ABSTRACT
The authorship of a document or book may be entirely authentic, and yet parts of it may be highly treacherous. The document of composite authorship may be garbled in the harshest sense of that word, or it may be a frank and innocent document of strict integrity. Yet sometimes, in dealing with a composite document, a considerable amount of both internal and external evidence may leave students uncertain of source or authorship. As both internal and external evidence may be used to detect the fraudulent document, so both may be employed to analyze a garbled or composite text. The very fact that a document is entirely and deliberately spurious often makes its character easy to detect. An excellent example of the kind of composite document which represents a straightforward use of several sources to make a new record—a twisting of several threads into a new cord—is offered by various books of Livy’s great history.
