Talk:Helvia gens

Article title and intro sentence

@P Aculeius: First, your long edit summaries come off a bit imperious, and the assertions you make in them would be better placed on a talk page. You are correct that I am not familiar with the topic of this article, but I am pretty good with the conventions of both English and Wikipedia, and that is what prompted my edits. You may want to have a look at Help:Edit_summary#What_to_avoid_in_edit_summaries. A couple questions, which I encourage you to consider with a fresh perspective, and not as the owner of this article:

• Why do you include (gens) in the article title? There is no other article titlied Helvia, nor do I see anything else on WP that might call for disambiguating it. I believe WP convention would call for Helvia as the optimal title. See Wikipedia:Disambiguation#Naming_the_specific_topic_articles, no. 3 and Wikipedia:Article_titles#Disambiguation, no. 3. Note that we do not typically add a parenthetical (family) in title names such as Hominidae.
• By the same token, why do you insist on keeping the bolded gens in the lead sentence, before the primary term? That does not read well. As in my above example, we do not lead with "The family Hominidae, whose members...". See Wikipedia:Superfluous_bolding_explained.

A couple more notes:

• I put a link on curule to help others like myself not familiar with the term. I found two articles on WP, Curule seat and Curule aedile; I guessed the latter was more appropriate, trusting that someone wiser would come along and adjust as necessary. You simply removed the link. By the way, the dreaded dictionary (AHD) defines the term "Privileged to sit in a curule chair; of superior rank".
• In this and the gens article, I tried the word clan — maybe not preferred here, but certainly not "anachronistic" — again mislead by the OED and the AHD. The latter gives this as the primary definition: "A patrilineal clan of ancient Rome composed of several families of the same name claiming a common ancestor and belonging to a common religious cult". That almost seems to apply here, wouldn't you agree? If not, you might do a kindness to the editors of those dictionaries by correcting their misconceptions. Eric ^talk 15:01, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

This is a good example of why familiarity with the project and its conventions would have been useful before making these edits. Addressing your points, apart from personal remarks: the name of a Roman gens is the feminine form of its nomen gentilicium. This nomen is shared by all the women of a gens; every woman of gens Julia was named "Julia", every woman of the Cornelia gens was named "Cornelia". Unlike women in modern times, most Roman women did not have or did not use individualizing names; there were a variety of reasons for this, including the ready availability of distinguishing surnames, nicknames, or descriptions, which in Latin frequently blended together in a way that they would not in English—and many of these have not been handed down to us in historical sources. The Romans treated the word gens as a necessary component of the name of a gens because otherwise the name would describe a person; and for this reason most modern sources do as well. From a technical perspective it does not matter whether one refers to "gens Helvia", "the Helvia gens" or "the Helvian gens", but although one could use "the Helvii" with proper context (without context, it could refer to any number of them, rather than the entire family), one would never use the nomen alone to refer to the gens.

The format "Nomen (gens)" was adopted as a logical and consistent titling format at the very beginning of the project, some ten years ago. All articles in the series—now more than three hundred of them, with perhaps a hundred more left to write—were started under this format until about 2018, when it was decided to adopt "Nomen gens" instead. This came about because certain editors, running into just two or three articles in the series, would decide that "(gens)" constituted unnecessary disambiguation whenever there were no extant articles about women who belonged to the gens in question, or other things (including disambiguation pages or articles about feminine names) using the title. These editors then moved just the articles that offended their sense of disambiguation propriety to other titles, usually although not always the bare nomen—an unexpected location, and an undesirable result, since it necessarily precluded the creation of articles about individual members without moving the articles again—or subjected them to uncertainty as articles about various plants and animals with Latin names cribbed from Roman gentes were deemed primary. Apparently certain taxonomists made a habit of assigning Roman names to genera of butterflies, beetles, spiders, fish, and various herbs.

Thus, by including the word gens in the title, the subject of the article is clear and consistent from one article to another in the project; nobody writing Roman articles has to guess what the names of the articles are, as they did before 2010, when various articles about Roman gentes might have been found with half a dozen different styles of title (and no consistent internal formatting). The word is in boldface as part of the name of the topic in the lead of every article in the series, because if omitted when referring to the gens, the reference becomes misleading; one never speaks of "Cornelia" and means the gens, nor of "the Cornelia"—which would mean "the most important person named Cornelia"—or plural "the Corneliae", which would mean two or more women named "Cornelia", not "the members of gens Cornelia". The example of "hominidae" is not analogous; there are no other persons, places, or things to confuse the term with; an individual member of this taxonomic group is not a "hominida"; and the same might be expected of most other taxonomic classifications—certainly the ones that don't already have disambiguation in the title. This makes the comparison inapposite to Roman gentes, which always share their names with all of their female members—and often with various flora, fauna, or other topics.

