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The Authorship of the Historia Augusta: Two Computer Studies*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

Ian Marriott
Ian Marriott
Affiliation:
Oxford University Computing Service
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Extract

The most widespread and best-known use of computers in stylistic analysis has been in the attempts to resolve questions of disputed authorship. Here, the computer's ability to store the whole known corpus of an author's work and to compare it with the disputed work in many ways which would be inexpressibly tedious, if not impossibly lengthy, by hand, is an invaluable aid. Many studies have been carried out on classical texts where the authorship is doubtful, but these studies have most often had undisputed texts against which a disputed work could be compared. The Historia Augusta presents a different situation: there are six ‘authors’ to whom varying amounts of the work are assigned.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 69 , November 1979 , pp. 65 - 77
Copyright
Copyright ©Ian Marriott 1979. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

1 See in particular Ellegard, A., ‘A Statistical Method for Determining Authorship: The Junius Letters, 1769–1772’, Gothenburg Studies in English 13 (1962)Google Scholar; H. Coppens-Ide, ‘Authorship Problems and The Computer’, L.A.S.L.A. Revue 3 (1971), 187; Mosteller, F. and Wallace, D. L., Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist (1964)Google Scholar; Yule, G. U., The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary (1944)Google Scholar.

2 e.g. L. Brandwood, ‘Analysing Plato's Style with an Electronic Computer’, BICS 3 (1956), 45; Morton, A. Q., ‘The Authorship of Greek Prose’, Journ. Roy. Stat. Soc. 128A (1965), 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar; St Paul, The Man and The Myth (1966); It's Greek to the Computer (1971); S. V. F. Waite, ‘Approaches to the Analysis of Latin Prose, Applied to Cato, Livy and Sallust’, L.A.S.L.A. Revue 2 (1970), 91.

3 Note especially White, P., ‘The Authorship of the Historia Augusta’, JRS 57 (1967), 115Google Scholar, esp. 125–8; J. N. Adams, ‘On the Authorship of the Historia Augusta’, CQ 22 (1972), 186.

4 ‘Sentence Length Distributions of Greek Authors’, Journ. Roy. Stat. Soc. 120A (1957), 331Google Scholar. Cf. Janson, T., ‘Word, Syllable and Letter in Latin’, Eranos 65 (1967), 49.Google Scholar

5 The calulation is as follows: subtract the mean of one text from the mean of another; then, for each of these texts, take the square of the standard deviation and divide this by the number of items, and add these two values together; finally, take the square of this sum to give the standard error of dffference between the means.

6 For a detailed discussion of this question see Barnes, T. D., The Sources of the Historia Augusta, Coll. Latomus CLV (1978).Google Scholar

7 See Barnes, T. D., ‘Hadrian and Lucius Verus’, JRS 57 (1967), 65, on pp. 66–74.Google Scholar