Talk:Roman Empire

Wiki Education assignment: Communication and Culture

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 2 February 2021 and 14 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Waltersaraceni (article contribs).

GA Reassessment

Roman Empire

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: It's been a month, and there's been no real improvement. I'm already working on Byzantine Empire, sadly. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:04, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Uncited prose, including the entire "Painting" and most of the "Literature" sections. It has a good structure, but it needs a topic-subject expert to go through to cite or remove the uncited sections. Z1720 (talk) 14:22, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Adding to this, a few scattered thoughts:

• The "Fall in the West" section is very out of step with a complex and fast-moving scholarly field. It's been decades since one could respectably write a narrative that begins and ends with invasions of nasty foreigners with beards.
• The same is true of the article as a whole, I'd suggest: it reads like it was written by "fans" of the empire rather than people with a real background in its academic study.
• The Languages section is also pretty outdated in its treatment of "vulgar Latin" and non-treatment of other Italic languages.
• The "Society" section is pretty rose-tinted, put mildly. Again, most treatments of Roman society in the last few decades have not shied away from the general brutality and unpleasantness of it.
• The article seems chronologically confused: it's theoretically about Rome post 27 BCE or so, but occasionally lapses into talking about the mid Republic, centuries earlier.
• The Freedmen section needs to at least acknowledge the existence of women.
• The "census rank" section gets bogged down in the idea of the ordines (which included only a minute fraction of the population), and then tries, not very successfully, to talk more broadly about social class and mobility. There's also a lot of chronological confusion and imprecision, where situations that changed over time (such as labels like honestiores or conversion to Christianity) are presented as if always part of Roman life.
• This thing is a monster! I know it's a big topic, but it definitely needs hacking up and shrinking down.
• There are a number of points where complex debates are reduced to one side of them, and cited to a single source. The Empire is best thought of as a network of regional economies, based on a form of "political capitalism" in which the state regulated commerce to assure its own revenues (cited to Potter) sticks out: it's not necessarily wrong, but at the moment the article is far too confident in its conclusions and often badly devoid of nuance, and will give the reader a false impression that ancient history is nicely settled and clear-cut.
• The "Legacy" section makes some rather odd choices as to what to focus on and leave out.
• More generally, and related: I don't think this article really knows what sets it apart from Ancient Rome: there's a lot here that's really about "the Romans" in general, rather than the specific material the article claims to cover.
• Citing Luttwak makes me sad.

UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 17:34, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree with all of these comments, except as to the size of the article. There's no just way to cover everything that is relevant with the Roman empire without it being very long. Ifly6 (talk) 20:41, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

I feel paring it down to focus on the Empire as opposed to Ancient Rome in general will solve the length problem. Generalissima (talk) 21:22, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

All good observations. This article deserves not just an general update, but for someone to drive it to FA status.

If any one decides to take on this challenge and upgrade this article I'll support you. I intend on spending most of this year reading sources as I work on the FAR of the Byzantine Empire and can offer my (unprofessional) perspective on modern scholarship where it overlaps. Biz (talk) 07:00, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

I have long said that the Roman Empire article is impossible to write within the parameters of Wikipedia. Here are some thoughts from a long-time contributor who worked on an overhaul ten years ago (at that time, the key was to get a more comprehensive outline structure) and whose doctoral work is in classical studies.

