Talk:Gaius Sosius/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 12:30, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

I'll look at this one. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 12:30, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

Rate	Attribute	Review Comment
1. Well-written:
	1a. the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct.	Mostly there. I've gone in and added some non-breaking spaces before BC/AD. The prose sometimes becomes clunky and archaic, and occasionally steers away from an encyclopaedic towards loaded vocabulary and moral judgement - I think this may be a reflection of slightly over-close use of some older sources (see point 2 below).
	1b. it complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation.	The layout is professional and the lead section does a good job of summarising the material. There is still some work to do on 'words to watch', or loaded language and editorialising more generally (see for instance 'warmly espoused the cause of Antony', 'a violent harangue before the senate', 'this critical year', 'this rabid Antonian'.)
2. Verifiable with no original research:
	2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline.	The formal aspects of citation are excellent. See 2b below, however.
	2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose).	The citation style, particularly the frequent use of multiple citations for individual points, sometimes makes it difficult to ascertain precisely what is proven by precisely which source. There are a few places where the line between the editorial voice and the citation is not clear: note 29, for example, cites Fluss, which supports the intercession of Arruntius but is at best indirect evidence for Octavian's reluctance to pardon Sosius, and offers no opinion on the reason for this reluctance. I would like to see the references straightened out a little - tighter links between the sources and the ideas they contain, and, in general, multiple citations reduced to one when supporting a single non-controversial fact. Where there are multiple views on something, it would be better to separate out in the text or a footnote precisely what each source believes. I am a little concerned that the article relies heavily on older research - the most cited sources are 1927, 1930 and 1939, there is only one 21st-century source, and the newer sources such as the CAH are referred to relatively lightly. I appreciate that doing Roman prosopography often means contending with changing scholarly appetites, but there has certainly been a lot of more recent research on the Second Triumvirate, for instance, and it would be good to cite the key matters of historical fact to up-to-date sources where possible.
	2c. it contains no original research.	Facts are reliably cited to secondary literature, and the handling of the primary-source evidence from Josephus is done well to avoid the charge of OR. See caveats in 2a above.
	2d. it contains no copyright violations or plagiarism.	I cannot straightforwardly check all the sources, but the overwhelming impression is that this represents the judicious synthesis of multiple sources throughout.
3. Broad in its coverage:
	3a. it addresses the main aspects of the topic.	A good overview and biography, especially given the obvious limitations of the source material.
	3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).	This is nicely done: clear and concise throughout.
	4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each.	There are a few minor points that need addressing here (see 1 above)
	5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.	This is difficult to judge: it was massively cut down on 25 December, having been broadly stable beforehand. There is, however, no evidence of edit warring thus far.
6. Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio:
	6a. media are tagged with their copyright statuses, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content.
	6b. media are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions.	There is a single image, understandable given the nature of the evidence - it would be good to expand the caption here, perhaps with a footnote, to explain why the identification with Sosius is possible/dubious. It would be nice to have an image of the Temple of Apollo Sosianus, if one exists, but I can see the argument that many more pictures would be an aesthetic rather than an educational improvement.
	7. Overall assessment.	This article is nearly there - I would like to place it on hold for a week to give the editors a chance to address certain matters. In particular, the overall tone and language needs to be brought closer into line with modern encyclopaedic English, and aspects of the citation need to be cleared up so that it is clear exactly what material is being sourced from exactly what authority. It would also be beneficial if the references could be more heavily weighted towards more recent scholarship.

• @UndercoverClassicist:
  • I have attempted to address the objectionable language (the article was indeed originally copied from an old public domain source) and the excessive citations.
  • The problem with using newer sources is that they are brief and refer to older works for the full picture (for example, the Oxford Classical Dictionary and Brill's New Pauly both rely on Syme 1939), so that, while "there has certainly been a lot of more recent research on the Second Triumvirate", this is not true of Sosius in particular, on whom older literature remains up to date. That said, I have reduced somewhat the number of citations to those sources from the 1920s and 30s.
  • Now that you mention it, I had never verified the authenticity of the coin picture. I found no sources aside from the CNG website itself, so I might replace or remove it altogether.
• Let me know if I forgot something. Avilich (talk) 21:26, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you - I can certainly see the progress. I think the coin picture is good for the article and the identification is good enough for a 'maybe' - though also note that the CNG page mentions a few with his actual name on them. I wonder if any pictures of those exist?

I'm not sure the problems are quite fixed, particularly as regards citations. To take a quick example: note 14 covers 'The Second Triumvirate was to legally expire in 32 BC against the backdrop of Antony's growing enmity with Octavian and his marriage with Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt.', and references it both to Broughton and to Syme. There's a couple of key facts here - a) the Triumvirate was due to expire in 32, b) Antony was increasingly an enemy of Octavian, c) Antony's marriage to Cleopatra was (by WP:SYNTHESIS) somehow connected to at least b) and somehow relevant to a).

Do both Syme and Broughton provide evidence for all of that? I'd suggest that it's more likely that some parts come from Syme, others from Broughton, and that the overall synthesis may be original to Wikipedia. If the two sources do indeed have precisely identical accounts, then only one should be cited; if not, and the difference is significant, it should be reflected in the article.

This is just an example - 26 is another (presumably, Shipley doesn't give evidence for Syme's views, and so the citation to him should be pushed back before the brackets); 13 sticks out as well (again, a lot of moving parts: a) Sosius rebuilt the temple, b) Sosius pilfered the statues, c) Sosius was trying to commemorate his own triumph.

