The creators of the Hindu scriptures known as the Brahmaand Bhāgavatapurāṇas lavished a great amount of descriptive detail on mythical and ‘mythologised’ places where important discourses were enunciated: the Naimiṣa forest, Mt Meru, Kurukṣetra, and Ānanda on the banks of the Ganges. At first glance this might appear to be idle expression of literary virtuosity, but I suggest that this careful ...

This paper is inspired by the manuscript of Philip Kitcher’s forthcoming book Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach, in which he offers a brilliant, philosophically inspired reading of Thomas Mann’s novel, as well as his views on the relationship between literature and philosophy. One of Kitcher’s claims, which is my starting point, is that philosophy can be done not only by phil...

We propose a computational model of text reuse tailored for ancient literary texts, available to us often only in small and noisy samples. The model takes into account source alternation patterns, so as to be able to align even sentences with low surface similarity. We demonstrate its ability to characterize text reuse in the Greek New Testament.