The problem of authorship of Xenophon's Cynegeticus

Abstract

Xenophon's On Hunting arouses problems of total or partial authorship since the late nineteenth century, as well as problems of unity. Different scholars have opposing views about all this: Radermacher and Breitenbach fully reject Xenophon's authorship; Marchant, on his turn, denies the authenticity of the first chapter; Finally, Delebecque and Gray support it for the whole work. From the comparison with genuine works by Xenophon as Eq. Mag, Eq. and Vect., an analysis of statistical linguistics confirms that the author of On Hunting is not Xenophon, that there is an unique author for the work, and that the author is contempo-rary, on one hand, with Xenophon and, on the other hand, with the hippocratic treatises Art. and Fract. and with their linguistic style of medical and scientific literature of the late fifth century BC and early fourth century BC.