User talk:Ifly6/Primary sources in classics

Comment

@Psychastes, HLHJ, Caeciliusinhorto, and NebY: Comments welcome on this essay. Ifly6 (talk) 12:48, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Nice work, and I do like your scholarly, sourced and technical examples in What is the big deal with primary sources? I do wonder if it could be more persuasive if those were preceded by some more commonplace ones. There are ways we all do - or at least should - now treat ancient historians as unreliable; a few, off the top of my head:

troop numbers, casualties, accounts of engagements

numbers in general

numbers that stand for "a lot" or "a helluva lot"

precision for verisimilitude

resonant numbers - 10-year siege, but of Veii; 300 fighting to the last, but the Fabii and only one survived, not two

speeches (hardly novel - cf Dionysius on Thucydides, Polybius on Timaeus, Diodorus on everyone)

bias, tainting not only tone and description, but the very inclusion and exclusion of material (Xenophon, Tacitus ...)

emulative falsehoods and dramah (Sallust taking details of battles from Thucydides, because that's how you write battles, Cassius Dio adding colour and horror).

Of course, even when we accept that we must read ancient historians sceptically, it's sadly tempting to treat them as reliable if filleted, like treating the Gospels as factual so long as you skip the god bits. Still, opening with such content might serve along the lines of "we know they're unreliable, and it's even worse than you might think."

Meanwhile I've been idly watching a discussion about primary sources in articles about very recent events (Wikipedia talk:No original research#New articles based on primary sources) which in part relates to the shifting definitions of "primary" - eyewitness accounts and court documents are more primary than reports of the day's proceedings, which are more primary than newspaper feature articles, which would be primary if published 100 years ago but may now be close to secondary as we can get. At millennium scales, the "secondary" status of historian shifts too. In some ways, Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources is independent of PST. Its main categories are

Generally reliable in its areas of expertise

No consensus, unclear, or additional considerations apply

Generally unreliable

Deprecated

Blacklisted

I wonder in which category the community would put Herodotus? NebY (talk) 19:39, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Ngl, I laughed aloud at numbers that stand for "a lot" or "a helluva lot". I'm intending to write a short paragraph inserted before "Primary sources are wrong" touching on the points you made. I had in a previous draft included a heading for such a section but it seems to have disappeared so I never bothered writing it. Outline-first has its issues. Ifly6 (talk) 00:32, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

As to Hdt, I would expect him to fall into additional considerations apply except on his gold-digging-ants-in-Afghanistan and the-Persians-attacked-with-100-billion-men stuff. Ifly6 (talk) 00:35, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Having checked, the number is exactly 5,283,220 per Hdt 7.816. Beyond the fact that France in 1914 had total mobilisation across the entire empire of 3.78 million men making Hdt's figure just absolutely hilarious, the precision of Hdt's figure is similarly laughable. Like actually hilarious. He says he knows down to the tens place how many men Xerxes brought into Greece. Not 5,283,210 or 5,283,230 men, Hdt counted that extra tent over there. Ifly6 (talk) 15:47, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

I'm sure he had a very reliable source, quite as good as the Egyptian priests who told him that twice in the preceding 11,340 years the sun rose in the west, and twice it set in the east, but it never made any difference. (Hdt 2.142)

Maybe, if you've not seen it before, you'll enjoy a Polybius quote about Timaeus, as an example of historians arguing about how to compose speeches.

For he has not written what was said nor the true sense of what was said, but instead offers what he thinks should have been said, and enumerates in all these speeches the concomitant details like someone at school trying his hand at a set theme; as if he were making a display of his own ability but not offering an account of what was truly spoken.

— Polybius 12.25a

NebY (talk) 16:16, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Honestly it's like Polyb. 12.25a = ancient Wikipedia talk page (DD MM YYYY BC). Ifly6 (talk) 17:19, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Fair! So I've put it on my user page.

I'm quite fond of Herodotus's math - so many ships, so many per ship, infantry counted 10,000 at a time by squeezing them into a special enclosure, and so on. The Aegean islanders contribute 17 ships and ships have 30 marines each, making 510, so there's a 10 in the total number of fighting men, 2,641,610. Then he suggests that there'd probably be more camp-followers, grain transport boat crew, and suchlike than there were fighting men but even assuming it was merely 1:1, that gives 5,283,220. It's like he's heard that rounding too soon introduces errors. Then he works out their rations and reveals he's not counted the women and eunuchs. NebY (talk) 20:49, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Surely once he counts the women and eunuchs he has to incorporate that wagons will be needed to supply them and wagon drivers and their support staff. With this kind of logic, the Greeks aren't fighting Persians anymore. They're fighting the Zerg. Ifly6 (talk) 21:19, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

And then he mentions the dogs need feeding too. NebY (talk) 23:19, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

In one sense, Ancient literary sources ... are considered primary sources for the purposes of classical studies and All literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence from the ancient world are primary sources for the purposes of classical studies are unnecessarily restrictive; you could simply say "for Wikipedia", or add "and for Wikipedia". Wikipedia:No original research#Primary has a long footnote, currently [d], Further examples of primary sources include: archeological artifacts; ... medieval and ancient works, even if they cite earlier known or lost writings; tomb plaques and gravestones. (The stricture on ancient works has been in WP:OR since at least 2011, when archeological artifacts were already included.) Worth mentioning? NebY (talk) 23:41, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