A "curule magistracy" is a magistracy with imperium, which therefore entitled the holder to use a curule chair—something that ought to be mentioned at "Roman magistrate", but for some reason is not. It's mentioned under "curule seat", but only in the subsection on ancient Rome. Curule aediles were the second set of aediles created when patricians were first permitted to serve as aediles—the original aediles were plebeians, and technically not magistrates, so they could not use the curule chair. The patrician aediles were considered magistrates, and so could—thereby becoming known as curule aediles, as opposed to the plebeian aediles. There is nothing wrong with linking the term, although those of us in CGR might not have thought of it—but a link to "curule aediles" did nothing to explain the use of the word in the phrase "curule magistracy". Normally gens articles speak of the first member to achieve the consulship, but in this instance none of the Helvii held the consulship, apart from the emperor Pertinax, nearly four hundred years after the Helvii first appear in Roman history, so the praetorship, the next highest magistracy, obtained by one of the Helvii in 198 BC, is mentioned; there was a military tribune five years earlier, but this was not an important magistracy, and so the praetorship was distinguished as the first curule magistracy held by any of the Helvii.

The word "clan" is one of several possible translations of the word "gens", along with "family", "tribe", and "race". Which one makes the most sense usually depends on context. To the Romans, any set of persons sharing a common nomen and claiming descent from a common ancestor constituted a gens. Gaius Bolonius Maximus and his children could constitute a gens, even if there were no other Bolonii. In drafting gens articles I carefully chose the word "family" because it most closely matches the way we use the word today. When we refer to "the family of Julius Goldschmidt", we include either all of his lineal descendants, or at least those named "Goldschmidt". Depending on how long ago he lived, his family could include a handful or people or thousands.

The word "clan" is not as good a description, because apart from conjuring up the image of highlanders in kilts, membership in a clan is not necessarily restricted by descent or marriage—individuals or whole families can be joined to, or removed from a clan, and one cannot assume that all of its members are descended from a common ancestor. Membership in a Roman gens was theoretically predicated on such descent, even in cases where that descent was the result of a legal process of adoption, or of confusion between the original gentiles and later persons sharing the same nomen for various reasons. The word "tribe", preferred by many sources, is here avoided both because it conjures up images of people living in a primitive state, and because its root—tribus—universally rendered in English as "tribe", refers to specific and distinct legal concepts in Roman culture, which unlike the gens were not based on either a common name or a common ancestry. The word "race" is avoided both because of its confusion in modern culture with skin colour or ethnicity, and because in a strict sense it could imply descent alone, thereby missing one of the two key components of a gens. This translation is best left to poetic use, while plain English is the best option to explain what a gens is.

The word "family" is understood by everyone, and is broad enough to encompass a gens of any size, whether or not it is divided into families—and as various encyclopedic sources explicitly state, many were not. It's preferable to using the words "clan", "tribe", or "race", because in each instance, the reader would then have to look up those terms to be clear about "what constitutes a clan?" or "does this mean that a bunch of tribes got together to build Rome?" or "so the earliest Romans were of mixed race?". The reason why I seem possessive of the leads of various gens articles is because they were very deliberately worded in order to convey an exact meaning, and to avoid other possible interpretations that would be less accurate, or potentially misleading. This is also why all but the shortest or oldest articles tend to follow a fairly standardized wording, with fairly limited variation. Where a particular change makes more sense,I generally leave it alone, or work with the new wording. But in this instance the specific wording is important. A dictionary definition is typically written for an economy of verbiage, which means potentially without the space to convey subtle shades of meaning, unlike an encyclopedia article, which can provide as much detail as necessary. And just as any other scholarly writing, word choice is often left to the sensibilities of the author. In this case, "family" is the best translation—the clearest, and least likely to require further elaboration. P Aculeius (talk) 18:50, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

