Talk:Roman Empire/Archive 2

message: I re-entered Greek as one of the two "official" languages in the infobox. Although no such thing existed during the Roman empire, neither in antiquity nor in the middle ages, if "official" is any indication of the importance and usage by the people or the state, Greek should by no means be absent from the infobox. "Official" presupposes an elevated status of importance for something. Modern constitutions state clearly what the official language of the state is. The Italian constitution states Italian is the official language of Italy. The EU has 25 official languages, one for each of its member states, as stated by EU law. Yet no such law existed in the Roman Empire to assign to any language "official" status. The Roman Senate enacted laws in Latin, which in theory applied to all four corners of the empire, but in practice were enforced only in a few, and in those cases "official" is a mute point. In the Senate itself, a speech could be delivered in Greek and every Senator was expected to understand it, even though it seldom happened. Beyond state afairs, Roman society, at least the aristocray, is best described as bilingual. Greek schools operated and Greek works were read in equal volume with Latin. Even so, after the foundation of Constantinople, laws were enacted in Greek as well as Latin, and at least in the East, Latin fell drastically out of use. I'm against the use of any box that tries to sum up in a few lines the characteristics of the Roman empire, escpecially for such a long living and changing entity. But if "official" should mean anything in Rome (and in Byzantium), it would only mean degree of use.
I go along with that. The existence of such things as the Res Gestae of Augustus in Latin and Greek support the idea of Greek as a language used by the administration (if that's what official means in this context). Djnjwd 14:15, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: No one was trying to argue that Greek wasn't important an important language and culture in the Roman world, but Ephestion's changes consistently brought a tone that Greek was the only important culture and language, which it obviously was not. --Masamax 18:17, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

text: Latin was used in the west and Greek in the East, this should be noted.
Cameron Nedland 01:47, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

text: I agree that both greek and Latin should be presented as official languages. Both where quite ubiquituous in the Empire and both had a signifigant position in the arts and culture. As for cultural clashes I'dd say Hate is too strong a word for the relationship between the Greek east and the Frankish/Latin west. Both had signifigantly diffrent perseptions of protocol and honour. As can readily be seen in the first crusade when the Frankish lords enountered the Imperial court. This conflict though does not take away the East's clame of Roman continuity. The term Byzantine itself only appears a century after its demise. Prior to this, it and much of the "known" world called it the Roman Empire, even if this was in greek (Basileía Romaíon). I dont see any oxymoron in this.Dryzen 12:52, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's contradictory because as from the 8th c. AD, Westeners (and most non-Byzantines) would only recognise the "Byzantine state" as the "Kingdom of the Greeks". According to contemporary records, even Byzantines would use "Graecia" when they spoke to a foreigner. If they said "Imperium Romanorum", nobody would understand what they were talking about. Miskin 16:29, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Things had indeed changed but its was still the linear contignuation of the Roman Empire, therefore still had the right to be called as such. As to identifying themself to what the foreigners could comprehend its a rather normal costum that doesn't necesairily mean thats you telling the exact truth. words have meaning and the same word to multiple people can have multiple meanings, its all about conceptions. If the Byzantine didn't say he was a Greek, then the foreigners wouldn't get the proper conception. Its similar to when the Europeans went on Crusades, even if they where from England or Germany, they where known as Franks. but I think this is beside the poitn of this perticular discurions, we where discussion the Offical Languages of the Roman Empire. I believe that Miskin and I both agreed that Greek and Latin are valid Official Languages.Dryzen 14:20, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Nobody was denying that Greek was an official language. But what re-started this discussion, was that Miskin was not satisfied with: "Latin also Greek in the eastern part" and proposes to replace it with Latin, Greek. What do I think of his proposal? Fine by me. Just do it. Flamarande 15:04, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I changed it Dryzen 14:54, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Official Language 

