User:Ifly6/More essays

More essays explaining some of my views on various topics.

Writing new articles, the primary sources, three-hundred-year-old books

It seems regular for people to try to write new articles or otherwise give substantial contributions through the very careless process of reading primary sources or otherwise consulting obsolete secondary sources instead of doing an actual evaluation of the views of modern academics. This is easy to do because lots of old stuff is online and in the public domain; one can even copy-paste it directly and throw in the EB1911 template.

I get it.

It's also the worst. These sources are bad. I've read Plutarch and have some familiarity with it. He is, frankly, a shit historian. It simply will not do just to write an article by paraphrasing Plutarch, Suetonius, or Livy.

First, a historian is engaging in a process of trying to get to the truth; these ancient authors were not. These ancient authors were in the process of telling better stories. They are inherently not credible. Second, it is a failure of an editor's duty. An editor's duty is to write an article that reflects what modern reliable sources have to say about some topic. Blind acceptance of Suetonius is not what modern reliable sources have to say about it. You also cannot actually find out what the modern reliable sources say without reading them.

In the Wikipedia stone ages, back when the site was still growing and someone had to create an enormous number of articles to document every major character in some story, I also understand why it was easier and acceptable then to find the nearest tertiary source (in classics this is invariably DGRBM or Britannica 1911) and lazily paraphrase the contents. We do not live in these stone ages anymore.

We editors have substantially improved resources since then. We have much better tools for finding them. (Google Scholar's ad hoc cite networks are always useful.) I think people should adopt perhaps the following steps when approaching an article or major contributions and to do so in a non-negligent manner:

1. Look in Oxford Bibliographies.
2. Look in the Oxford Classical Dictionary. The online edition is accessible through Wikipedia Library and is much more in-depth than the older print versions. Pay attention to the references at the bottom. (Also, the OCDs before the 4th edition are now very much out of date; this is in part due to the age of the references.)
3. Look in the second edition of the Cambridge Ancient History.
4. Look in New Pauly and then, failing that, the Realencyclopädie.

Age doesn't matter

There is this widespread myth that just because the rate of discovery of new texts has fallen considerably since the Enlightenment, there are no changes in classical scholarship. This is nonsense from start to finish.

First, there have been new texts discovered and archaeology conducted. The two most important are probably the discovery of Constitution of the Athenians (Aristotle) and the full text of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti. There also have been substantial improvements in the emendation of texts. For example, Mommsen didn't know Augustus was referring to auctoritas because at the time the RG inscription was incomplete. Stories from the Gracchi of farmers driven off the land by huge slave plantations are increasingly questioned when we see no indications thereto in the archaeological record: the rural population of Italy seems stable and sustainable. These overturn old narratives: someone reading a regurgitation of an 150-year-old book written by an editor who never read anything since then is woefully under-equipped in understanding how modern scholars think about that topic. I would go so far as to say that someone repeating those stories would be laughed at by their professor if they brought them up in class.

Second, the way we do history now is hugely different. This is not just in the field of economics, interest in the non-elite, or women's studies. These are all important fields people did not do 150 years ago; just ignoring them also woefully under-equips a reader, so a responsible editor would have to take a look at it. But the difference is not just at the periphery: it is at the utter core of historical inquiry.

Historians are not so teleological today. They are not so schematic today. They are not so naïve today. They have much more experience with which to analyse probabilities today. And, even though we all write histories for our own times, we have had many more times to compare with today. Consider the "optimates". Mommsen was a German liberal disappointed in the failure of 1848. He projected onto the past an image of "optimates" as the organised conservative party junker nobles of his day. He viewed Caesar teleologically as an heir to a popular tradition that would sweep away the hierarchies of the past. Other people thought Caesar Augustus had some grand design to cover his monarchy with republican make-up.

Historians no longer hold these views. They know now not to project their own party-political experiences into the past: the "optimates" are actually nowhere in the evidence unless you simply assume Latin optimates means "political party run by conservative nobiles". They know now not to say Caesar (both of them) was great because he won: both with Julius Caesar not actually being this committed pseudo-redistributionist card-carrying "populares"-member and also with Augustus' regime both being an experimental evolution from the late republic and also being a plausibly temporary deviation from the traditional republic until Tiberius' accession.

This too matters with schemas. Mommsen's books on the Roman constitution were important and reached many conclusions now accepted. But many of them were also wrong. And the last hundred years have been spent tearing it apart. His view of rigid Roman laws is no longer accepted: people now view the Roman constitution fluidly, that actions were legitimised by precedents and the citizens weighing the costs and benefits (both materially and morally) in public discussion. Much has been learnt from Millar's Roman democracy thesis, even if it is perhaps a bit too overblown. The political parties model and the Augustus-planned-everything model are also both examples of overly-schematic thinking.

