Authorship Attribution and Small Scales Analysis Applied to a Real Philological Problem in Greek Patristics

We combine the traditional philological approach and recent mathematical techniques to a real case in Authorship Attribution (A.A.): the attribution of a letter written in Greek in the 4th century by Basil of Caesarea or his brother Gregory of Nyssa, two influential Christian theologians. Their extensive work is fully analysed and compared having recourse to the methods discussed in [1] and [2]. Here we refine our analysis introducing a new method that makes possible the attribution and comparison of texts at smaller scales. Our novel method is based on two similarity (pseudo) distances, based, respectively, on the statistics of n–grams and on zip-like algorithms [1]