message: Starting this week I plan on writing a completely reorganized version of this article that will be a gateway article to Roman Empire related articles. I will be doing this on my home PC and uploading the new version all at once to avoid convolution. Once it is up, the wording can be reworked, but the organization and spirit will be done at once which I think will be hugely helpful. Here are the sections I plan on including in the article:
*Government
*History (very brief version of the current article, broken down as follows:
**Age of Augustus
**Julio-Claudians
**Flavian Stabalization
**Five Good Emperors
**Crisis of the Third Century
**Stabalization (Diocletian->Constantine)
**Final Decline (361-476 AD)
**Explainations for Decline
*Economy
*Culture
*Military
As well, the current parts of the article such as the "See Also" as well as Links will just be recycled.
If you have any suggestions for sections of the article please post here. I will upload the article as soon as it's done, and instead of reverting, if you see anything you disagree with please EDIT IT. Admitedly, my article may not stand up to complete Wikipedia standards, so I leave it up to the community to edit the new article I will create. I know this seems drastic, but the current article is unacceptable to most, but the scope of the work has just meant most want to stay away.
--Masamax 08:26, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Now that the Ephestion argument has (hopefully) subsided, I agree that a substantial rewrite of the main body is a good idea. For my part, the principal problem with the current article is the way in which it duplicates biographical information and event-by-event history per Emperor; I think what we should have in each of the sections is an overview of historical trends, rather than the detailed political history that we have now (as long as it's suitably linked by date, person and subject). Djnjwd 18:36, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  The reason I'm going to arrange the sections the way I've planned them is because in the early to middle empire the easiest way to organize the history is who was ruling at the time. I don't intend to do much biographical work, instead I will focus on the major events during each period, as well as the atmosphere of the Empire. --Masamax 20:42, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Complete Reorganization of Article 

message: The text includes the statement:
"at Augustus's death, there would have been few living who could recall a time before Augustus himself. The average Roman had a life expectancy of only forty years." 
I suspect this is a misconception (as well as being peripheral to the subject of the article).
In fact, it was quite normal for Romans of this period to live to the age of about 70 years. The reason for the low life expectancy was high infant mortality (ie almost half of newborns died during their early childhood).
I am very tempted to adjust the text, but not wanting to be percipitous, I wish to solicit viewpoints before making the correction. 
--Philopedia 23:17, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If you wish to adjust it, do so, as I agree, and I will work it into the new article I am currently writing (see above). --Masamax 06:44, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lifetime and Perspective 

message: It doesn't matter at this entry, for the simple reason that there are never two images on the screen at any one time; nevertheless, it should be generally understood that making images identical in size and "and justified on the right for consistency" makes poor layout, though sometimes insisted upon by Wikipedians. Perhaps the appeal of "justified on the right for consistency" is drawn from a political ideal rather than from visual experience. Certainly it makes a poor precedent. --Wetman 22:48, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Formatting: "justified on the right for consistency"

message: Article states:
"For many years historians made a distinction between the Principate, the period from Augustus until the Crisis of the Third Century, and the Dominate, the period from Diocletian until the end of the Empire in the West. According to this theory...We now know..."
I'm a history Phd candidate at Duke and can assure you both "principate" and "dominate" are accepted and still thriving terms.
:The article does not say that the terms "principate" and "dominate" are obsolete , but that our knowledge of this period in time is more nuanced. That in reality neither the principate nor the dominate can be as easily generalized as the theory mentioned. --Tokle 11:59, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Principate 

message: From my understanding the traditional teaching in the West is that the Roman Empire fell, and I even remember trying to answer that culturally biased Exam question "Why did the Roman Empire Fall?". Only recently have I found the Eastern perspective of these events which see no collapse of the Roman Empire since the capital of Rome was tansfered. Byzantium was no longer called Byxzantium, it was called Nova Roma or Nea Rome (New Rome). Having done Roman History (from a western perspective) the coins used by the Roman Empire were locally made. This means that the Coins by convention had the face of the Emperors but would also have on them the local or commonly spoken language. In the West one would assume this would have been Latin, but surprisingly, they have both languages, Greek and Latin. In the East and the far East, Greek was used alone. 
But we know that in the West Greek and Latin was the language of the nobility. The tutors and the pedagogues were deliberately chosen to be educated Greek servants and slaves. The whole education system in Italy Rome was based on Greek philosophy, mathematics and science. This is why the Greeks would later also enjoy Roman citizenship since their customs and religion and language were now the same as the Romans.
So why is the Roman Empire called the Byzantine Empire? In the early stages, it was never called this. "The Roman Empire of the East" and the "Roman Empire of the West" were the officially accepted terms. It was always Old Rome and New Rome. If you read the 7 Ecumenical Councils of the Church they were all written in Greek, and nowhere is there any mention of Byzantium or Constantinople. It is always refered to as NEW ROME. Only later (by the west firstly and then by the east) was it called Contstantines City out of respect for Constantine who helped Christianise the Entire Roman Empire. Under Constantine there was no East and West, only later , after he died were these names used.
sorry i'm not registered as a member yet.
It's all good.
66.205.108.8 23:15, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: So far as I know, the term Byzantine was first used of the eastern empire in the 16thC. - probably coined by humanists to exclude the then (as now) muslim east. I have no refs for this.--shtove 21:55, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: "The term Byzantine Empire was introduced in 1557, about a century after the fall of Constantinople by German historian Hieronymus Wolf, who presented a system of Byzantine historiography in his work Corpus Historiae Byzantinae in order to distinguish ancient Roman from medieval Greek history without drawing attention to their ancient predecessors. So far, it appears that there has been no study tracking the reasons why that term came to gain prominence."Dryzen 13:06, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

