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Good article reassessment for Stoicism

Stoicism has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 17:04, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Parentage at Comus

Since 2004 Dionysos has been credited as the father of Comus in the article on him. Comus is a late Classical creation anyway and there does not appear to be a scholarly source for the claim. However, Milton claims him as the son of Bacchus in his masque (line 54 ff) and it is possible that he knew of one. Can anyone throw light on the genealogy before the claim is removed from the article? Sweetpool50 (talk) 10:00, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

For context, see the discussion between myself and User:Sweetpool50 at Talk:Comus#Son of Dionysus. – Michael Aurel (talk) 10:35, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The body of the article says that Milton invented his descent from Bacchus. DGRBM does not mention it; nor does the Realencyclopedie seem to (with the caveat that I don't read German, so I'm relying on machine translation here). Brill's New Pauly omits him except for a brief mention in the article on komos that it was "the name of a satyr"; Oxford Classical Dictionary doesn't have anything at all (there's an article on the komos, but no mention of a related satyr or god). Searching google scholar, everything I can find about Comus as the child of Dionysus is in the context of Milton's masque, so I think it's reasonable to assume that this is indeed the source, but I haven't been able to dig up anything which explicitly says so. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 10:46, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

(And now having read the talkpage discussion which Michael Aurel links to, I agree with him that the current lead implies that Comus was considered the son of Dionysus in antiquity, and shouldn't unless we have a source for that.) Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 10:50, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

On looking again at the Comus article, I note at the end of the References section that the (original) text is ascribed to Theoi. But the parentage claim is not backed by the quotation from Philostratos there. Sweetpool50 (talk) 11:14, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Judging by their attribution of the parentage to "Other references", I suspect that Theoi derived the claim from Milton, whose genealogy they do note near the end of the page (describing it as a "post-classical invention"). – Michael Aurel (talk) 11:29, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Gentes and the single common ancestor

The article gens Servilia includes a phrase, The nomen Servilius is a patronymic surname, derived from the praenomen Servius (meaning "one who keeps safe" or "preserves"), which must have been borne by the ancestor of the gens. There are two elements which I want to focus on: must and the ancestor. The two together imply that there must have been, ie it is historical that there was, a single common ancestor for the gens Servilia who bore the name Servius.

I removed the underlined portion and was reverted by P Aculeius. I then edited the statement to say that the Romans believed in a single ancestor, along with other clean up, and was then again reverted here. The following are the edit descriptions.

• the idea that they're all descended from one servius is nonsense
• That *is* both the premise of patronymic surnames, *and* that of all Roman gentes; the definition of a gens involves at least the tradition or belief in descent from a common ancestor. That the gentiles were, or believed that they were descended from such a person is not nonsense, but tautological.
• literally a non sequitur; a fictitious kin group – "That distant ancestor (princeps gentis) was commonly a fiction" OCD 4 sv gens – is not the same as your addition right here of text implying that this ancestor must have existed at some point. i am editing to say that they thought some ancestor existed and tagging. WP:TSI.
• Rewording, but deleting "failed verification" tag for reasons to be discussed on the talk page.

Pursuant to obligations, I am here for a third opinion. I bring here because of similar language used on gens Quinctia and gens Lucilia.

Aculeius' desired text has two major issues:

• Basically nobody in the WP:SCHOLARSHIP believes the facile claims that every gens was descended from a common ancestor. Writing that every one descended from a single ancestor should not be the default; policy requires such semi-extraordinary claims to be sourced.
  • OCD⁴ sv "gens": That distant ancestor (princeps gentis) was commonly a fiction and a real or supposed kinship link between those claiming membership of the same gens became increasingly difficult to demonstrate. Common fictions are not consistent with a historical single ancestor as the premise ... of all Roman gentes.
  • Cornell Beginnings (1995) p 84: In historical times the clan (gens) was a patrilineal descent group whose members (gentiles) claimed descent from a common ancestor. This common descent, whether real or fictitious, was reflected in the system of nomenclature. A claim of common ancestry is not evidence that such a common ancestor existed.
  • Forsythe Critical History (2005)
    • pp 100–101: the obvious derivation of both the Etruscan and Latin forms of the name from a toponym conforms to a larger pattern of ancient Italian nomenclature, by which a clan name could be nothing more than an adjectival form of a city’s name used to specify origin (showing that not all clan names actually emerge from a common ancestor)
    • p 160: The clan name usually ended in -ius (e.g., Fabius, Cominius) and in theory it indicated that all bearers of the name could trace their descent back to a common ancestor, although (as argued above concerning the Etruscan origin or descent of Tarquinius Priscus, see p. 100–101) in some instances a clan name could be simply invented or borrowed (again, a claim of common ancestry is not evidence of that ancestor's historicity)
  • Salway 1994: it is not plausible that the progenitors of, for example, all the families of Marcii, will have been one and the same Marcus, casting the very idea as implausible
  • Smith 2006: we can see that there will have been a tendency to try to identify the first holder of a given nomen, the ancestor of the gens... it will be evident that these figures are mythical, and that the relationship to a single ancestor is fictitious, and this raises questions over how genuine was the kinship between members of a gens. Rejecting the idea of common descent. (Book positively cited in Lomas Rise of Rome 2017 and in reviews.)

