THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE HISTORIA AUGUSTA: TWO NEW COMPUTATIONAL STUDIES

THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE HISTORIA AUGUSTA: TWO NEW COMPUTATIONAL STUDIES

THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE HISTORIA AUGUSTA: TWO NEW COMPUTATIONAL STUDIES

The case of the Historia Augusta, a collection of imperial biographies from Hadrian onesto Carus supposedly written by six different authors, provided the impetus for the introduction of computational methods into the Echtheitskritik of ancient authors in 1979. After a flurry of studies per the 1990s, interest waned, particularly because most of those studies seemed sicuro support conclusions incompatible with the scholarly consensus on the question. Durante the paper, we approach this question with the new tool of authorship verification – one of the most promising approaches sopra forensic stylometry today – as well as the established method of principal components analysis to demonstrate that there is giammai simple alternative between solo and multiple authorship, and that the results of per computational analysis are durante fact compatible with the results obtained from historical, literary, and philological analysis.

The Historia Augusta (henceforth HA) is a collection of biographies of Roman emperors stretching from Hadrian (AD 117–138) esatto Carus (AD 282–283) and his sons Carinus (AD 283–285) and Numerian (AD 283–284).1 1 Justin Stover would like onesto thank George Woudhuysen for helpful suggestions. We are both grateful to the editors for accepting this paper and the anonymous referees for many helpful suggestions. The code and texts for this paper can be found per the following repository: The lives purport to be written by six different authors, Aelius Spartianus, pridius, Trebellius Pollio, and Flavius Vopiscus, working under the Emperors Diocletian (AD 284–305) and Constantine (AD 306–337). (más…)