Exploring Formulaic Tradition Across Disciplinary Boundaries: Byzantine Book Epigrams and Beyond

Byzantine book epigrams – metrical paratexts found in the margins of manuscripts – form a highly interconnected corpus (Ricceri et al. 2023). Beyond the socio-historical connections apparent through metadata (e.g. provenance), these poems are linked through a network of formulaic expressions. Yet tracing these connections is complex: formulae are not simply repeated but creatively adapted. From lexical substitutions to the reproduction of patterns in more abstract forms, formulaicity in book epigrams has drawn the attention of linguists and Natural Language Processing researchers (Giannikou et al. 2024). In this paper, we explore how the formulaic material of Byzantine metrical texts extends beyond the manuscript tradition into other material contexts, such as stone inscriptions and frescos. To examine the formulaic tradition beyond – and in comparison to – manuscripts, we focus on the corpus curated by A. Rhoby (Rhoby 2009-2014). Our study combines philological analysis with computational linguistics. First, we use convolutional neural networks for textual pattern mapping and combine the results with FAISS, a system for textual comparison. We then undertake a linguistic analysis of the similarities and differences revealed, to assess the extent to which the formulaic material across media coalesces, and to evaluate whether this approach can be extended to the broader Byzantine epigrammatic tradition. Ultimately, our paper presents our methodological approach and the resulting insights, demonstrating how computational models, combined with philologically informed linguistic research, enable scalable comparative approaches into textual reuse and adaptation across the diverse writing media of Byzantine culture.