The Authorship of Greek Prose

Abstract

1.1. THE study of ancient literature is limited by the uncertain authorship of the texts. External evidence of authorship is scarce and often difficult to interpret, so that stylistic evidence plays a large part in the decision about the authorship of any work. This paper extends the work of Wake (1957) on sentence-length distributions of Greek prose writers and looks at the occurrence of some common words in Greek prose, and concludes that Greek prose writers have habits which persist over long periods of time and wide ranges of subject matter. The Pauline Epistles are examined and it is shown that only four major epistles can be accepted as written by the author of Galatians. 2.1. In the study of Greek prose, the determination of authorship is a perplexing problem. When books were written and reproduced by hand, the rights of authorship were limited and what would now be considered forgery was common. The names of reputable authors were borrowed for many reasons. Soon after Isocrates died, his son complained that the booksellers were putting his father's name on any rubbish, as the name sold the book. Another common motive for substitution was prestige. Views which would receive scant attention under the name of their begetter would at least get a critical review if they bore the name of Plato or Aristotle or some leading authority in the field. Another practice, not yet extinct, was for the head of some institution, such as the medical school of Hippocrates, to have his name on all the work which emerged from the school. A last motive was the optimism of the human race, which sees the old picture in the potting shed as a Rembrandt and the old neglected letter in the church cupboard as Pauline. The result of this convention of authorship, and of these practices, is that no attribution of authorship in Greek prose can be taken at face value, it must be justified by a critical study. In the circumstances which necessarily attach to works surviving from a remote era, it is rare for there to be conclusive independent evidence about the authorship in a contemporary history, and so the decision about whether to accept a work as genuine or reject it as spurious is commonly made by a study of the work itself, and in this examination the analysis of literary style plays a large part. 2.2. The subjective analysis of literary style is a highly developed art, but one which suffers from two limitations. The first is its essential subjectivity. A critic draws up a list of genuine works, using literary style as an important criterion in his Asked how he knows the works to be genuine, he can only reply, I see in them the mind and style of the author and the external evidence agrees with this judgement. If you then ask him how he knows the mind and style of the author he can only say, I see them in the genuine works. So a large part, and it may be the decisive part, of his analysis is founded upon a circular argument. The second limitation of subjective stylistic analysis is best seen in an example. The authorship of Plato's Seventh Epistle is much questioned. It is either his political testament or an apology for his views written by a friend soon after his death. Plato's