• The sources cited in the article right now do not support the claim that there was a single ancestor for the gens Servilia called Servius. This content fails verification and, given the above, should be removed.
  • The 1897 article deals relevantly only with the etymology of Servilius. The entire article has four instances of the substring servili: the first two have to do with where the long-i is, the third lists it as formed from a suffix added to the praenomen Servius, the fourth is in a list of names. This does not support the single ancestor; it does not support this ancestor being called Servius; it does not support that so-called ancestor giving rise to the gens Servilia.
  • Livy 1.30 states only He [Romulus] nominated Alban nobles to the senate that this order of the State might also be augmented, amongst them were the Tullii, the Servilii, the Quinctii, the Geganii, the Curiatii, and the Cloelii. (I have checked the Latin, they are in accusative plural.) This does not support the single ancestor; it does not support this ancestor being called Servius; it does not support that so-called ancestor giving rise to the gens Servilia.

The closest I'm aware of when it comes to a facile ecce conditor story is with the gens Marcia. See Morelli 2021, describing how Numa adlected someone called Marcus and made him Marcius. But then Morelli notes there were other branches of the same family – basically Salway's point – and that the patrician descendants of the adlected Marcus died out. (Even though those branches then claimed descent from this first Marcius for political prestige reasons.)

Anyway, that's my position: the clause should go and so should the like clauses in other articles. Third opinions on this matter welcome. Ifly6 (talk) 16:50, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

• I note that you didn't wait for me to finish posting on the article's talk page before bringing the issue here to involve a larger audience. This is meant to be a discussion, not a spectacle or an election where whoever garners the most votes wins. I gave the matter extensive consideration—and I admit my discussion is even more of a wall-of-text than this is, for which I apologize—but frankly this is a minor point in the article, and it's not even likely to be relevant to the particular article in which it occurs, because no sources dispute that the patrician Servilii at the beginning of the Republic were all part of the same family. And as I tried to explain on the article's talk page, stating that the Servilii would have been descended from someone named Servius should be no more controversial than saying that a family named Johnson was presumably descended from someone named John, even though that likely would have occurred so far in the distant past that we have no idea who the person was.

If the dispute concerns the use of the word "must", as if to imply that "no other possible explanations are possible", then I concede that other explanations are possible, although I would state that no other explanations are plausible, particularly as there are no traditions in Roman writers concerning some other hypothetical reason why the Servilii were so named. This strikes me as nothing more than hair-splitting in the extreme: "you can't prove that someone named John existed!" or "He might have been mythical!" But if the dispute is that a claim of common ancestry is not the same as having a common ancestor, I think you at least must have some reason to dispute specific instances, rather than making a general assertion about Roman gentes.

The Servilii were patricians, the earliest generations mentioned all seem to have been related, and the fact that some other family at some other place and time might have acquired the same name from a different ancestor (also, presumably named Servius) doesn't really seem relevant to the origin of the patrician Servilii of the early Republic. The article doesn't say that the Servilii said anything about their common ancestor, doesn't involve whether he was real or mythical, only that their name was derived from some ancestor named Servius—and in the case of the Servilii at the beginning of the Republic, there seems to be no reason to speculate about whether they could actually have been several unrelated families, because that claim is found nowhere in any source relating to the Servilii.

