That's an excellent point you make, and it kind of slipped my mind that the there is indeed a possibility that a lot of the work that we attribute to Demosthenes may not have been written by the same person as the writer of De Corona.Qimmik wrote:You have to be careful about this. Not everything in the Demosthenic corpus was written by Demosthenes (and almost nothing in the Lysianic corpus can be securely attributed to Lysias, if you believe Dover). So unless you separate out the Demosthenic speeches that are recognized as genuine, it's not clear what conclusions you can draw about Demosthenes. You don't have to do this for Lysias, as long as you recognize that comparisons of genuine Demosthenes agains "Lysias" are just comparisons against a collection of randomly assembled speeches, some of which might even be--who knows?--post-4th century rhetorical exercises in composing "pure" Attic by koine-speakers.
Still, despite this possibility, the fact that Lysias and Plato were both treated in a research on Attic particles, and Demosthenes not, makes it interesting enough to look into the numbers. As Kroon did in 1995, when she looked into Latin discourse particles, a whole new theoretic framework emerged and showed that the old methods don't always suffice in the case of particles. I'm not saying that this will be the case with Demosthenes as well, but one can hope.
mwh -- I will run some numbers today to compare it with the other orators in 4th century BC. I'm in not mistaken, we're quite sure about the attributions to Isocrates?