in twelve hours. So says Classicist James T. McDonough Jr., 27, of Philadelphia's St. Joseph's College, who uses modern electronics to analyze Greek metrics. McDonough has done as much for Homer, and as a consequence of this odd work he can almost definitely answer an old scholarly question: Did one man or many men write the Iliad?

A Boston-born product of Boston College High School, where Jesuits douse the lads in Greek and Latin, McDonough at first aimed for M.I.T. and physical chemistry. Instead, the classics lured him to Boston College, where he was hooked on Greek poetry by the Rev. Carl J. Thayer, S.J., an inspired teacher whose students habitually sweep national Greek sight-reading contests. On top of that, McDonough worked one summer in a Boston insurance company office, where he discovered the talents of computers.

Since a computer prefers to read numbers, McDonough designed an eight-digit code covering all possibilities in the Iliad's 250,000 syllables. The digits represent eight variables: syllables at the beginning, middle or end of words, and monosyllables, all four of which can be either long or short. To "translate" every line in the poem in these terms, McDonough used computers that he begged and borrowed time on, from Harvard to Columbia. Then, summing up all the metrical patterns, one machine, in a total of five hours, clacked out a detailed analysis of the Iliad's style.

Produced for a doctoral thesis at Columbia University, the result is a huge black notebook composed of pages and pages of numbers--a coded guide to all 157 varieties of syllabic patterns in the Iliad's 112,000 words and 15,693 lines. McDonough can now say, for example, that the poem's most common syllabic pattern is a word of one short followed by two long syllables appearing at the end of a line, in 6,344 lines or 40.42% of the total lines. Sample: 'Apollwn'(Apollo). By the same token, this kind of word never once appears at mid-point in a line. Such evidence of stylistic consistency goes far to disprove the 19th century theory that many men wrote the Iliad. Scholars can still debate whether or not the author was Homer, but Computer Classicist McDonough hopes to solve another old mystery: Did the man who wrote the Iliad also write the Odyssey?

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