The Authorship of the Historia Augusta: Two New Computational Studies

Abstract

The case of the Historia Augusta, a collection of imperial biographies from Hadrian to 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 in the 1990s, interest waned, particularly because most of those studies seemed to support conclusions incompatible with the scholarly consensus on the question. In the paper, we approach this question with the new tool of authorship verification – one of the most promising approaches in forensic stylometry today – as well as the established method of principal components analysis to demonstrate that there is no simple alternative between single and multiple authorship, and that the results of a computational analysis are in fact compatible with the results obtained from historical, literary, and philological analysis.

Historia Augusta authorship: an approach based on Measurements of Complex Networks

“…In this paper, the General Imposters method (GI) (Koppel and Winter 2014;Kestemont et al 2016) in the R package stylo (Eder et al 2016) is used to compare the results obtained using Topological and Spectral Measurements of Complex Networks to represent the analyzed texts. The use of imposters enables us to compare our results on Historia Augusta with those reported in Stover and Kestemont (2016) that use GI.…”

“…the specificity of AS, it was necessary to assess whether it would stand in other contexts. We thought it was worth to conduct an experiment along the lines of Stover and Kestemont (2016), who pointed out stylistic differences between the authors of the so called Hauptviten and Nebenviten. The goal was to verify whether the specificity of AS would hold in the broader set of the division between the block of Hauptviten and that of Nebenviten-in fact, according to the traditional Fig.…”

“…These same authors advanced an approach based on different statistical methodology applied to the occurrence of function words, concluding for multiple authorship. More recently, Stover and Kestemont (2016) shifted the focus from authorship attribution to authorship verification, resorting to the General Imposters framework (GI) and over the results obtained was applied a Principal Components Analysis. This methodology allowed the authors to conclude that the results obtained by GI verification did not support multiple authorship; moreover, besides the existence of stylistic features common to the entire collection, their research displays evidence of two distinct authorial layers "which correspond, more or less, to the categories of the Hauptviten and later lives" (Stover and Kestemont 2016), showing also a stylistic discontinuity after the lacuna.…”

Stilometriai Elemzés Lehetőségei Magyar Történeti Szövegkorpuszon

“…A saját szerzőségű Törökországi levelek mellett Mikes munkásságának jelentősebb része franciából való fordításokból áll, amelyeket Hopp Lajos a következő kategóriákba sorolt: erkölcsnevelő értekező próza önálló átültetése; 45 Eder, Rybicki and Kestemont, "Stylometry with R, " 107-121, https://doi.org/10. 56 így lehetővé válik a szerzőségi vizsgálatok elvégzése nagyméretű szövegkorpuszokon is. 57 A lexikai alapú elemzés javításának egyik lehetséges, további módját a harmadik kísérlet mutatja be.…”