Talk:Thirty Tyrants (Roman)

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Edit 3 Feb 06[edit]

Feminism is all fine and well, but it too can be POV; just because it is in the Zeitgeist of our own times does not make it any less so. I reverted the intrusive excursus on women, while keeping the gist of it, that the HA is indeed misogynistic; but if, except for a tossed-off comment, the writer of the HA could include women among his subjects without separation or preaching, why should we do any less? Bill 22:10, 3 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I cannot see what misogynism has to do with an accepted tendency in the historiography of a certain period that the lives of women are not an appropriate topic for a historian to expound. It does not imply hatred of women (misogyny< (greek)misos: "hatred"+ gune: "woman"), it simply implies that the position of women is not in the pages of a history book according to the perceptions of the historian. It is still POV to claim that HA is "misogynistic"; it is forcing a modern category onto a text whose author would probably have no idea what he was accused of. Therefore I removed the bit about HA being misogynistic, not only because it is spurious, but also because it does nothing but provide the POV of the author based on modern sensibilities which do not promote knowledge about or understanding of the HA at all.Lucius Domitius 02:53, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Present version of the text does not account for the two extra tyrants (32, while the title only mentions 30) - I see no other explanation than that the two women were not counted. Whether that results from misogyny in the strict sense can indeed be debated. That the author(s) of the HA had misogynic treats in a broad sense (as probably was *customary* in the time) can not be denied: the text is explicit on the point. --Francis Schonken 10:16, 12 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the text is explicitly "misogynistic" (even if the comment is just in passing, it's a striking one). Yes, there are 32 people mentioned, yet the title is 30 and it so happens that 2 of the 32 are women. On the other hand, I'm rather with Lucius, forcing modern thought and categories onto old texts is the classic "ahistorical error". On the third hand, it's just enough of interest to us moderns that in throwing out the longish excursus on women, I did leave the nub of it, the word "misogyny", which is informative if not good historiography. But to lay the 30-32 business on misogyny is not right, for three reasons: (1) the "Thirty Tyrants" title is quite clearly merely to make them parallel with the 30 Greek tyrants; (2) the Historia Augusta is such a hash in so many ways that I couldn't attribute one more mess (the miscount) to any particular cause; but mostly because the author, 31.7, explicitly states (talk of making a hash of things!), after covering 30 people, including both the women, that he's going to add two supernumeraries, and then he does, Titus and Censorinus, both men. It cannot therefore be argued that misogyny is responsible for the bad count: Titus and Censorsinus are. Bill 10:47, 12 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I don't believe that every single thing that strikes a modern person, deserves to be put into a review about an ancient quasi-historical tome. The author obviously does not very much like homosexuals, should we add that he is a homophobe? These things are irrelevant to a general and NPOV review of the HA. What the reader should be told about in the Wikipedia are commonly accepted facts about the work. You might think that the HA is expressly misogynistic, I claim "misogynism" is not even a category one can seriously use to refer to a work so old. Ideas and notions are born in specific contexts, they are not valid in every place and time. Lucius Domitius 00:25, 19 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]