Authorship Attribution of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae.

This paper describes attempts that have been made over the past century to disprove the alleged date of writing, and the manuscript attribution, of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae. The manuscript tradition has attributed the thirty biographies to six specific authors; but researchers have instead...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Literary & Linguistic Computing Vol. 13; no. 3; pp. 119 - 132
Autores principales: GURNEY, PENELOPE J., GURNEY, LYMAN W.
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Oxford University Press / USA Sep1998
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:This paper describes attempts that have been made over the past century to disprove the alleged date of writing, and the manuscript attribution, of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae. The manuscript tradition has attributed the thirty biographies to six specific authors; but researchers have instead attempted to assign the attribution to a single author—a ‘forget’, writing in the late fourth century. The biographies describe the lives of emperors and usurpers of a great part of the second and third centuries of our era, and constitute an imperfect, yet important source of information on this poorly documented time. The attempts to demonstrate single authorship have been based upon internal evidence and linguistic analysis. This paper describes various statistical analyses of word frequencies of the fully lemmatized and disambiguated texts of the work, and demonstrates that not only has multiple authorship not been disproved, but also that the manuscript tradition attributing specific biographies to stated authors has very clearly not been overturned.