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Graffiti quote the frozen lines
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Ancient walls, potsherds, and school exercises carry Homer quoted from memory, while the manuscript witnesses of Homer disagree line by line. The surprising connection is that mass memory was a population-scale stabilizer of the written text: a passage carried in thousands of heads made every reader a proofreader, so the more a passage shows up in casual epigraphy, the less its manuscript witnesses should drift. Copyists made it so unwillingly — one cannot transmit a deviant version of a line the whole audience can recite back. If this holds, parts of the Homeric vulgate were fixed from below, by popularity, and the graffiti record becomes a predictor of manuscript stability rather than a curiosity shelf.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Rank Homeric passages by their frequency in published graffiti, ostraca, and school-exercise corpora. Primary clause, which decides the verdict: the Spearman correlation between epigraphic quotation frequency and inter-witness stability (inverse variant density) in the collated manuscript tradition is positive with rho of at least 0.3. Secondary clause: the most-quoted decile of passages shows plus-verse incidence no more than half the poem-wide average.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
The Homer Multitext project's collated witnesses of the Iliad and Odyssey for the stability measure, cross-referenced with the epigraphic and school-papyrus corpora of Homeric quotations.
In the kill-dataset registry:
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Composed blind by claude-fable-5 from internal knowledge with zero tool use and emitted as a single text message.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Quotation frequencies of Homeric passages in school papyri are tabulated (Cribiore counts the skew toward the Iliad and toward particular books), and witness stability is measurable in the Multitext collations, but no one has correlated epigraphic/school quotation frequency with inter-witness variant density.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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