Talk:Antistia (wife of Pompey)

Cultural depictions

If anyone is able to access this source it seems to have further information on depictions of her. ★Trekker (talk) 17:13, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

I think this might be a false positive: I checked it out here and got no hits in the search for 'Antistia' or 'Pompey'. There are a few hits to a play called Pompée, but they seem to be talking about The Death of Pompey, which is no good. None of the hits for 'wife' seemed any good, either. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 17:29, 27 January 2023 (UTC) Sorry - wrong! She's referenced (and renamed) in the 1662 play Sertorius by Pierre Corneille. See here p476ff: I can wikimail you a screenshot of the relevant pages if you like. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 17:36, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

@UndercoverClassicist: Thank you I would appreciate that.★Trekker (talk) 19:43, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Actually, you can't attach a file to a wikimail; could you email me? I've also just gone ahead and put a paragraph into the article based on this source. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 22:45, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you so much for your additions to the section @UndercoverClassicist:!.★Trekker (talk) 23:16, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Bugs

I'd be curious to know if the mantis genus Antistia has anything to do with her. Per https://www.irmng.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=1358893 the genus was named in "Original description Ofvers. VetensAkad. Förh. Stockholm, 33, no. 3 page(s): 69" but I'm not readily finding that online. jengod (talk) 21:30, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

An incredible amount of flora and fauna are named after Roman women, its possible, but its also possible the namer just picked out a nice sounding Latin name.★Trekker (talk) 22:05, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Image

Is there any real justification for the inclusion of the image of a random Roman woman in the infobox? It has no obvious connection to Antistia that I can see and looks quite a lot later in date. Furius (talk) 19:00, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

It's good for articles to be illustrated: it's encouraged for articles to be illustrated with at least one image, and illustration is one of the Good Article criteria.

From MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE:

Images should look like what they are meant to illustrate... (emphasis original)

When possible, find better images and improve captions instead of simply removing poor or inappropriate ones, especially on pages with few visuals.

It certainly looks like Antistia would have (or, more pedantically, at least somewhat like what a Roman portrait of her would look like — remembering that Roman women's portraits are generally highly conventionalised and idealised), and so helps the reader visualise the article's subject. If we follow the tentative age-guess in the article, it's about the right age for her in the period mostly discussed, and it's a young Roman women of the right social class. It certainly looks no less like Antistia than any of the images in articles for, say, Homer or Sappho, none of which are based on anything more than imagination.

With that said, I'll have a look around for a more contemporary one (I did deliberately avoid any with a confirmed date that was much later, but suspect this one's 2nd-century CE or so); equally, if you've got one, please fire away and replace. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 21:23, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

I agree with both of you here, it's always good to make articles easier for readers to remember, and people tend to remember information better when its connected to an image, especially one of a face, but if we decide to have a bust to illustrate how a Roman women would likely have looked like at the time, it should probably be contemporary, preferably one from the early 1st century BC, the one used now is far too late to really be of much relevancy.★Trekker (talk) 21:44, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

I've swapped in one from c.30 BCE, which is at least plausibly within Antistia's lifetime (and certainly the right artistic style) - I found another example from c.50 BCE, but that one's quite distinctively Greco-Egyptian, so greater closeness on the date there creates further problems. Also expanded the caption with a footnote, to explain more fully how this image can/can't be used as a guide to what she looked like. Again, there's nothing particularly special about that image: if one closer to the 80s can be found, it would be good to swap it in, but my sense is that the corpus for Republican women's portraits, especially before the very late Republic, is pretty small.UndercoverClassicist (talk) 21:58, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Furius. I see no need for an image that nobody claims is actually of Antistia. How many articles on Roman women could we put such an image in? How many articles that as of now have none would suddenly get good lead images if this practice were universal? It's a bad idea. Srnec (talk) 01:30, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Please remove it. Such pictures are misleading. There is no need to "invent" a lede image. T8612 (talk) 03:43, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

I see that argument the other way — that many articles would be improved by a similar image, with the necessary caveats that are in the article. I take the point that nobody has identified it as Antistia, but I have trouble with the idea that it would be perfectly fine if some nineteenth-century curator or auctioneer had fancifully slapped that label on it (which is, realistically, where we get a lot of our 'identifications' of similar ancient portraiture), or if it were a modern painting of a beautiful woman that the artist had titled 'Antistia' to appeal to the market. In objective fact, many of the well-known portraits of people from the ancient world have just as little claim to looking like the subject, and sometimes just as little claim to having been intended to do so.