I guess I should thank you for a thorough explanation, though it was longer than you needed to get your point across here. As you imply above, the intended meaning of a word such as clan could be made clear with context, e.g. "...a clan of families having the same name..." However I am not pushing for the use of clan; that was just what I came up with when I briefly researched gens in an attempt to improve the wording for the general reader. For an article such as this one and gens, it can sometimes help to have the perspective of someone who lacks familiarity with the topic, but is interested in it and seeks to improve how the concept is conveyed, since this encyclopedia is for everyone, not just scholars of ancient Roman civilization. Regarding the (gens) in the title: I understand the motivation for a consistent naming convention, but I think I would side with those who would forgo the parenthetical addition in unambiguous cases. Anyway, it's all yours, and thanks for your work here. Eric ^talk 20:54, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Point well taken. Sorry for being so defensive, but in the past this type of discussion has gone very differently, and I thought this would be one of those times. Apologies for the wall of text. As I mentioned, the titles of newer articles don't have parentheses, and older ones could be moved, but I haven't done that yet because I wanted to avoid having to fix a lot of links to and redirects for some of the bigger ones. P Aculeius (talk) 22:31, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Affectation "at ancient Rome"

'ats off for yet another imperious, condescending edit summary, P Aculeius — true to form! Contrary to what you imply in your snarky comment there, I understand more about prepositions than you imagine, and in several languages. So I am amused, not offended, at catty attempts at insult. You call your use of at standard; I call it affected. As this article evidently belongs to you, I defer to your superior (OED A.7.b.) opinion. Eric ^talk 15:35, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

The irony of the above seems to be lost on the author. P Aculeius (talk) 19:00, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

To provide more detail: there are several possible prepositions here, each with its own distinct shade of meaning, but at is the one intended. At describes simple location in or in the vicinity of a place, without more specificity. It has always been used with cities, towns, villages, and, according to the OED, small islands. In implies within the physical boundaries of a place, which is definitely not the intended meaning in instances such as this. Neither the Helvii nor any other Roman gens was physically limited to the area enclosed within the walls of Rome. Of implies point of origin, which is seldom provable in the case of any Roman gens—even the oldest families are frequently suspected of having come to Rome from somewhere else. In a few cases, of might be appropriate, but chiefly when a family is associated with a particular place other than Rome, although still described as "Roman". But at the root of it, there is nothing the least bit improper, or "affected" about using at when referring to a city or town. Simply because you're not be accustomed to using a particular word in order to convey a specific shade of meaning, or avoid others, doesn't mean that it should be replaced with the wording that you would have chosen—changing the meaning of the sentence in the process. P Aculeius (talk) 22:33, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

As for my comment, it was a response to your characterization in your own edit summary of a perfectly ordinary English construction as "bizarre" and "inappropriate". If you're going to throw around that kind of language, you ought to expect some pushback, instead of responding to it with an all-out assault on the article's talk page. P Aculeius (talk) 22:38, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

Granted, "bizarre" was, in retrospect, inappropriate. As for "inappropriate", I'll give myself a pass.

In my grasp of modern English, if the gens was not confined to the walls of Rome, that would seem to call for of – and here I reveal the presumption and logic of my offending edit. This because the term "ancient Rome", in the context* of the sentence at question (in question?) will, to my mind, evoke to most readers a geography greater than the city limits of Rome, something for which I would not employ the preposition at.

*a context that does not specify whether we are talking about the city or the empire

Eric ^talk 02:20, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

That's precisely my point. In literally means "within", "inside of", while at is less specific, less delimiting. You can be "at Rome" whether you're sacrificing to Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, reviewing troops on the Campus Martius, or at a party in a villa on the Mons Sacer. Given the traditional territorial adjuncts of Rome proper—presumably including the vast swaths of agricultural land radiating out from the city, originally divided amongst the various tribes and their members—a great many Romans weren't within the city at any point in time, but they weren't precisely at any other location; in this sense they were at Rome without necessarily being in it. True, of avoids that particular difficulty, and as I said above is sometimes appropriate—but in this context it tends to imply "from", "originating at", which is a shade of meaning I'm trying to avoid, since we don't really know the geographical origin of most gentes. Put another way—all roads led to Rome, but not all roads led away from Rome—if you take my meaning.

As for the ambiguity of whether the city or the empire could be meant, the city is the more natural reading, both because it's more literal, and because for large areas—such as Latium, Italy, the Empire—in would be a more logical choice, although technically at would still be true. The distinction in this specific instance is that in ceases to be accurate if we interpret "Rome" to mean the city. Of would be accurate if "Rome" means the whole empire, but like in, becomes misleading if by "Rome" we understand it to mean the city. Perhaps there's no perfect wording here—but I stand by my opinion that of these three, at is the most neutral choice. Is it less used in this manner than in the past? Yes, obviously. But that doesn't make it any less correct, or less desirable when it has the shade of meaning closest to the one intended. P Aculeius (talk) 04:14, 14 January 2021 (UTC)