Abstract

Although the biographies known collectively as the Historia Augusta purport to have been written by six different biographers, it has often been thought that their similarities are so numerous that they must be the work of a single author. In this article I shall deal with a piece of linguistic evidence which supports this view. The two scholars who have treated the language of the H.A. in most detail, E. Wölfnin and E. Klebs, attempted to show that certain linguistic features which are not spread evenly among the Scriptores point to multiplicity of authorship