Talk:Ancient Rome/Archive 1

message: This article was chosen as Article Improvement Drive article of the week on Sunday, 11th December 2005. The archive of the selection process can be found at Talk:Ancient Rome/AID vote archive
Don't delete, I dont' have the time to start the article but it is the current COTW. For those who do look at the Ancient Rome list.Falphin 17:39, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

message: The current version has a section concerning the the Pantheon. I would suggest that this article is not a place to discuss individual temples, persons, cities (other than Rome itself), technologies, works of literature etc. If we were to do that, the article would soon grow out of all proportion. --Chino 06:03, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I have now completely changed the "religion" section of the article. Please help me to improve it, especially with spelling :-) The table that was there can now be found at Roman mythology. --Chino 15:27, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

text: My suggestion would be to treat them in a paragraph titled "Successor states" or something along those lines. Byzantine empire had a history, culture, administration, language, and religion so different from Roman Empire that I think it goes beyong the scope of this article. --Chino 14:31, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

text: Agree. I created the relevant headlines. Hopefully somebody will add material. --Chino 09:34, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  What to include? 

message: The section on monarchy contains a bad misconception, which I propose to correct. If no one has anything to add or does it first I will do it within a few days.
The misconception concerns the founding of Rome. The facts have been twisted to support the story given in Vergil's Aeneid, which, because the poem is so good, seems to collect unthinking afficionados of its literal truth. It is in fact probably NOT literally true.
Specifically, an early settlement by the Latins and Sabines followed by an Etruscan takeover is certainly not supported by any archaeology. This is the traditional story. There isn't much archaeology on the initial communities mainly because most of Rome is inaccessible to archaeologists. There's a little space in the forum, but they aren't going to remove any buildings there looking for prehistoric sites. The author of our article is just trying to give the credence of archaeology to the traditional story. If it doesn't fit, get rid of it. Any doubt, throw it out.
Whatever small documentary evidence we have and the general similarity of Roman architecture and customs to Etruscan indicate the Etruscans were in on the founding, perhaps even the only founders. In other words, the article begs the question. The whole point of the investigation concering the origin of Rome is to try and find evidence settling such questions. They aren't settled yet. We shouldn't mislead the public. Let's present the question, not the prejudice that led to it.
But I must say, the issue is even more general. The earliest "Etruscologists" invented a whole migration of the Etruscan civilization from Anatolia to support the Aeneas myth. Archaeology battered down that tower long ago. The Etruscans were there before the Italics. Certainly, there were there long before the founding of Rome. Their presence in the Aegean is related to their having been a maritime empire, as they were equally present widespread over the Med. The Italics moved in on this coastal civilization from over the mountains.
Was there an Aeneas? Did he come from Troy? Who knows. The archaeology supports a flourishing Etruscan maritime civilization before the founding of Rome, with settlements as far south as the Naples region and all the way north to the Alps. Let's not get too carried away by third year high school Latin courses. You professional Roman citizens, where are you?Dave 15:19, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Rise

message: There's the list of Ancient Rome-related topics to mine for stuff, but there's also Culture of Ancient Rome, which partly overlaps with this. Zocky 02:04, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Other articles 

message: Does anyone think that this can become a featured article.--ZeWrestler 14:37, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Featured Article 

message: I changed the bit about the majority of English words having Latin roots, since there are plenty of words that have Germanic/Saxon/Celtic/Proto-Indo-European roots. But I freely acknowledge the importance of Latin or successor language roots (lots of French, for one).  
I'm also not entirely comfortable with the assertion that the reason that Latin is no longer widely spoken is because it relies more on inflection than syntax - that would mean that German is also no longer widely spoken... 100 Million German speakers would probably disagree... but I'll leave the rewrite to someone else for now... YggdrasilsRoot 20:42, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Latin Language Legacy 

message: I'm planning to make significant changes to the chapter about Roman republic. About half of the text in the current revision deals with the personal history of just two men, Julius Caesar and Augustus. While the two men where extremely important in the history of Rome, there are definitely too much details about them concidering the long history of the Republic. Also the chapter is quite long when it should essentially be a summary of the main article, Roman Republic. Therefore I'm goingt to significantly shorten the part about late republic, while adding modest quantities of material to the part about the earlier period. --Chino 07:39, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scope of the treatment of Roman history 

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 21:46, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should there be a "Roman" portal? 

