Talk:Atthidographer

Latest comment: 7 years ago by Botteville in topic Notability

Notability edit

How will this grow into anything more than a dictionary entry? If it is going to be an article about histories of Athens, "Historiography of Athens" would be a better article title. - TheMightyQuill (talk) 21:29, 28 May 2013 (UTC)Reply

Well. Interesting thought from a non-classicist. In the field of classics, and from the field of classics, Atthis is one of those technical terms refering to a genre of detailed Athenian social history. It was a prolific genre. Since it was local to the big apple of the eastern Med and everyone then took it for granted and probably knew it by heart, like the passenger pigeon, no one thought it would need any preserving. So it is gone but for fragments, replaced by other fads. Now, the proposed title does not cover the topic, and it does not because it is an English exonym. The endonym is Atthis. So unless we are not going to learn any classics, but are going to wipe it all out by translation, Atthis should be our topic in one form or another. It is classics topic. We want to teach and learn classics.
The prediction of a short dictionary entry is not very accurate. The main work is no doubt going to be V1 of Mueller's Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum of 1841, published in Paris, which dedicates a big chunk of itself to Atthidographers. There are about double what is stated in the article so far. Those German scholars of the late 19th century were good ones, thorough and accurate. They show you what, from an English point of view, Germany could have been, should have been, would have been, and still might be. In any case there are topics in WP a lot more obscure than this one.
The starting point for this effort is without a doubt a translation of the German article. Just follow the method and its rules. But, that is only a starting point. We should not suggest to take that as the final article.Botteville (talk) 07:52, 19 April 2017 (UTC)Reply