  In the past several decades, many authorship attribution studies have used
computational methods to determine the authors of disputed texts. Disputed
authorship is a common problem in Classics, since little information about
ancient documents has survived the centuries. Many scholars have questioned the
authenticity of the final chapter of Xenophon's Cyropaedia, a 4th century B.C.
historical text. In this study, we use N-grams frequency vectors with a cosine
similarity function and word frequency vectors with Naive Bayes Classifiers
(NBC) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) to analyze the authorship of the
Cyropaedia. Although the N-gram analysis shows that the epilogue of the
Cyropaedia differs slightly from the rest of the work, comparing the analysis
of Xenophon with analyses of Aristotle and Plato suggests that this difference
is not significant. Both NBC and SVM analyses of word frequencies show that the
final chapter of the Cyropaedia is closely related to the other chapters of the
Cyropaedia. Therefore, this analysis suggests that the disputed chapter was
written by Xenophon. This information can help scholars better understand the
Cyropaedia and also demonstrates the usefulness of applying modern authorship
analysis techniques to classical literature.
