The Multiform Author: Computational Stylometry, the Female Voice, and the Plasticity of the Homeric Tradition

The question of who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey—one poet or many, and of what identity—has been debated since antiquity, but it is being reopened by two developments the older debate could not anticipate: computational authorship analysis, which supplies quantitative evidence bearing on the unity of the poems, and a renewed attention to the female voice within archaic Greek epic. This article synthesises the published evidence on both fronts and advances a single argument: that the most defensible account of Homeric authorship is neither the single genius of tradition nor a faceless committee, but a multiform tradition—plural, re-performed, and plausibly multi-gendered in its compositional sources. It reviews the computational studies that find measurable stylistic divergence between the two poems, sets them against the scholarship defending unitary authorship, and reads both alongside the “authoress” hypothesis and the documented female lament and catalogue traditions embedded in the epics. It then specifies, as a prolegomenon rather than an executed study, a computational framework that would bring author-profiling techniques to bear on the gendered-composition question, together with a candid account of the methodological obstacles such a study would face. Finally, it argues that this reframing has contemporary stakes, illuminating the controversy over adaptations such as Christopher Nolan’s 2026 Odyssey: the demand for fidelity to a single authorial original presupposes precisely the fixed, unitary author that the evidence dissolves.