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

Abstract

In this work, we analyze in detail the topology of the written language network using co-occurrence of words to recognize authorship. The Latin texts object of this study are excerpts from Historia Augusta, a collection of biographies of Roman emperors extending from Hadrian, who started to reign in 117 CE, to Carus and his sons Numerian and Carinus, that is, to the years up 284–285 CE. According to the manuscript tradition, the biographies are attributed to six different authors. Scholarship since the late 19th century has been arguing for a single authorship instead. The aim of this paper is to verify this hypothesis.