Comparative rates of text reuse in classical Latin hexameter poetry

This paper presents a quantitative picture of the interactions between poets in the Latin hexameter tradition. The freely available Tesserae website (tesserae.caset.buffalo.edu) automatically searches pairs of texts in a corpus of over 300 works of Latin literature in order to identify instances where short passages share two or more repeated lexemes. We use Tesserae to survey relative rates of text reuse in 24 Latin hexameter works written from the 1st century BCE to the 6th century CE. We compare the quantitative information about text reuse provided by Tesserae to the scholarly tradition of qualitative discussion of allusion by Latinists.