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Anthologies chose the triads
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).
Claim (verbatim)
Anthologies chose the triads. Joins the Byzantine school selection of the tragic triads to the older stratum of anthology culture: teachers selected plays not by dramatic merit but by gnomic yield — the sentences a schoolboy could copy, memorize, and deploy — and that yield had been assayed centuries earlier by the excerptors feeding Stobaeus. On this view the selection is downstream of the florilegium: the triad plays should be precisely the plays that were always over-quoted per line, and the alphabetic Euripides plays those the excerpt tradition had already passed over.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Normalize Stobaeus quotations per 100 surviving lines for each fully extant play of Euripides. Primary clause: the select plays' median quotation rate is at least twice the alphabetic plays' median, with at most one alphabetic play intruding into the select plays' range. Secondary: the same separation holds for Sophocles' triad against his other four plays. The verdict follows the Euripides clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the source apparatus and author index of the Wachsmuth-Hense edition of Stobaeus, with play line-counts from the TLG canon.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries; single packet Write was the only tool use); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen (sidecar docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_titlelist_20260708.md); prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W01 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending
A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).
The link between gnomic quotability, the school curriculum and tragic survival is an active, established topic: Mastronarde discusses Euripides as a teaching resource, most surviving tragic fragments are gnomic and came through Stobaeus, and recent work (Euripides and Quotation Culture; the BMCR survey of the indirect tradition) treats exactly the selection/quotation nexus. So the connection is well anticipated. Not located: the item's specific directional-and-quantified test -- the select plays showing >=2x the Stobaeus quotations-per-line of the alphabetic plays (with the same separation for Sophocles' triad) -- reading selection as downstream of the excerpt tradition. That precise measurement against Wachsmuth-Hense is the open contribution.
- Donald J. Mastronarde, 'P.Phil.Nec. 23 and Euripides as a Resource for Teaching' (Center for Hellenic Studies) — Euripides in the school curriculum and quotation tradition
- 'Treasuries of literature: anthologies, lexica, scholia and the indirect tradition of classical texts in the Greek world', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2025.08.08 — The florilegium/selection/survival nexus; per-line quotation-rate test not located
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