message: what is the basis for the 2nd half of the following statement regarding the relationship of Roman Law and the US Senate? 
"The Roman law formed the basis of most of the legal systems of Europe and her colonies for hundreds of years and has been the direct inspiration for the Senate of the United States and other modern nations"
The name Senate came from Roman government, not Roman Law.  See the main article on Roman Law.  Nothing there providing support for a relationship between Roman Law and the US Senate. 
Hmains 06:09, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Roman Law and US Senate 

message: I have to say that I'm not in total agreement over the lack of cultural legacy that Rome gave us.  To say that these have had little to no effect on the future generations is a fallacy, Roman literature had a strong effect on Victorian England which cannot be understated. It also looks really stupid saying that the cultural legacy was small when there is an entire subsection on it later.
LordHilly 22:14, 13 December 2005 (GMT)
Roman history had a strong influence, but as the article notes, the only new artistic form that Rome developed was the satire or slapstick play (unless you count extreme sports).  Victorians read Virgil because they knew Latin but not Greek, but Virgil imitated and actually copied from Greek epics.  "Roman" architecture is just Greek with small modifictions, similarly with Roman sculpture.  Roman painting is a combination of Greek and Etruscan.  In short, Rome was a tremendous influence -- but only by passing on forms developed in other cultures.  Rome was not an innovator in art or literature. Rick Norwood 13:42, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Legacy 

message: Hi wikipedians! Thanks to the Improvement Drive (and due to that Ancient Rome is one of my great interests), I will try to contribute to this article. One thing I immediately noticed was that I think there are too few images - in my opinion every major section should have a suitable image. This makes it far more appealing to the average reader. I will try to go about it. My regards, Dennis Nilsson. --Dna-Dennis talk - contribs 01:09, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Images 

message: Does anyone else think it's a huge mistake to have four maps on this page? This article is called "Ancient Rome", not "Geography of Ancient Rome"; there's vastly more to know about Rome than where its boundaries happened to be at certain moments in time. Having more than one or two maps seems excessive when there are so many other aspects of Roman history, art, society, etc. that are going unillustrated, and when there are already dozens of maps on this page's subarticles. Wouldn't an image of Romulus and Remus or something under the "Monarchy" history section be more useful and appealing to readers than a generic map? -Silence 05:55, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Maps 

message: Or any similar title, if anyone has any suggestions. This article would be based on the text currently on Ancient Rome and Culture of ancient Rome pages dealing with this topic, and would centralize information on numerous currently-existing articles (like Equestrian (Roman)), and also allow us to significantly shorten (through summarization) the "Class structure" section on this page, helping reduce bloat on a very broad topic (it's not easy to cover 1200 years in a single article!). Plus I think there's a huge amount of information left on this topic that's not yet on Wikipedia, such as information on the lowest of low classes in Rome, who are dramatically underrepresented in the history books. Thoughts? -Silence 15:41, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Good idea. It's a big topic and deserves representation, and to give it the representation it needs would unbalance this article (which it's already threatening to do). --Nicknack009 17:03, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

text: I've created a new article, Social class in ancient Rome, copied the original section there and put up verify and expansion requests, and cut the section here down a bit. I'm collecting my sources to expand the new article. --Nicknack009 22:14, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: New article: [[Roman social class]]

message: i'm thinking this article is ready for a peer review. any objections?--ZeWrestler  Talk 01:19, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I welcome any attempts to spread knowledge of this article around so it can get more work done, though I'm already aware of dozens of shortcomings and problems with the current article as it stands, so if you're saying "let's put it on peer review because it's excellent and we're out of things to work on and that's the next step in making it FAd", I disagree with that course of action; if you're saying "let's put it on peer review so it'll get wider attention again and more work will be put into it", I agree, though we should probably wait at least a little longer first. -Silence 03:09, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh, i know we're not out of things to work on Silence.  I'm saying latter option, "let's put it on peer review so it'll get wider attention again and more work will be put into it." I deffinetly think this can make FA status eventually, but not yet.  It needs more more work, which i think a peer review will help with. but per your suggestion, it can wait a little while first. --ZeWrestler  Talk 04:43, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  peer review 

message: The recent addition on the Roman economy is sourced and interesting, but the use of the word "advanced" is POV.  I would like to see the author do a rewrite which states the kind of economy he means, instead of "advanced" economy. Rick Norwood 14:47, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The adjective "advanced" does not really convey any information, only an opinion.  Can't you be more specific? Rick Norwood 21:30, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Advanced? 