text: 'Greeks' is not inaccurate. It is the standard term used by non-Byzantines to refer to Byzantines, their contemporaries never called them Romans (except for the Islamic states maybe). As Ostrogrsky defines it "Byzantine" is was coined to differentiate between "ancient Roman and medieval Greek history". The thing is that the perception of the term "Romans" in the middle ages was different from the one of antiquity and modern times, which corresponds to the Latin speakers of the city of Rome and its domain. That explains terms such as Kaiser, Tsar, Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, Basileia Romaion etc. Furthermore the Byzantine Emperor who was known by the time of Heraclius as "Basileus ton Romaion" (Lord of the Romans) ended up in the Byzantine era as the "Basileus ton Hellenon" (Lord of the Hellenes). The political term "Roman" was a title of prestige which symbolised the absolute power and land claims beyond limit. Once those values became history in late Byzantium, the "Roman" title was of no use. Miskin 16:34, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Not completely of no use. Greeks continued to call themselves Romans well past 1453. It was only in the late 19th century that "Roman" finally gave way to "Greek". Colossus 23:24, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Tell that to the Byzantines. --76.188.161.254 07:49, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why is the Eastern Roman Empire called Byzantium? 

message: I just looked at the Dutch and Suomi pages, which were feature articles on their respective WP sites. The Dutch article was concise. Very concise. I'm awfully tempted to replace the mishmash we have here with an English language equivalentof the Dutch article. Even if we don't, everyone interested in working on this page should take a look at it, if only to get some gears turning. 
I have no ability to read Suomi (any Finns in the house?), but that article is about the right length and seems to hit the right topics. Just eyeballing it, it seems a little heavy on the history and occasionally inconsistent, like when it jumps straight from Augustus to Trajan.  Several people here have suggested a topical reorganization of the English article, and the Finnish seems to be a decent step in that direction.
Regrettably and shamefully, the Latin language page had the worst article in the bunch, consisting merely of a list of emperors. My time is too tight as is. Sigh. Ddama 08:27, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Ddama, I'm being polite, but it is Wiki etiquette to post new talk sections at the bottom of the talk page. Thank you. --Alexander 007 09:12, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Grazie, and with pleasure. Ddama 06:09, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

text: The problem with English Wikipedia is that it attracts such a variety of contributors, each of whom is liable to fight to keep his contributions posted, regardless of the benefits of a major edit or reorganisation. The intro to Adolf Hitler is a good example - one group of contributors will have a month-long argument over the wording, and, after they've reached some daft compromise, another group will come barging in and heedlessly rehash the argument, with a different outcome.  The reason for the success of the Dutch counterpart of this article may be down to one or two authoritative contributors, who don't have to put up with a bunch of cranks and egos. And I've come across one Dutch Wikipod who shuns Dutch WP as boring and contributes only to English WP, because there's so much going on here - all the poodles run to this house.--shtove 22:11, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Some musings on other language pages