But again, I'm not sure why this discussion could not have been had on the article's talk page before being brought here with copious citations, none of which frankly affect the basic issue. P Aculeius (talk) 17:20, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

• I see that approximately the same time I posted this, Aculeius posted a wall of text on Talk:Servilia gens. The justification given there essentially misses the point of the chosen grammatical construct's the ancestor of the gens. Nor does the rest of the response engage at all with why it {{failed verification}} or connect the admission that it is by no means inconceivable that multiple families could have borne the name due to their descent from different persons named Servius (similarly it is self-evident that all of them would have been descended from someone named Servius) to that the ancestor construct.

To answer the question why are we going to argue that the Servius whose descendants were named Servilius in Republican Rome was a "fictitious person" whose existence cannot be verified? The reason why is because Aculeius' proposed text asserts that such a person existed and, by admission, it fails verification. Moreover, the argumentation given that all the noble Servilii are related because they use the same praenomina is, by admission, only suggestive and also WP:SYNTH when here applied. It also doesn't support the claim brought back to the article that the single ancestor applied to the whole clan, contra just these specific patrician families. Ifly6 (talk) 17:20, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

In reply to the argument that not everyone who bore some nomina could have been descended from a common ancestor, all scholars agree that names such as Marcius or Servilius could have arisen independently at various times and places. But in no instance do we have evidence that the Romans considered any important gentes to have consisted of two or more separate and unrelated families that merely happened to share the same gentilicium, and in no instance can we prove that one prominent family was unrelated to another bearing the same nomen—the closest that we can come is showing descent by adoption (which the Romans considered legal descent), or unresolved disputes over whether the plebeian Junii could have been descended from Lucius Junius Brutus (who was assumed to have been a patrician, though there are good reasons to doubt this), or whether the Marcii or Tullii were really descended from Ancus Marcius and Servius Tullius. Nobody disputed whether the Junii, Marcii, or Tullii constituted individual gentes, and nobody today disputes whether Marcius is derived from Marcus or Tullius from Tullus.

In the case of any nomen gentilicium which is derived from another name, the presumption is that some ancestor bore the name from which it was derived. That is not itself a tradition about such an ancestor, or a claim of historicity, or proof that it could not have arisen any other way. But in the complete absence of any reason to doubt it, that is the presumption. And patronymics such as Servilius are unusually transparent in this regard; even if they were not all descended from the same Servius, they would all have been descended from some Servius. And there is no reason whatever to doubt that the Servilii of the early Republic were all part of the same family, and thus whatever Servius gave them their name can fairly be described as one person—though as there is nothing more to say about him, it is baffling why we need to have this conversation for the whole WikiProject to weigh in on. P Aculeius (talk) 17:39, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

The legitimacy of Brutus' claimed descent from Lucius Junius Brutus is irrelevant for this dispute. Your self-described presumption of a common ancestor requires a source, especially when reliable sources say that we cannot use a name like Marcius to presume descent from a single ancestor: it is not plausible that the progenitors of, for example, all the families of Marcii, will have been one and the same Marcus (Salway 1994). There is a material difference between some Servius and one Servius.

If you are baffled by why I brought it here rather, I must say I am similarly baffled then by why the similar claim is made at The nomen Quinctius is a patronymic surname based on the praenomen Quintus, which must have belonged to an [one!] ancestor of the [one!] gens (contra "some ancestors") and The nomen Caesonius is a patronymic surname, based on the praenomen Caeso, which must have belonged to the [one!] ancestor of the gens. The reason I brought it here is because I expect you to revert any changes to those sentences there as well; there's little point splitting discussion on the same thing into three separate talk pages.

What I would want to see on all such pages is the claim merely that the nomen is patronymic and the omission of any of these claims about how there was an or the ancestor of the gens. This is in fact what my original you reverted did. The statement that it is patronymic also already implies what you say you want, that there were some people who bore the root praenomen. Ifly6 (talk) 17:59, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

The incipit's accusation, which relies on my being able to see your post and then compose this separate post in the three minutes between your posting it there and my posting this here, is not plausible. I have already given justification as to why this forum is preferable due to similar claims on other pages.

As to no sources dispute that the patrician Servilii at the beginning of the Republic were all part of the same family. WP:ONUS. You need to cite a reliable source saying that they were in fact all part of the same family, not assert it. Having read your response, your response does not say they were all part of the same family, just that some specific patrician Servilii were. Even if this is true, there is no reason to believe that the Servilii listed as living in the high empire are descended from the same alleged Servius and (more relevantly) no reliable source for it. That distinction, at a minimum, should be reflected in the text.