message: Hi! I am 12 years old and I need some information on shopping in Ancient Rome for a guide-book I am doing for homework! And I need it by 3-1-06 (Friday 3rd January 2006).
PLEASE HELP!!!!!
: Welcome to Wikipedia! I have a feeling if there was more information on shopping in Rome, it'd probably be present in this article. I never thought of Ancient Rome as a large shopping centre, though... —THIS IS MESSEDOCKER (TALK) 13:46, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Shopping In Ancient Rome  

message: This is a general article on ancient Rome for an English encyclopedia: so I removed anything that was on some detailed facet of ancient Rome, or in a foreign language. Some of these smelled of sales boosting — translations of German biographies of Caesar, a Finnish book on consuls, etc. The Trojan Origin was one of literally many tens of thousands of similar small papers. Etc.
I removed the ancient references altogether, since there are many hundreds of books that might plausibly be put here. Absolutely major sources, for example, would include Appian, Dio, Dionysius, Polybius, the Historia Augusta, the works of Cicero. This is an article, not a reading list. Bill 16:40, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The German biography of Caesar is actually a classic. IMHO it can and should be used as a reference. --Chino 05:54, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, why don't you assemble a classic bibliography (the best of the ancients, then Burckhardt, Carcopino, Mommsen, Tenney Frank, Platner-Ashby, Steinby, etc. and a good list)? Bill 11:16, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pruning of "References" section, Feb 06

message: I've read recently about ense et aratro ("with sword and plow"). The book claims it to be the another motto of the Ancient Rome. Alitus 17:43, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You did well to check. No such thing.... Doubtless some modern historian said that the phrase was appropriate, which it is, to Rome's expansion. I'm not sure it's ancient; it was the motto of a 19c French general, though, who prolly got it from somewhere. Anyway, Rome had no such thing as a motto, official or otherwise. Bill 17:53, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Supposed unofficial motto 

message: "The eastern empire, governed from Constantinople, is referred to as the Byzantine empire after 476 AD." Admittedly the phrase Byzantine Empire is one of modern day historiographical convenience, but it is worth noting that significant contemprary opinion regarding this label initiates its use after the reign of Heraclius and the rise of Islam, instead preferring 'Eastern Roman Empire' for the sixth century. Clearly there is a division between this view held by the likes of Mark Whittow and contrasting views like those of Ostrogorsky, but perhaps this should be relected.
:This technicality seems more suited to the article Byzantine empire than to this article. Rick Norwood 16:07, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Transition to Byzantine Empire 

message: Please get involved in reprting vandalism done to this page, since recently some keep erasing and inserting nonesense words.  Make sure you warn the users first in good faith, but they continue, do go ahead and report them.Zmmz 01:34, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Contrary opinion (see my user page): it is better in the long run not to revert any vandalism. The immense waste of time involved in reverting constant vandalism is far better used working on new material or significant edits. Reverting vandalism endlessly solves nothing: what needs to be done is pressure the powers that be to force traceable registration in order to edit; at which point most of the vandalism will dry up pretty permanently. Bill 20:56, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

text: That's my whole point. If enough of us refuse to revert, the articles will liquefy, and the boss of this outfit (Mr. Wales, whose word is law) will change the rules and make traceable registration required. 95% of all vandalism is from unregistered editors. But by reverting vandalism, we are perpetuating the system that allows it: in sum, the system currently relies on peons to keep the articles clean, rather than on intelligence, and if you are reverting vandalism, you are being used. Bill 10:48, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vandalism 

message: I undid the well-intentioned addition, because it is so one-dimensional (and in part, wrong) as to be very tendentious and, overall ,meaningless. Children had a special welfare system, for example, instituted by Trajan and expanded on by later emperors; the quantities varied a great deal in various periods;  there were cash subsidies; there were special subsidies to parents of more than 3 children (apart from the Trajanic dole to children); etc., etc. It seems to have been more or less enough for the recipients and their dependents, but it's very hard to tie that down as was done in this edit. Such an addition needs to be written by an expert. Bill 20:56, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Roman welfare system

message: A criticism section is probably warranted.  If it could be improved on what I wrote, that would be great.  An article about a country that conquered and devastated as many nations as Rome cannot be complete without some form of a criticism section
63.173.47.193 17:55, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: How about merging the Criticism section with Scholarly studies under the e.g. Criticism name? Brand 21:52, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criticism Section 

message: My apologies - I reverted to the wrong edit by mistake...oops... --Chrisd87 16:39, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: vandalism

message: Do we have to have this huge table in the middle of the article? It makes the article appear cluttered. Whispering 18:56, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think we should. Otherwise I'll put it somewhere else :P --Brand спойт 13:04, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Then, obviously, you should put it somewhere else. I'm surprised it lasted on this page as long as it did. -Silence 05:09, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Demographic outlines in the 6th century BC—1st century AD (the city of Rome area)