message: I would like to see some consensus before undertaking a major reorganization of the article. I feel like I had such a consensus 18 months ago, but subsequent events intervened, and there are sufficient new actors that I think it necessary.
I'm basically looking to Masamax's plan and the Suomi article for organization, with the entire history section being a redacted version of the history found now under the epochs section of Roman Emperor. I need to give it more thought and very much want to hear what the community has to say. Ddama 07:08, 8 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Why not begin with a schema of proposed subheadings right here, in outline form, the way they'd appear in the revised Table of Contents box. Give editors a chance to suggest revisions to the new scheme. In general, I'd merely hope information doesn't get lost in the shuffle, and I'd hope for more space for cultural history to supplement dynastic relations, politics and wars. --Wetman 17:45, 8 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Reorganizing the article

message: Hi folks,
I'm contemplating the possibility of creating a portal for Ancient Rome, to replace Roman, which is a disambiguation page and has nearly 400 links pointing to it from articles (not counting the ones from Talk or Wikipedia pages).
If I was to go ahead with this, I would need help from other people on the content, as I don't know too much about the subject matter - my motivation for doing this is because it seems to be needed, and I believe I can figure out the technical aspects of making it happen.
Some possible issues:
# It needs a suitable name. I'm thinking "Ancient Rome", but there may be other options. My intention would be to redirect Romans to the portal so that every vague reference and accidental linkage to "the Romans" would end up in a suitable place.
# I think it would be appropriate to include Byzantium, and maybe Ancient Greece if it doesn't already have a "home".
# Other uses of the word Roman currently listed on Roman would probably be moved to Roman (disambiguation), which is currently a redirect.
#I would not like to become the sole maintainer. I would be willing to continue doing technical stuff, but selection of featured articles and suchlike should be done by somebody who can tell whether or not the content is accurate.
For examples of existing portals, see Portal:Egyptology, Portal:Star Trek, and many more are listed at :Category:Portals.
I am interested in opinions on this idea, and I invite discussion on the topic at my test page User:LesleyW/RomePortal. Please feel free to copy this notice to other places where it might be noticed by knowledgeable people. I will be away for the next few days, and will pick up discussions early next week at the latest.
--LesleyW 21:47, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, I hadn't spotted that one. It appears to have been created on 2005-11-28 (about the time I started thinking seriously about a Roman portal) and all the significant edits are by one person. It does complicate matters somewhat. --LesleyW 02:56, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should there be a "Roman" portal? 

message: I'm currently reworking my timeline of the Roman Empire and plan to move it on a page of its own, leaving a little template box like the one on the right. I'd like to put the timeline in one line, widening it to 1600px, which would screw up the article layout. And the article is pretty huge even without the additional timeline. I would just ask for the template to stay somewhere visible near the top of the article. After all it gives an introductory overview at a glance which might make it interesting for a reader to notice it fast. Any comments? Ah, the icon is temporary, I'm working on a cleaner SVG version. --Dschwen 21:41, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Just uploaded and inserted the SVG version. --Dschwen 23:08, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

text: I sure do, and have to agree on the looks. Have you checked the reworked version? Click on the link above in the template box. Suggestions for improvement are certainly welcome. The compilation was indeed a lot of work and I appreciate it beeing left in the article until now. After a long time I'm working on it again and still see lots of room for improvements. As for the Byzantine timeline, it is nice, but the approach with a graphical timeline is entirely different. I wanted to visualize correlation in time, what happened, who was emperor at that time, what was the period called, which famous people lived at that time, and what were the significant developments. --Dschwen 14:41, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Right now the templatebox is a rip off of the commons media box. But I could make a new compact template for use in infoboxes. The vertical format allows the reader to read the timeline from left to right. Also it is easier to maintain it in a compact state, since vertical orientation with horizontal labels creates more overlap between unrelated objects. --Dschwen 16:54, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Have to agree, looks nice. --Dschwen 18:57, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Timeline 

message: The map is very well done, however, it is a little inaccurate.  Rome from 85-105 AD controlled a chunk of what's now eastern Scotland.  Also, from 12 BC to 9 AD, Rome controlled all of what are now the Netherlands and all of what's now Germany west of the Elbe River.
Cameron Nedland 01:47, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Map 

message: Can anyone edit the infobox? In the "official language" part it links Greek to the wrong article, it links it to Greek language instead of Koine Greek. I'm not saying the former would be a bad option, but the latter was the Greek spoken during the times of the Roman Empire and I think it should link to that article. Could someone link it correctly? --Thorri 16:23, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Wrong link