Applied Network Science (Jul 2021)

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

  • Armando Martins,
  • Clara Grácio,
  • Cláudia Teixeira,
  • Irene Pimenta Rodrigues,
  • Juan Luís Garcia Zapata,
  • Lígia Ferreira

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-021-00390-7
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 6, no. 1
pp. 1 – 23

Abstract

Read online

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.

Keywords