The new image is from the right period and style: it's a woman of the right social class and, at least as far as we can conjecture, more-or-less the right age for the main period in the article. I disagree that it's misleading: the caption explicitly says it's not identified as Antistia, but then explains in an EFN why it's a reasonable proxy for a portrait of her. That said, I'm completely open to adjusting that caption if it would help.

To slightly expand one of those quotes from MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE:

Images should look like what they are meant to illustrate, whether or not they are provably authentic (italics original, underlining mine).

As such, my reading of Wiki policy is that it should be kept in rather than a blank space; equally, that any 'better' image (e.g. of an actor playing 'Aristie' on the stage, or one of those completely-imagined Early Modern portraits like we currently have for Julia) should be swapped in when it can be found. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 09:14, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

You misread the MOS. I also read "Images must be significant and relevant in the topic's context, not primarily decorative" and "However, not every article needs images". Moreover the passage you cite is about a cupcake, not a person. T8612 (talk) 13:44, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

I read those too, but I think I've explained above why the image is both significant and relevant (essentially: right period, right style, right gender, right age). I suspect you meant the 'cupcake' point in good humour, but I think it's worth being clear that the MOS is making an illustrative example here: it isn't a policy specifically about images of cupcakes.

Later on down the MOS, we have:

Similarly, an image of a generic-looking cell under a light microscope might be useful on multiple articles, as long as there are no visible differences between the cell in the image and the typical appearance of the cell being illustrated.

I'd note here that:

• It explicitly allows for articles to be illustrated by images that do not depict the subject, but another instance of its general class.
• It explicitly allows for the same image to be a fitting illustration for multiple articles (which is relevant to User:Srnec's comment above)

I don't think it's a massive stretch to rephrase that as:

Similarly, an image of a generic-looking Roman portrait might be useful on multiple articles, as long as there are no visible differences between the portrait in the image and the likely appearance of the person being illustrated.

If I read your points correctly, you seem to be saying that the infobox image for an article about a person should only be an image that has been associated with the name of that person. To me, that seems like an argument about policy rather than an argument from policy: it's a perfectly reasonable standard, but I don't see it anywhere in the MOS. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 14:11, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Addendum: to be absolutely clear, I am not saying that this is the best possible image for this article, and I fully share all the opinions expressed about why that is so. However, my reading is that the MOS creates a much lower standard for 'this image should not be deleted without replacement', and that the image, in context, passes that standard. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 14:36, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

I think the relevant policy is: Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Images#Images_for_the_lead

"Lead images should be natural and appropriate representations of the topic; they should not only illustrate the topic specifically, but also be the type of image used for similar purposes in high-quality reference works, and therefore what our readers will expect to see. Lead images are not required, and not having a lead image may be the best solution if there is no easy representation of the topic.

I'm not totally unsympathetic to the point that you make here, especially now that the image is closer to being contemporary, but it still seems off - I can't really imagine using a bust of a random Roman man for an article on a Roman senator... Are there portraits of Roman women from the early 1st century BC? I had a vague impression that that was a late 1st century development... Furius (talk) 16:38, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

There are, but there aren't many - This one is a fairly famous example (and from almost exactly the right time period), but is already named as Aurelia Philematio. Again, I'm fully of the view that almost any more-contemporary portrait should be swapped in if/when found.

In terms of MOS:LEADIMAGE, I'd point out that this is exactly the sort of image you find introducing similar topics in high-quality reference works: look at cover images for books on Sulpicia (another Roman woman in the same position of having no attributed portraits) and you get a similar sea of anonymous women, often well out of time (see this recent example).

