Nature: Large-scale quantitative profiling of the Old English verse tradition
Interesting article, primarily concerned with Beowulf. However they also count the number of periods ending lines in the Iliad versus the Odyssey and come up with this.
For instance, Fitch [34] demonstrated that the ratio of intraline to total sense-pauses is a reliable marker of relative chronology for the tragedies of Sophocles, Seneca and Shakespeare, perhaps because frequent inclusion of sense-pauses not coincident with line breaks reflects a more confident and mature poetic style.
The Fitch reference is Fitch, J. Sense-pauses and relative dating in Seneca, Sophocles and Shakespeare. Am. J. Philol. 102, 289–307 (1981).
Like Beowulf, the Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey have also generated much debate about their authorship and composition. Conventionally attributed to a single author—Homer—both works nevertheless clearly originate in a long oral tradition and show signs of considerable evolution in the course of their transmission history, including the possible influence of written versions37,38. Since the two Homeric epics have numerous features in common, we hypothesized that they might also have a similar pattern of sense-pauses. However, as shown in Fig. 2a, the Odyssey has a higher proportion of intraline sense-pauses relative to the Iliad. This difference suggests a slight change of compositional practice between the two Greek poems, whether due to a single poet’s stylistic evolution or natural variation across the oral tradition. Had the two parts of Beowulf shown a similar or greater disparity in the sense-pause data when compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, this might have supported the view that two different poems had been conjoined. However, as it stands, the comparative uniformity of the data suggests that the compositional practice of both parts was the same, at least with respect to sense-pauses