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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.
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)[reply]
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The Languages section is also pretty outdated in its treatment of "vulgar Latin" and non-treatment of other Italic languages.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 theordines (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 likehonestiores or conversion to Christianity) are presented as if always part of Roman life.
This thing is amonster! 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 necessarilywrong, 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 fromAncient Rome: there's a lot here that's really about "the Romans" in general, rather than the specific material the article claims to cover.
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)[reply]
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 theFAR of the Byzantine Empire and can offer my (unprofessional) perspective on modern scholarship where it overlaps.Biz (talk)07:00, 23 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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 Empirereally 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?
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.
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Im editing this page to add a Trivia, with its first information being: "Many say Julius Caesar was the first emperor. Whilst making the way for Augustus to take power, he was not a emperor, but either a Dictator for Life."WikiUser982 (talk)13:30, 7 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
level-4 vital article is ratedB-class on Wikipedia'scontent assessment scale.
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between11 January 2022 and6 May 2022. Further details are availableon the course page. Student editor(s):ChristopherNoell21 (article contribs).
Not done for now: please establish aconsensus for this alterationbefore using the
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