The Scriptores Historiae Augustae: History and Controversy
L. W. GURNEY, Penelope J. Gurney · Literary and Linguistic Computing · 1998
This paper describes the contentious history of the date and authorship of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, a set of biographies of Roman Emperors of the second and third centuries of our era. The thirty extant biographies are attributed by the manuscript tradition to six otherwise unknown authors of the late third and early fourth centuries; but research in the past 100 years has claimed that they were created at the end of the fourth century, by the hand of a single author—a ‘forger’. This introductory section demonstrates how the attribution of single authorship that has been proposed by historians, on the basis of literary and historical analysis, can be verified or challenged by stylometric analysis.