• Length. The current article is indeed too long. Most sections that have their own main article, such as "Languages", are far too long and detailed. When some of the sections were sketched in ten years ago, there were no main articles for those topics. It's a harder writing task than you might think to offer both clear broad statements that are useful to the wide range of visitors to this article in combination with some concrete details that bring those to life. Maybe we should just link them to the Jason Momoa SNL video and be done with it.
• The dangers of recentism. Classical studies is not a field in which older work is discarded. It isn't like either the sciences (where older ideas are actually proven wrong and progress is made) or, say, literary studies (the latter meant to continually renew the vitality of texts for current readers). What you find in classics, because it's inherently multidisciplinary, is that areas of focus within the field change over time, so that research on some topics may be concentrated during certain decades, like republican prosopography in the Ronald Syme era. All that work is still valuable and perceptive; classicists took up other questions and other approaches. I have read some awfully lightweight published articles lately by newborn classicists in which I could immediately spot internal contradictions and research gaps that make me wonder what's happening in the field—support for the humanities in the US is drying up, of course. Still good work in English from the UK but more so from younger multilingual European scholars. Anyway, in classical studies the date of publication is not a measure of the depth or value of research, though archaeology and text retrieval (as of Philodemus from Herculaneum) continually provide new resources to build on.
• Neutrality. Neither rosy nor brutal should be the aim. If you go in thinking "my job is to show just how nasty the Roman Empire really was," then that's as detrimental a mindset as wanting to wear a toga and lie about on couches eating grapes. Scholarship is about trying to understand what the Romans were about in relation to their own time and to the world as they received, entered, and reshaped it. If anything, scholarship in the last decade has moved away from the "Romans bad" agenda.
• Audience. This article gets high traffic. What do visitors come for? My occupation IRL is book editing. At least half of all compositional problems in nonfiction can be solved by putting yourself in the shoes of the average reader. What questions are they likely to bring to the article, and how can the article be structured and compiled to best answer those questions?

Cynwolfe (talk) 17:56, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Capital

User: Rheskouporis, that date there in the infobox is very much a mistake, unfortunately. Constantinople becoming a new capital, a "new Rome" in the East, is not equivalent to the old Rome being stripped of its capital status. It's important to understand what the word "capital" ("caput imperii"=capital of the empire; "caput mundi" or "caput orbis"=capital of the world) meant to the Romans. Rome, as the city that originated the Romans, as the place where the Senate was based, as the most populated urban centre, as a community that was fed and supplied by the rest of the empire by law, etc. etc. was "capital" by definition. Even if the Emperor was elsewhere Rome was not stripped of its capital status and of all the privileges associated with it. This is why Constantinople, to be a new capital, had to be a "New Rome", had to have its own Senate, had to have its own 7 hills, had to have grain supplies specifically designed to feed the city like Rome etc. Rome lost its status as Imperial capital because the Empire there fell, leaving only the Eastern Roman Empire and hence only Constantinople as capital.

So I think the better dates for the capital should be: Rome "(27 BC-476 AD)", even though 476 is conventional as one could say Odoacer pretended to be a Patrician for the Emperor in Constantinople, but that is not a point I am raising; whereas for Constantinople we can mantain "(330-1453)", even though that's another convention as for example it's 357 the year in which the Senate of Constantinople was put on par with that in Rome, but this is not a point I am raising either.

A proof that Rome continued to be considered "capital of the empire" after 330 is that, when it is sacked in 410, ancient authors explicetely say that "the capital of the empire" was sacked. Let me quote Saint Jerome, Letter 128 (text here: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001128.htm), on the sack of 410:

The world sinks into ruin: yes! But shameful to say our sins still live and flourish. The renowned city, the capital of the Roman Empire, (in Latin: Romani imperii caput) swallowed up in one tremendous fire.

Barjimoa (talk) 19:09, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

The various capitals of the Western Roman Empire were Rome, Mediolanum, Ravenna, Salona, and Spalatum. Dimadick (talk) 17:48, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

But these were not made official capitals of the Roman empire; rather they were, altough it's still significant, seats of the Western Roman Emperor. The presence of the Emperor by itself was not what made a city the capital. And even if we consider these cities capitals as well, their role did not strip Rome of its official capital status either. Barjimoa (talk) 18:30, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Community Consensus: Change semi-elective absolute monarchy (de facto) to Despotism (de facto)

Title says it all. According to Montesquieu, "monarchy" does not do justice to the despotic and autocratic Cæsars. In Spanish it's called "Autocracia", check out the Spanish wikipedia. 190.141.81.136 (talk) 02:42, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

It's not our job to point fingers and moralise. However, I see no justification for keeping "semi-elective", and "monarchy" neglects the periods within the scope of this article when the empire had two emperors - and of course there was the tetrarchy. I'd favour simply changing Semi-elective absolute monarchy (de facto) to Autocracy, a term which does encompass single and multiple autocrats and isn't (unlike "autocratic") loaded. NebY (talk) 12:40, 23 May 2024 (UTC)