It falls back then, on the unsourced core claim that each patrynomic gens has a single common ancestor who bore that name. This, for example, misses the point – no more controversial than saying that a family named Johnson was presumably descended from someone named John – the assertion given in those pages is beyond that. It is analogously that all families named Johnson were descended from a single John. There is no proof of this. Ifly6 (talk) 17:40, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

You should have waited because I specifically said that there would be discussion on the article's talk page, then immediately went to write it. The articles you mention all concern the same very simple issue: a patronymic surname being described as the result of an ancestor bearing the name from which it was derived. This should not be controversial!

As for the claim that other, unrelated families might have borne the same name for other reasons, these articles are about Roman gentes that were treated as one family in Roman times and grouped together by modern scholarship because they cannot readily or reliably be separated with unrelated lines being distinguished—in almost every case, the most that modern scholarship can do is guess as to whether families widely separated in time were related to each other, but the lack of any relationship is almost never provable.

The gentes that dominated the Republic were a relatively small group of families constituting the Roman aristocracy; this meant that provincial families that just happened to share the same names for etymological reasons could not simply insert themselves into Roman politics unless their lack of relation were obscured and they were thought to be part of the same gens—and if the Romans themselves could not distinguish them, then modern scholars cannot hope to do so.

My arguments have focused on the fact that the Servilii bear all the hallmarks of being the single gens that they were treated as by Roman historians and continue to be treated in modern sources, but the same arguments would apply to other gentes, such as the Marcii: could there have been Marcii who were not related to the others? Certainly. But were the few families of Marcii who were part of the Republican aristocracy related to each other? Almost certainly—and we have no evidence that they were not. Discussions over whether they were descended from Ancus Marcius or how Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus related to them are beside the point; with the exception of Coriolanus, all of the Marcii who were significant in the history of the Republic appear from the mid-fourth century BC onward, and there is no reason to doubt that they were related to one another, as they always assumed. That there could have been two or more unrelated families is no more than speculation, as the Romans did not say that there were, and there is no possible means for modern scholars to distinguish them. No source says that there were two gentes Marciae, or two Serviliae, and to argue that they should be treated as such in the absence of any proof is idle speculation. P Aculeius (talk) 18:01, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

These long sentences on Coriolanus or provincial families obscure the point. Wikipedia is not here to publish your conclusions on the families of the Marcii, Servilii, or others. It is here to summarise scholarly conclusions on those gentes. Scholars do not claim that there was a single common ancestor for each gens bearing its root praenomen; I have cited two above which reject the idea.

These replies are mostly interpretive arguments about primary sources attributed to nobody. The others are misunderstandings of the core dispute. I put it out clearly already: that there must have been, ie it is historical that there was, a single common ancestor for the gens Servilia who bore the name Servius. What I am disputing is that there was a (1) historical (2) single (3) ancestor for the (4) whole gens. That is what the sentence I removed claims. Restoring the sentence unaltered and then justifying it by omitting or conceding one of the subclaims here – but not there – is highly misleading. Ifly6 (talk) 18:11, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

What I am disputing is that there was a (1) historical (2) single (3) ancestor for the (4) whole gens this seems a perfectly reasonable thing to question for me; if we can't find scholarly sources saying that this is the case we shouldn't say it either. I certainly don't believe, to use the example provided by P. Aculeius above, that all Johnsons descend from a single historical John from which the surname derives; I don't see any reason why we should necessarily assume that's true of Servilii either. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 22:47, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

I never said that every person named Johnson is part of the same family and descended from a single person named John. I said that any family named Johnson must have had a John underlying that surname, the same as anyone named Stevens would look back to some unknown Steven or Stephen, or every Samuelson to someone named Samuel. There may well have been many such persons who independently left their name to different families, though nobody knows who they were. But this is all that the article says: "they must have been descended from some person named Servius."

It seems to me that Ifly6 has confused this patently obvious (and passing) statement with the question of whether all Servilii (or Marcii, or Lucilii, etc.) were descended from the same Servius, Marcus, or Lucius, or whether the tradition that the Marcii were descended from Ancus Marcius was true. That is not the subject of this discussion. The basic premise of all Roman gentes is that their members shared a common ancestor, and in the case of the aristocratic families of the Roman Republic, there is no reason to doubt it. No source, ancient or modern, disputes that the Servilii Prisci, Structi, and Ahalae were all part of the same gens, or that the Servilii Caepiones, Gemini, or Vatiae of the middle and late Republic were descended from them. I do not know of any legends about the ancestors of the Servilii, but the fact that their name was Servilius means that they must have had an ancestor named Servius, and that seems too obvious to be worth disputing.

