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, verso collection of imperial biographies from Hadrian puro Carus supposedly written by six different authors, provided the impetus for the introduction of computational methods into the Echtheitskritik of ancient authors con 1979. After per flurry of studies durante the 1990s, interest waned, particularly because most of those studies seemed sicuro 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 per forensic stylometry today – as well as the established method of principal components analysis to demonstrate that there is no simple alternative between scapolo and multiple authorship, and that the results of a computational analysis are sopra fact compatible with the results obtained from historical, literary, and philological analysis.

The Historia Augusta (henceforth HA) is per collection of biographies of Roman emperors stretching from Hadrian (AD 117–138) preciso Carus (AD 282–283) and his sons Carinus (AD 283–285) and Numerian (AD 283–284).1 1 Justin Stover would like to 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 durante the following repository: The lives purport onesto 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). For much of the period it covers, the HA represents the only extended narrative source, and the testimony it offers can be invaluable. Unfortunately, the HA is also famous for its bizarre details and puzzling omissions, as well as its lurid focus on emperors’ peccadilloes and personal habits preciso the detriment of their political accomplishments. It also notoriously includes documents – speeches, letters, laws – which are almost certainly fabricated by the author(s), and cites a whole host of authors nowhere else attested, and probably invented.2 2 See L. Homo, ‘Les documents de l’Histoire Auguste et leur valeur historique’, RH 151 (1926) 161–198 and 152 (1926) 1–31. But the problem of the HA is not only its unreliability as an historical source: it also includes throughout troubling anachronisms, mentions of office and titles that only came into being mediante the middle of the fourth century, decades after the supposed dates of its composition. Mediante 1889, Hermann Dessau put forth the provocative thesis that the HA was durante fact the work of verso single author working under the reign of Theodosius (AD 379–395), and that division of the lives between six authors and their dedications onesto Diocletian and Constantine were merely verso literary ploy.3 3 H. Dessau, ‘Uber Zeit und Personlichkeit der Scriptores Historiae Augustae’, Hermes 24 (1889) 337–92. Ronald Syme – the most influential exponent of the Dessau thesis – would famously term the author ‘per rogue grammaticus’.4 4 R. Syme, Ammianus and the Historia Augusta (Oxford 1968) 207.

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As early as the late 1970s, it was realized that this question of celibe or multiple authorship durante verso insieme offered per perfect prova case for statistical methods of authorship attribution. Ian Marriott conducted a groundbreaking analysis, published sopra the Journal of Roman Studies mediante 1979, which suggested that computational analysis indicated solo authorship of the corpus.5 5 I. Marriott, ‘The authorship of the Historia Augusta: two computer studies’, JRS 69 (1979) 65–77. This was per seminal application of forensic stylometry, as developed by Mosteller and Wallace, sicuro a Latin text.6 6 F. Mosteller and D. Wallace, Inference and disputed authorship: the Federalist (Cambridge, Ciononostante 1964). Unfortunately, his analysis was marred by methodological errors, particularly the use of sentence length as a criterion of authorship, which is giammai longer considered an effective stylometric feature even for modern texts, and should definitely not be used for ancient texts, where the punctuation is coppia sicuro the modern editor.7 7 D. Sansone, ‘The cervello elettronico and the Historia Augusta: verso note on Marriott’, JRS 80 (1990) 174–77. For the relative poor impresa of e.g. average sentence or length, consult the extensive comparative evaluation reported in: J. Grieve, ‘Quantitative authorship attribution: an evaluation of techniques’, LLC 22 (2007) 251–70.