hi, these are interesting results! as i’ve already mentioned here, in response to a similar question earlier on this forum, that i don’t think you can have an objective ranking of difficulty because it depends on where your own particular weaknesses lie:
http://discourse.textkit.com/t/methods-for-learning-greek/10207/1
however i don’t mean by this that you can’t rank authors by difficulty according to some objective or subjective criterion. eg., i think of homer as easier than say pindar, based on the totally unscientific subjective criterion that after working through a few books of homer very carefully after that i could almost free-read homer, i.e. it pays off in terms of fluency with reading the rest of that work. you could use that as a subjective criterion for ranking authors by difficulty - after you’ve worked through say 25% of a work, how hard it is to read the remaining 75%?
there’s definitely a ranking you could make there between say homer and other authors where you just keep having to chip away word after word even after the first 25% of the work - the analogy i’ve used before is like digging a mine, you’ve only really gained the area you’ve actually dug and it doesn’t break you through to some grand open space as i used to hope (for these types of authors). this can be for a whole range of reasons and isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all - as aristotle notes in the poetics (1458b), it’s important for tragedians to seek out the rare and unusual words (i.e. the hard ones!) and to avoid constantly ordinary prosaic language:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0055%3Asection%3D1458b
this is not just specific to greek - although i only read him in short doses, huysmans is still one of my favorite french authors, and my annotations to e.g. his à rebours are as heavy as on say my greek text of thucydides - someone described him as dragging mother image by the hair or feet down the worm-eaten staircase of syntax, or something like that (you could probably apply the same idea to some greek poets!), and i think i read he went out specifically searching for dictionaries of rare and obscure words to give his text this particular flavour.
with pindar, i had to go through and re-order his words just to make sense of what went with what, which i typed up in this article here (see the italicized text): http://www.aoidoi.org/poets/pindar/O1.pdf, something which you definitely don’t get with other types of authors.
so i think you can rank authors according to a particular criterion like this (or another particular one) but if you just say “this guy was the hardest overall” then you run into the issue i raised in that earlier response linked above - whether tragedy or thucy seems harder will really depend a lot on your relative strengths in the 10 factors i mentioned there (and probably in other factors that i didn’t mention or realise), rather than being a purely objective difficulty factor.
i’d be interested to know, from those who’ve voted above, what was it in particular that you had in mind when you voted someone as super difficult, compared to an author as easier, i.e. what criterion did you use as your rule of thumb? was it e.g. still bashing your palm into your forehead when reading the final pages of some work, rather than being able to glide in to the finish easily as you can with other authors, or something else? cheers, chad