The name Servilius could indeed have arisen independently from other persons named Servius, but their descendants were not the patrician Servilii of the Republic. No Roman source distinguishes any group of Servilii and says that they were not part of the Servilia gens; we cannot even assume that the plebeian Servilii toward the end of the Republic were not part of the same gens, because both Roman and modern scholars agree that most patrician gentes had or somehow acquired plebeian branches.

While it is possible that some of the "miscellaneous" Servilii listed at the end of the article were not lineal descendants of the Republican Servilii, there is no way of distinguishing them. And in any case, all of them would still have been descended from some person named Servius. It should not be a controversial statement that a specific family—the Servilia gens—must have taken its name from some ancestor named Servius, even though that is all that can be said of him. The statement is tautological; demanding proof of the obvious is simply a waste of time. P Aculeius (talk) 14:46, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

If you believe that, then stop reverting my removal of text that says, in effect, that every person named Johnson is part of the same family and descended from a single person named John. Here you keep saying that you don't mean that there's literally one ancestor and to justify your repeated restoration of text, which through use of through use of singular articles, requires there to be one ancestor.

Moreover, tChase 1897, does not actually support this claim of necessary descent from some (contra one) ancestor with that name. I've already listed every single instance of servili* in that article. The relevant part says only—

So Lucilius, Manilius, and Servilius are explained as formed by the gentile suffix -ilius directly from the praenomina Lucius, Manius, and Servius

It says nothing as to descent. Nor does the word patronymic appear anywhere in the article. Now, there are other (uncited) sources describing essentially all nomina as patronymic. Smith 2006 p 18 Modern scholarship has shown that the nomen was in essence an adjectival patronymic. But this is not the only view. Ibid p 17 n 11 We should note the position of Franciosi, who denies that the nomen was a patronymic and associates the Roman onomastic system with a sort of totemism; Franciosi (1999) 223–60; Franciosi (1984b).

The restoration of the contested clause must be justified by providing an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the contribution (WP:BURDEN). This burden has not been met. Ifly6 (talk) 18:33, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

You brought this here for a "third party opinion" because you weren't willing to discuss it on the talk page, and between eleven separate posts of yours totaling more than 14,500 bytes, exactly one other person has written one short paragraph while you wikilawyer and quote in green and red with numerous links to things you assume I don't understand because I don't share your point of view, while deliberately confusing multiple issues and continue splitting hairs about the blatantly obvious—and now you say "stop reverting me!" as though you're continually being victimized by evil me, when in reality you haven't been reverted once since before any of this discussion or the ignored talk page discussion was posted. If you didn't want to hear from anybody else, you shouldn't have started this in the first place. P Aculeius (talk) 22:45, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Instead of attacking my intentions and trying to bait me into an edit war, justify your revert or propose an alternative wording. Ifly6 (talk) 22:59, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

between eleven separate posts of yours totaling more than 14,500 bytes Given that you've contributed about 12,000 bytes to this discussion and I still don't even understand what your argument is you don't exactly have the moral high ground here.

As best I can make out you now agree with Ifly's original argument that there is no reason to believe that there was a single original Servius from whom all the Servilii were descended. To me, the text at issue (which must have been borne by the ancestor of the gens) clearly implies that there was a single common ancestral Servius from which all the Servilii were descended. What do you actually want to achieve here? What is your objection to Ifly's proposed text? Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 23:19, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

No, I do not agree; the Servilia gens believed itself to be one family with a common name and springing from a common ancestor, and there is no evidence whatever to contradict that: not one Roman writer claimed they were an amalgamation of unrelated families that just happened to have the same nomen; no modern writer disputes that the Servilii of the Republic were all related to one another; no reference source disputes the definition of a gens as a group of Romans sharing the same nomen gentilicium and claiming descent from a common ancestor. Only fringe sources make ridiculous claims such as that gentilicia such as Servilius, Marcius, or Lucilius are not patronymics but instead some kind of totemism; neither Roman writers nor mainstream scholarship today make such outlandish claims.