@UndercoverClassicist: Also wanted to ping you! Ifly6 (talk) 19:31, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Good essay -- I think it does a good job of fleshing out why WP:PRIMARY is as it is, particularly for sources in our field. I think your point about secondary sources which simply rehash primary ones is also important; I note that you tactfully stopped short of naming names there. If I may make a couple of suggestions, all very minor:

• I think it is worth being explicit that primary sources are only useful for evidence that can be verified from the source itself (WP:PRIMARY) -- in practical terms, this means for their own contents. In other words, a sentence cited to (e.g.) the de bello Gallico almost always has to begin with "in the de bello Gallico, Caesar writes that..."
• You have slightly misrepresented Bret Devereaux, who goes on to point out that this "rule" is actually pretty murky, and doesn't hold up well for the end of the Western Roman Empire (where we have big and important disconnects between what the literary sources seem to say and what the archaeology seems to show, and neither resolving those or ignoring them is an easy business), or for certain sub-fields like demography. The basic principle is sound, but even as an archaeologist by training, I'd stop short of saying "archaeology always beats text" -- as ever, it's more complicated than that.
• Likewise, I think you have been a bit heavy-handed on Cambridge Scholars Publishing, which sometimes gets a bad name from authors -- but that is largely a factor of its aggressive marketing tactics, and the perception that they reach out to (e.g.) newly-minted PhDs and sweet-talk them into accepting an offer when they might have got a better one had they taken the manuscript to an academic press and been prepared to do more work meeting their process. Their status is tricky, but very few people would go beyond "some issues, maybe handle with care" to "this is vanity press". See for instance a breakdown here. They do feature in Beall's list, but that listing is specifically about journals, which they no longer publish. The point isn't wrong, but the phrasing should, in my view, be softened.

Again, nice work on an essay that I hope will be read where it is needed. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:03, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

These points are well taken. I've weakened the claims in the latter two, though I am also open to suggestions as to how they could (or should) be rephrased from here as well. As to the first point, I think this is addressed already (actually marginally more broadly) in the example with Cicero and the one-day consulship of 45 along with the following note that Reasons to use primary sources alone may include ... use of a primary source to support a claim that the source makes that claim. Ifly6 (talk) 00:29, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps, but I wouldn't necessarily agree with the statement in the essay that citing the letters of Cicero to support the claim that Cicero was displeased by the election of Gaius Caninius Rebilus -- Cicero could have been being ironic, or lying, or using some cultural idiom or code that is not obvious today, or the text may be corrupt, or there may be other sources that cast doubt on it... In this context, I would only consider those letters good enough to support a claim that Cicero wrote that he was displeased, and then only with a supporting secondary source. This is a small distinction, admittedly -- as long as readers understand that WP:PRIMARY is the guideline and that this explains it rather than replacing it, there should be no real problems. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 09:17, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

I've substituted expressed displeasure, which is what I think I was trying to say in the first place. Ifly6 (talk) 13:14, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Totally offtopic here, but I find it credible that a Mediterranean lagoon would be drained by a tsunami, often called a tidal wave because it acts like a tide (even in the 21st century, with seismometer networks and tsunami warning systems, people stand around in harbours going "Wow! Why has the tide suddenly gone so far out? Let's go out and look!" -- and then, sometimes, they die; if the harbour drains, run for the hills along the local tsunami evacuation route). A tidal wave might well not be readily distinguishable from the effects of tides and waves, but of course it isn't 24-hour periodic, or just-the-north-lagoon hyperlocal, and it might well leave geological traces which presumably are not evident. Ancient observation is often more reliable than ancient theory. Herodotus's famous insistence that any report of the sun being to the north while rounding the south tip of Africa is an obvious lie...

The predominance of expensive sources in the classics is a problem for professional classicists, too. And society more generally. If any classicists reading this want to start a platinum open-access journal, Wikiversity will host it for you, for free.

Do the second and sixth bullet point imply that primary archeological papers are secondary sources here?

Could we clarify that it is entirely permissible to quote ancient sources (and PD translations), at reasonable length, to give context to the modern scholarship on what they mean? Classical scholars tend to assume that anyone interested in their work has all the relevant source texts (which may amount to a few hundred words altogether) memorized, which the average Wikipedia reader will not. So a quote often makes things make much more sense, like the extensive examples in this essay.

A quibble, but I find some of the sentence structures a bit hard to follow. I've done a bit of minor rephrasing and can do more if it isn't unwelcome. HLHJ (talk) 01:47, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

The story of the capture of New Carthage in Polybius is that Scipio waited for the tides to drain the lagoon north of the city, then marched his troops over the now drained lagoon, to captured the northern sea walls. They sacked the city that evening. Livy's story is the wind did it even though there's nowhere for the wind to have built up from. Most older treatments are of the view that it was both. I think this is methodologically untenable: why posit one impossible event when you can posit two probability-independent impossible events at the same time?

There are multiple levels of archaeological report. The ones that we get to read in stuff like the Journal of Roman Archaeology are many times something which tries to incorporate lots of different strands of evidence to argue for some narrative. I wouldn't call those primary sources in the same way a field report or daily dig log is a primary source.

Where would you want to put the translation element? Any such quote would have to be contextualised just like the citation.

No issues with your copyedits. Ifly6 (talk) 22:45, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

References

Move to WP space

I'd like to move this article to WP space, probably with the title Wikipedia:Primary sources in classics or Wikipedia:Ancient primary sources. Are there any objections? Ifly6 (talk) 16:34, 30 August 2024 (UTC)