I do take the point that MOS:LEADIMAGE can be read as impose a higher standard for images in the lead than MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE imposes for the article generally, which might support moving the image down into the article body. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 17:14, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

I don't think books are a good example here, because they are standalone works. The author and publisher need not care if the same image is used for different women on different book covers. But that would be quite confusing here, I think. Likewise, nobody expects an image of a cell to be of a particular individual cell. The same could be said for an image of a firefighter. But an image of named individual should be of that particular individual and not some other person. Srnec (talk) 20:09, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

I've moved the image out of the infobox and out of the lead.

I take the point that having an image of someone's face in the infobox implies a particular connection between the image and the subject (after all, we have an image of Pompey in the article, but would never put it in the infobox), and that MOS:LEADIMAGE imposes stricter standards for images in the lead, which it's at least highly debateable that this image meets. At the moment, there's no infobox image: with how the page is laid out now, I don't think that's a major aesthetic or UX problem. Perhaps a cover page of Plutarch's Lives would do, otherwise?

I still think there's value to having the image and its caption somewhere in the article: it's effectively saying 'we'll probably never be able to show you a "real" portrait of Antistia, but we do have good grounds to say that it would look something like this, if we had one.' For someone who doesn't know much about Roman portraiture, or hasn't seen much of it, I think that's a useful statement. There's also a definite thread to be drawn between the use of Antistia as a tool/cipher/symbol in the historians (particularly Plutarch: as Hillman has it, his 'narrative' of the story isn't interested in the narrative at all) and the idea of an idealised/conventionalised portrait that represents a type or concept more than a specific person.

I'm also mindful that the other two images in the article are Pompey and Corneille - something doesn't quite sit right about making the only images be of men who, in different ways, used/manipulated Antistia, particularly given the general thread throughout the topic of how historiography has ignored/neglected people like her.

One other benefit of moving it down is that I've been able to turn that footnote into more caption, which adds to the image's explanatory value: it no longer relies on the reader mousing-over the right thing to get the full point. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 07:08, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

This is better. I'd keep the infobox imageless - I think the void makes the point about how history/historiography treated her quite well. On your point: "we do have good grounds to say that it would look something like this" - this is what lay behind my question about early 1st century BC female portraiture. Do we lack a sculpture of Antistia simply by accident or because portraits of Roman elite women weren't yet being created in her lifetime? The example that you provided of a freedmen funerary monument doesn't really resolve this, since it is of a different genre and social class, and the other sculptures I'm aware of are from Delos. Furius (talk) 09:23, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

That's a good question: a bit outside my wheelhouse, to be honest, so I'd be speculating to give a 'proper' answer either way. It's also worth pointing out that her 'lifetime' is a bracket from (at the latest) about 100 BCE to anywhere between 80 and 20 BCE) - being such a busy period, culturally and artistically, it's not great for our ability to say things with certainty that so much of it is an error bar.

Sources like Thompson and D'Ambra certainly talk about earlier C1st female portraiture (usually to differentiate it from the 'new option' of more individualised/realistic portraits in the late-late Republic, or from imperial portraiture), but I don't know exactly what corpus they're basing that discussion on. As you say, I know a lot of the relevant material for Republican portraiture in general comes from Delos.

(On the 'different social class' point - there's then the whole can of worms about arte plebea and its relationship to 'elite' art that I am completely unqualified to open). UndercoverClassicist (talk) 10:24, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

A lot of Wikipedia articles on ancient Roman women use illustrations created during the middle ages, I am unable to find any such of Antistia, but would it be possible to maybe commision an artist to create an illustration of Antistia (maybe with Pompey to make it more clear) and have them give up copyright for it to be used in the infobox? Would that be possible, I have in the past commisioned work of Servilia that is avalable on Commons, but I havn't added them to her Wikipedia article.★Trekker (talk) 10:38, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Using an image from a later period strikes me as valid because reception of these figures is part of the topic of any article on them. Creating our own images strikes me as less valid - I think it's probably WP:OR. Furius (talk) 11:37, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Family section, her mother

Should we maybe include some information about her mother's family here? ★Trekker (talk) 17:24, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

I've added what I can find - which isn't much - a little background on the gens Calpurnia and her father. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:57, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you I think that is great.★Trekker (talk) 23:12, 30 January 2023 (UTC)