Brilliant scholars can pursue elaborate pattern-seeing delusions

Evidence

In the year he became professor he published Analecta Orientalia ad Poeticam Aristoteleam (1887), a collection of translations of Arabic and Syriac texts that might be used for textual criticism of the Greek text of Aristotle’s Poetics. Margoliouth, who was brilliant at crosswords and anagrams, had the kind of beautiful mind that could see patterns where none existed. Among other things he conducted eccentric investigations into possible anagrams and chronograms in the Iliad and Odyssey. He believed that Homer had signed his epics, but disguised his signature in anagrams. In The Homer of Aristotle (1924) he argued that the Homeric epics were full of chronograms (words or phrases where the letters form a date). This kind of approach made little impression on more orthodox classical scholars. His ideas about the Bible were similarly eccentric, as he entertained the strange belief that the Book of Daniel was written when it purported to be (sixth century BC) and therefore that its prophecies were genuine. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 374

Categorization

• CANDY: The Homer-anagram theory and the dog ordered to ‘Assume the recumbent position’ are delightful oddities.