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Pan Piao's part in this chapter

It is difficult to determine whether most of this chapter was written
by Pan Ku or by his father, Pan Piao. Stange (ibid., xii) thinks that a
large part came from the experiences of Pan Piao. But Pan Piao was
born in A.D. 3 (HHS, Mem. 30 A: 5a), so that he was only twenty years
of age when Wang Mang was killed. His father, Pan Chih, was living
in retirement as a Gentleman at the tomb of Emperor Ch'eng, because
of his tacit opposition to Wang Mang, so that Pan Piao would hardly
have been acquainted in court circles. It would thus seem that only a
negligible part of this chapter could have come from Pan Piao's own experiences.
In a work made up largely of piecemeal quotations from
documentary sources, we would hardly expect any differences in style
between father and son. Pan Piao became later only a minor official in
some of the capital offices; he was sent out to hold office in a city of the

present Anhui and later to one in Hopei, so that he hardly had access
to the numerous sources available to Pan Ku. The HHS says that Pan
Ku considered his father's account not to have been sufficiently detailed
(HHS, Mem. 30 A: 7b), and, in his own preface, Pan Ku does not mention
his father's work. I suspect that Pan Piao did not have much to do with
the "Memoir of Wang Mang," although it is impossible to prove such a
statement.