To my knowledge, there is no systematic study on the theory of attribution; it holds no chair in the departments of our universities; it is not the subject of international symposia; and lacking a forum of discussion or source of direction, each practitioner appears to follow the suggestions of his own imagination, or unfortunately, his own biases. Under these circumstances, it would be tempting to attempt to fill the void, but that is not my intention here. What follows is simply an introduction, a suggestion of a critical methodology that might deal with questions of authorship in a systematic manner, an introduction to the field of attribution criticism. Attribution criticism is simply an attempt to discover the authorship of the numerous anonymous or doubtful documents contained in the archives of humanity. To use the Pirandellian phrase, the attribution critic is truly a “personaggio in cerca d’autore.” In a broad interpretation of the terminology, attribution criticism is not confined to literary scholarship. Fraudulent documents occur in almost every facet of civilization, from the history of antiquity to the modern world of diplomacy and the daily operations of the forces of civil order. Nor is attribution criticism a new field of inquiry. Since the beginning of the use of the written word in our society, the fraudulent document has stood in lively competition with the authentic. At the first great organized center of literary studies, the library of the Museum of Alexandria, founded around 280 B.C., one of the principle concerns of Aristarchus and his colleagues was the separation of spurious and authentic verses in the text of Homer. Later, in Rome, the first great grammarian, Aelius Stilo, attacked the problem of distinguishing the authentic plays of Plautus from those falsely attributed to the playwright. Stilo’s follower, Varro, continued this project, establishing the canon of 21 authentic works, the fhbulue varroniunae, that probably coincides with the 21 commedies extant today.’ At the outset of this project, however, I should emphasize two points. The first is that although we may distinguish attribution criticism from other types of studies of the written word because of the special nature of the problem that it confronts, it is not for this reason an entirely independent field of inquiry. Attribution criticism does not exist in isolation, rather it incorporates and makes use of the methodologies of each sector and subsector of literary scholarship. The second point deals with the particular limitations of the conclusions reached by the investigator in questions of attribution. Although in the course of our discussions we have occasion to speak in terms of “solutions” and “proof’ with regard to problems of attribution, we must emphasize that these terms do not have the full force of significance that they have in purely scientific endeavors, such as mathematics. A problem of doubtful or unknown authorship is “solved”