All that the disputed statement at the heart of this absurd war says is that a family sharing a gentilicium that is plainly and transparently formed from a praenomen must have been descended from someone with that praenomen, just as families named Johnson or Williams or Jackson can safely assume that they are descended from someone named John, William, or Jack—and I did not and do not claim that there can only ever have been one John, William, or Jack after whom all Johnsons, Williamses, or Jacksons everywhere are named, but there is no reason to believe that the Servilii of the Republic shared multiple unconnected origins, and even if they had they would all have been descended from someone named Servius, even if they were descended from multiple such persons.

And that makes the distinction between one or many families moot, although as I have tried to explain the mere potential for unrelated families to have shared the same gentilicium does not justify claiming that any particular gens was in fact an amalgamation of unrelated families. Nor is whether the particular ancestor they claimed was a real or historical figure, raised in the arguments above, relevant in any way, because all that was said in the first place was that the Servilii (Marcii, Lucilii) must have been descended from somebody named Servius (Marcus, Lucius). That would be just as true even if some of the Servilii could be shown to be descended from a different family with a separate origin—which they cannot, and even if no traditions relating to such a person have survived from antiquity; that is simply how patronymic surnames work. P Aculeius (talk) 00:46, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

Please cite a reliable source for these claims. Ifly6 (talk) 01:00, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

You're asking for proof of what all standard references on Roman culture agree upon: as Cornell puts it (p. 84): "[i]n historical times a clan (gens) was a patrilineal descent group whose members (gentiles) claimed descent from a common ancestor. This common descent, whether real or fictitious, was reflected in the system of nomenclature" (italics in original). Virtually the same thing is said under gens in the Oxford Classical Dictionary (2nd ed.). Harper's said the same thing decades earlier: "[a] Roman family in the widest sense of the word, descended on the male line from a common ancestor, and therefore bearing a common name." Cornell also does us the favour of mentioning the Servilii among the patrician gentes (p. 254), and note 47 helpfully adds that the plebeian Servilii are thought to have descended from the patrician Servilii Gemini.

The DGRBM has an article on the "Servilia Gens", not several "Gentes Serviliae". So under "Servilius" in PW, an ancient patrician gens, in which it is noted that the first individual mentioned bore the cognomina Priscus and Structus, which were borne by his descendants, who subsequently assumed the surnames of Ahala and Fidenas. The descent of the later Servilii Caepiones and Gemini from these early families is unclear, but assumed, since they are still treated as part of the same gens, and I note that they were still patricians, and so can hardly be imagined to be some upstart family that migrated to Rome after the demise of the original Servilii. But, as I said above, it would not matter if they had been, because anyone who bears a patronymic surname may rely upon an ancestor having borne the name upon which the patronymic was based, so no matter how many gentes Serviliae there were (good luck proving that there was more than one), all of them would necessarily have been descended from someone named Servius.

Cornell also assumes what we have been saying here, again on page 84: "[e]ach individual member of a gens had two names: a personal name or praenomen (e.g. Marcus, Titus, Sextus) and a clan name or nomen gentilicium, sometimes in the form of a patronymic (hence Marcius, Titius, Sextius). We may compare the names of the Scottish clans: MacDonald, MacGregor, etc." And in OCD, "[m]any [nomina] are thus formed from praenomina: these probably arose as patronymics, Marcius, for example, standing for Marci (filius)". Chase says at p. 125, "Lucīlius, Manīlius, and Servīlius are explained as formed by the gentile suffix -ĭlius directly from the praenomina Lucius, Manius, and Servius."

Or are we arguing that when such names are called "patronymics", then the scholars using that word didn't know what it meant, which according to Webster's Third New International Dictionary is, "a name derived from that of the father or a paternal ancestor". PW discusses such patronymic gentilicia under Namenwesen at col. 1657 ff., again clearly stating that these names came arose from an ancestor with the praenomen in question, and became "fixed" when they no longer changed if one's father bore a different praenomen; i.e. when the grandson, great-grandson, great-great-grandson, etc. of Marcus didn't change his gentilicium from Marcius to Quinctius if his father were Quintus rather than Marcus; there was necessarily an original Marcus (or a last one) in the patrilineal ancestry of a family named Marcius, whose name was preserved even if his descendants no longer used the name—or even, as Cornell observes, they preserved no traditions relating to their "founder".