Historians also are no longer so credulous. Emperors like Caligula and Domitian are re-evaluated when you do not take the senatorially-dominated sources at face value. That means that just because Suetonius says Caligula did all these terrible things does not mean he actually did them. Just because Cicero and Sallust say the First Catilinarian conspiracy (FCC) happened does not mean that it actually did. These are both ancient rumours that are largely baseless. People at that time may have believed them. That does not mean they actually happened. It is a consensus today that Caligula did not have sexual relations with his sister and that the FCC was made up by Catiline's political enemies to discredit him. If you wrote an essay in a university class based on an article which repeated these rumours uncritically, you would fail.

What else would have you do poorly would be a failure to take the modern literature seriously. If a professor asked you to write a paper about the fall of the Roman republic and you wrote Sallust's moral decay thesis or Montesquieu's "citystates-cannot-run-empires" thesis and I were the TA, I would give that a D. It does not follow that a city-state or a republic cannot run an empire; "moral decay" too is a non sequitur. A causal mechanism is necessary. Just adding Brunt's senatorial-alienation thesis and out-of-control-proconsuls turns that into a C. If you wanted an A, you would have to actually engage with Meier and Gruen: the out-of-control proconsuls and their soldiers did not come to destroy the res publica, they came to free it; the senate was not doing nothing, the aristocrats were not just eating fish with Lucullus, they took meaningful and decisive action to solve their problems. Why are Meier and Gruen wrong? It is not for me to say in an article, but it would embarrass a professor if his students wrote articles like some of the ones we have.

There are many reasons editors should do better. Doing better is not hard; nor is it onerous. Editors simply need to accept the virtue or the role of actually doing research.

References

Bad sources

The worst example of bad sources was with the article Knossos. A professor of mine, Eric Cline (author of 1177 BC: the year civilisation collapsed), once mentioned in a cautionary tale that some students submitted essays calling the city "Gnossos". Why did they do that? Because a previous version of the article said that was what the city was sometimes called. Why? Because this "alternative spelling" had been made up by an editor, placed in without a source, and nobody noticed for six years. The essay then continued and spoke of the site as if nothing done after the first world war had happened and cited a number of things all published c. 1910.

I mention this because people use Wikipedia for at least two major purposes. In the last section, I covered the obvious one: to find out things. The second one is to look at the references and mine the source list for real references. Our bibliographies can be very useful indeed. Other times, these sources are truly poor, like the no-name authors writing in Pen & Sword. Frankly, if a student cited one of those books, I would recommend that they take remedial classes on how to use the university library. It is actually better not to have any source than to have an misleading or unreliable one. We editors have a duty not to send students to bad sources which will mislead them or send them to remedial classes. If one cannot act by rewrite, removal is a second-best.

Anachronisms in info-boxes

Roman territory is in red. Allied territory is in green. The land of the allies does not belong to the Romans. You wouldn't say that Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, the former leader of the German party Die Linke was born in "Demmin, Russia" merely because the Warsaw Pact existed. These allied territories are still nominally independent. If you think romanisation in the second century BC had advanced so far that this had become irrelevant, see Mouritsen 1998.

People today think the way that the world works is relatively settled. That might be true. We have a Westphalian system of sovereign states, clearly-marked borders, and monopolies of control. That was not the case in the past. And what is profoundly annoying is how some people seem to make up anachronistic facts to place into info-boxes.

This is most especially the case with locations. I want to get this one out of the way first: the Roman Republic was not a place or a state. It was a form of government. Putting that someone was born in Rome, Italy, Roman Republic is an anachronism that gives the res publica (lit. 'public thing') some kind of Westphalian territory. It was not and it did not have that.

The provincial administration of the late republic is also not the same was what someone today hears with the word "province". A "province" in the republic is largely a task: "war with Macedonia" and not some place. It becomes a place or territory when that task becomes "administer, garrison, and maintain the peace in Macedonia". It is not the same as actually running the place. What that means is that you cannot start saying that someone born in 190 BC near Thessaloniki was born in "Roman Macedonia". That place does not exist yet. It will not exist for almost 50 years.

Similarly, "Italy" is an anachronism before the Social war. The maps of Roman expansion through the Italian peninsula sadly lack nuance. The main form of expansion was by the Romans beating up someone and then saying that they are friends now and dragging the person they just beat to war with the next set of fools in their way. The people who the Romans just beat were the allies. They retained their autonomy and independence. Rome had no legal authority to meddle in their affairs. When the lex Julia de civitate passes and the Italian cities elect to join Rome, they dissolved their own governments and became part of the ager Romanus. After that point, Rome assumes direct jurisdiction over the whole peninsula south of the Rubicon and you can start speaking meaningfully about a real "Roman Italy".

References