# BERT in Plutarch's Shadows

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.05673 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05673/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [Revisiting Few-sample BERT Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05987/) (2020)
- [Sentence Encoders on STILTs: Supplementary Training on Intermediate Labeled-data Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01088/) (2018)
- [Dear Sir or Madam, May I introduce the GYAFC Dataset: Corpus, Benchmarks and Metrics for Formality Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06535/) (2018)
- [Style Transfer Through Back-Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09000/) (2018)
- [Learning and Evaluating General Linguistic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11373/) (2019)
- [Transfer Learning across Low-Resource, Related Languages for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.09803/) (2017)
- [Shakespearizing Modern Language Using Copy-Enriched Sequence-to-Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01161/) (2017)
- [Latin BERT: A Contextual Language Model for Classical Philology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10053/) (2020)
- [Controlling the Output Length of Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10408/) (2019)
- [Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06262/) (2019)
- [Fine-Tuning Transformers: Vocabulary Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14569/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Exploring Large Language Models for Classical Philology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13698/) (2023)
- [Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19190/) (2025)
- [Sentence Embedding Models for Ancient Greek Using Multilingual Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13116/) (2023)
- [Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit. Detecting Latin Allusions to Ancient Greek Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12008/) (2023)
- [Heidelberg-Boston @ SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task: Enhancing Low-Resource Language Analysis With Character-Aware Hierarchical Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20145/) (2024)
- [An Annotated Dataset of Errors in Premodern Greek and Baselines for Detecting Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11071/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The extensive surviving corpus of the ancient scholar Plutarch of Chaeronea (ca. 45-120 CE) also contains several texts which, according to current scholarly opinion, did not originate with him and are therefore attributed to an anonymous author Pseudo-Plutarch. These include, in particular, the work Placita Philosophorum (Quotations and Opinions of the Ancient Philosophers), which is extremely important for the history of ancient philosophy. Little is known about the identity of that anonymous author and its relation to other authors from the same period. This paper presents a BERT language model for Ancient Greek. The model discovers previously unknown statistical properties relevant to these literary, philosophical, and historical problems and can shed new light on this authorship question. In particular, the Placita Philosophorum, together with one of the other Pseudo-Plutarch texts, shows similarities with the texts written by authors from an Alexandrian context (2nd/3rd century CE).