But if at the end of this long, long road, all of which results from your insistence that we cannot say that "Servilius is a patronymic surname derived from the praenomen Servius, which must have belonged to an ancestor of the gens", then I am going to throw up my hands (and possibly my breakfast) and take the next train out of Dodge, because I cannot stand one more wasted hour on this nonsensical war against the blatantly obvious. Do whatever you want, I'm through. P Aculeius (talk) 07:02, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

• [i]n historical times a clan (gens) was a patrilineal descent group whose members (gentiles) claimed descent from a common ancestor. This common descent, whether real or fictitious, was reflected in the system of nomenclature. Saying that they "claimed" descent from a common ancestor and this common descent may be fictitious seems to me to support Ifly's position here. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 19:07, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

As for the OCD: I don't have the OCD2 to hand and you don't quote the text in question, but the OCD4 is online and the article "gens" begins derives from a root denoting procreation and the gens was frequently conceived as comprising the free-born descendants of a common ancestor in the male line. That distant ancestor (princeps gentis) was commonly a fiction and a real or supposed kinship link between those claiming membership of the same gens became increasingly difficult to demonstrate. This goes even further than Cornell, explictly stating that the supposed common ancestor of a gens was "commonly a fiction". Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 19:11, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

Whether a legendary "founder" existed or was invented at a later point to give the gens a mythical origin has nothing to do with this: we're not discussing whether traditions relating to such a person are historical, because we don't have any such traditions about the Servilii to dispute. And as Cornell says, most gentes had no such traditions. A patronymic name is not a tradition about a founder; it is not a claim of a mythical founder who might or might not have some basis in history. It is itself a record of an ancestor's name that tells us nothing besides the fact that such a person existed, whether or not he held any particular significance to his descendants, and that would be the same even if there were two or more such families, because each of them would still have been descended from some person named Servius. P Aculeius (talk) 20:49, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

• The sources do not support your position. The text you restored requires defending four elements: (1) historical (2) single (3) ancestor for the (4) whole gens. You have provided evidence for:

• A historical single ancestor for the patrician part – maybe adding the Servilii Gemini per Cornell – of gens Servilia (though I still believe this is impermissible under WP:PRIMARY)
• A theoretical single ancestor for gens Xia (OCD, Cornell 1995)
• A historical single etymological root for the whole gens' name (Chase, RE)

None of these defend all four elements of that the text requires. But if you are serious about disengaging, that's fine. I'll go and implement the removal of only the text that requires all four elements in the three different articles where analogous claims are made. Ifly6 (talk) 21:23, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

I have now made those edits at pages for gentes Caesonia, Servilia, Quinctia, Sextia, Vibia, Titia, and Aulia. Ifly6 (talk) 21:49, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

• I think the debate can be resolved by rephrasing the contentious sentence: The nomen Servilius is a patronymic surname, derived from the praenomen Servius (meaning "one who keeps safe" or "preserves"), which was theoretically borne by the mythical ancestor of the gens. T8612 (talk) 14:46, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

  But there was no "mythical ancestor". They were not named Servilius because they believed in or had a tradition about an ancestor named Servius who may or may not have existed; they were named Servilius because some ancestor of theirs had been named Servius at the time their gentilicium became "fixed", instead of changing with each generation (as explained in PW under "Namenwesen"), irrespective of whether they had any memory of him. In other words, this is not an instance where the statement depends on whether a legendary personage did or didn't exist. We know that the Servilii had ancestors, we know that one of them must have been named Servius, and it does not really matter who he was.

  If the Servilii had any such traditions about an ancestor from whom they derived their name, we do not know of it. Cornell says that, as a rule, most gentes seem to have had no particular traditions relating to their "founder", although I'm sure we can all think of a few exceptions, such as the Julii or Mamilii, who claimed descent from Aeneas and Odysseus, respectively, or the various gentes that claimed descent from the Roman kings, but apart from such instances, most gentes—even very important, patrician ones—seem to have attached no great importance to their founders.

  The only reason we know that there was a Servius in the ancestry of the Servilii is that it's where their nomen came from, the same way that we can state with reasonable certainty that someone named Roberts is ultimately named after someone named Robert, or that a family named Torkelson must be descended from some Thorkil, even though we have no idea who the people who lent their names to their descendants were. It's not merely "theoretical"; it's how patronymic names work. P Aculeius (talk) 19:04, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

Question on two "Roman era history articles" at the Teahouse

Hi! Not sure if the question at Wikipedia:Teahouse#Request for third party feedback fall under the scope of this WikiProject; if they do, please feel free to respond at the Teahouse instead of here. Thank you! Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 18:34, 15 November 2024 (UTC)