I fully appreciate your point on the lack of modern scholarship on Sosius specifically - though there is a significant chunk that comes up when you put his name into JSTOR in "quotes". It's also not quite the case that everything is simply a restatement of .g. Syme - see for instance Barbara Kellum's recent-ish (2008, p. 279) look at the Temple of Apollo Sosianus through a gender lens, which you can get the salient parts of from the Google Books preview (https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Sex_and_Difference_in_Ancient_Greece_and/waUxEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1). Ditto if you do the same with Google Books - there's some good material on him in Barry Strauss' 2022 book, which goes into more detail on his role at Actium (https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_War_That_Made_the_Roman_Empire/4qJgEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22Gaius+Sosius%22&pg=PA162&printsec=frontcover). Even if you cite a modern source which bases its argument on older ones, you have the advantage of their fact-checking - that is, it proves that the older narrative is indeed up to date, and has not been superseded or questioned. If you only read and cite the older source, you run the risk of missing an important modern critique.

The tone is much better: there are still a few parts which read a little 'off' (more like an essay, or perhaps an early-20th-century historian) - look out particularly for bits which editorialise in favour of the Romans/one side: 'subdued the rebellious island city of Aradus' (is that how the locals would have described it?), 'which cost him the victory and the life of his ally' (lovely zeugma, but strange focalising: gives the agency to the person who didn't do the dying), 'the disastrous Battle of Actium' (not for Octavian). There are a few other spots which give the sense of detail being missed out: 'a constitutional advantage' (what, exactly, is that?) and 'advocating birth control'. In general, it looks as though the article's had a good spot-fix, and could now do with a more general look-over so that the ideas are expressed as someone would express them in 2022, not 1922. I've got a personal bugbear against 'committed suicide' (see Suicide terminology), but there are a couple of other examples where the language sticks out as dated ('routed under cover of fog a squadron...'). UndercoverClassicist (talk) 22:03, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

I made some further changes as suggested. Still, I don't see a problem with some sentences citing more than one source, nor am I convinced that any reader at all will think that some of these passages are "from 1922", whatever that means. As for the works you cited above, they aren't focused on the topic and thus cover it only briefly; the ones from JSTOR are also mostly passing mentions. Syme's Roman Revolution and Broughton's Magistrates are classics, used as basic works of reference to this day, and there is no reason not to regard them as reliable sources. Avilich (talk) 00:48, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

The issue with citation isn't about multiple citations in one sentence - it's about the loss of precision when multiple ideas are cited en masse to multiple sources, without any clear sense of which, if any, are supported by each source. A good example is the following sentence:

Gaius Sosius assumed the consulship in 32 BC just as the Second Triumvirate, which had ruled Rome for the last decade, was about to legally expire and relations between the triumvirs Antony and Octavian collapsed.

There's at least four factual claims there:

• Sosius became consul in 32 BC.
• In 32 BC, the Second Triumvirate had ruled Rome for the last decade.
• In 32 BC, the Second Triumvirate was about to legally expire.
• In 32 BC, relations between Antony and Octavian collapsed.

The current citation style (citing Syme and Broughton for the whole thing) makes it impossible to tell which are actually supported by Syme and which are supported by Broughton. This is part of WP:TSI. I don't have the sources in front of me, so this is only an example, but it's possible that the real picture of what the sources actually say is closer to:

Gaius Sosius assumed the consulship in 32 BC, just as the Second Triumvirate, which had ruled Rome for the last decade, was about to legally expire and relations between the triumvirs Antony and Octavian collapsed.

Assuming that all of those assertions are indeed backed up in the sources, splitting the citation so that the individual facts are cited would prove the case and remove the ambiguity. The other way to do it is through WP:BUNDLING, where the footnote actually explains what each source says: so something like:

Gaius Sosius assumed the consulship in 32 BC just as the Second Triumvirate, which had ruled Rome for the last decade, was about to legally expire and relations between the triumvirs Antony and Octavian collapsed.[1]

^ For Sosius' consulship, Broughton, p.147; for the breakdown of the Triumvirate in 32 BC, see Syme, pp.276-277.

In terms of the sources cited: there's nothing wrong with picking up valuable information passing mentions. You aren't going to find a whole book on a relatively peripheral figure like Sosius: what we do when we work with these kind of characters (and even the major ones) is pick up small bits of material from multiple sources, often where few see our subject as their main topic. Syme was the great master of this approach - have a look at his footnotes and see how he pieced together the raw material for his narrative. Both of the sources I linked for you contain useful information, on topics pertinent to the article, which is not currently reflected in the article.

On the older sources: Syme certainly has a lot of value, but definitely isn't the standard text on the 'Revolution' any more, and hasn't been since at least the 1970s. If you've got JSTOR access, these reviews will give you a sense of how his work is currently used and (rightly) viewed more through a history-of-scholarship lens than as a first resort for matters of fact and interpretation:

• [1] Christopher Smith, 2012 (esp. p.308)
• [2] Osborne and Vout, 2010 (of Wallace-Hadrill's Rome's Cultural Revolution, which is very important in the current conversation on the period)
• [3] Christopher Stray, 2010 (esp. pp. 9-10)

As the article stands, I'm not happy to pass it under c1 or c2. I recognise, however, that some of these are subjective matters, particularly when it comes to assessing what level of prose or citation is 'good enough' for GA status, versus the expectations of an FA. I'm happy, therefore, to wait until the end of the hold period to see where the article is at that point, and to pass it on for second opinion if the concerns above still stand. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 10:25, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

So you haven't a clue what the sources say, and are drawing conclusions on how they should be cited? WP:TSI says nothing about pedantically assigning each individual citation to each fragment of a sentence, nor about readers being able to personally verify what is in them, and and bundling sources "that each support a different portion of the preceding text" is explicitly allowed by WP:CITEBUNDLE. Do elaborate more on C1 and C2, because all the concerns on your box for C1 have been addressed, and there are absolutely no verifiability concerns. Avilich (talk) 15:14, 27 December 2022 (UTC)