Hypotheseis, a Database of Named Entities Surrounding Greek Rhetorical Exercises

Abstract

The rhetorical exercises written in Greek from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine age constitute a wide corpus of texts that in the last two centuries have been the subject of few studies in comparison with many other areas of ancient Greek literature. As a result, there is no comprehensive list of Greek progymnasmata and declamations nor an overall study of the topics they cover and of the Named Entities they mention (mythological characters, historical persons, places, events, etc.) has already been published. The relational database Hypotheseis, founded in March 2024, is a Wikibase instance that aims to fill this gap, providing an easy way to describe the Greek rhetorical exercises and the Named Entities to which they are connected as structured data, available in CC0 license; a SPARQL endpoint allows making sophisticated analyses on the collected data. This paper presents the data model of the database, the corpus of texts it intends to catalogue, the work done so far and what could be done in the future.