Platonic Prose Rhythm

Prose rhythm may be characterized by the occurrence of five-syllable sequences in passages of text. This characterization may be used to assess the similarity among passages. The data presented in Table 70.1 come from thirty-three passages representing ten Platonic texts. Each passage was divided into sentences, lists of words ending with a colon, question mark or period. Syllables within each sentence were classified as long or short. Each sequence of five syllables was identified as being one of the thirty-two possible groupings of five long or short syllables. Thus each sentence of length N greater than 5 contributed N-4 such identifications. Table 70.1 gives the percent of each of the thirty-two five-syllable sequences for each of ten books: Timaeus, Critias, Laws, Republic, Phaedrus, Symposium, Sophistes, Philedus, Seventh Epistle and Politics.