Talk:Roman Empire/reorganization

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Links entered from Category:Roman Empire: finished!

I've started this article as a way to speed up the reorganization of the Roman Empire article without completely destroying the current article in the process. When this article is mostly complete we can simply replace the old article with this one. At least this way we don't leave an empty or half-filled space in what is essentially a very important and well traversed Wikipedia page. I've basically transposed my old outline that I posted in Talk:Roman Empire onto this page, but I have not actually added any content to it yet, so if anyone has any better suggestions, just let me know.

--Masamax 10:56, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Sections

Good plan, the reorganization/overhaul. Much needed. I have some suggestions for sections:

  • Geography (!)
  • In stead of 'government' 'administration' (more general term, i guess)
    • Imperial level
    • Provincial level
    • Local level
  • Romanization (with Flamarande) - might also be a subsection of 'culture'
  • Religion
    • Emperor cult
  • subsections for economy:
    • Commerce
    • Currency
  • Justice

...Or should we discuss all of this on the main article's discussion page? --Hippalus 21:10, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

This sounds like a good place for us to discuss. I agree, I just was in a hurry last night so I copied and pasted. I will redo the sections now.
--Masamax 22:45, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
No, we should stick to the format used by the original article. This is ALWAYS how the history of the roman empire is told. The original just needs to be cleaned up pretty extensively. This is not for trivia or factoids. This page is a history of the empire. If you want a page on roman trivia you can do this, and even put a link on the top of this page to your trivia page. I don't even know where you wouild get much info on things such as the provincial governemnt or roman commerce.Politicaljunkie6 16:32, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Periods

Masamax, your age-sections (early - five good emperors - late and decline) were not meant to be definite, were they? Afaik the five good emperors belong to the early empire, as do the Severan Age and the Crisis of the 3rd Century. I think we need to have broader main sections than in the old article. Two options come into mind:

  • Early Empire - Late Empire - Western Empire - Eastern Empire, or
  • Principate - Dominate - Successors (West) - Successors (East)

I personally prefer the last option, mostly because Principate and Dominate are not wholy arbitrairy terms. By the way, I wouldn't use the term decline, as it is extremely subjective. You might as well use 'evolution' or 'consolidation', depending on your interpretation of the period. What do you think? --Hippalus 21:44, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

I understand your point, but honestly I've always felt that the 'Five Good Emperor' period was a midway point for the empire. It is a time of some much possibility, and eventual disappointment. I do think I like the second of your suggestions best though. Be my guest and change them (I never intended to write this entire article myself anyways!) :)
--Masamax 03:36, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
I guess the Five Emperor period could/should be a subsection of 'Principate'. The Principate was a three-century period, so somewhat large to be discussed in a single paragraph!--Hippalus 17:58, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
Masamax, I tried a subdivision based on dynasties, which would give the Five Good Emperors a place in the spotlights. But it didn't work for me, for three reasons: 1) it gave some ugly gaps and anomalities - for example, Commodus is a member of the Antonine dynasty, but not of the Five Good Emperors, and his successors are part of neither the Antonine nor the Severan dynasty, 2) the number of sections would be much to long, shifting the balance away from the other sections like 'culture', 3) A dynasty-based periodization would inevitabily lead to an emperor-centred history account.
So I decided to work out my proposal. Hope you like it (or at least can live with it).--Hippalus 19:10, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Can I help?

I can see that this reorganization is quite advanced and I quite like it. I really want to help. A fair warning: I am planning to include some stuff from the Western Roman Empire article and to improve/modify some paragraphs. My main problem is simply the following: sometimes I simply have too little time and too much to do (some articles to write and I have a life besides wikipedia :) ). So can I help? Flamarande 15:12, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

I think you should help, just read 'overhaul' instead of 'reorganization' and you know you are at the right spot ;-) . It is important that more people start contributing to this project anyway, to give it some critical mass - I am not that critical mass as I'm not a very active Wikipedian. --Hippalus 17:58, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

--Masamax 19:23, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikilinked subdivisions

I've created the major subdivisions, as I see them: Political/military history, Economic history, Social history, and a new major subdivision "Topics in Roman history" to cover topics that span more than one subdivision. Are there other major subdivisions of kinds of history to add? I shifted a few divisions to fit under the broadest categories.

The next step might be to take each article currently at the Category:Roman history and its sub-categories and merely set a bulletted bluelink under the right division here. I've done A-C and found a place for every one save Crispus. That will soon reveal whether the skeleton is workable. Grouping the blue-links will reveal some sub-headings we haven't thought of yet: I found a subheading "Disease and health" was necessary in order to add Antonine Plague. If a condensed version of each of those articles were to follow, replacing the bluelinks, we'll soon see where the lacunae are. I think writing text right now is premature. --Wetman 14:59, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

I thought your would come up with some good ideas ;-) . Blandishment has once again proved itself to be a great manipulation tactic...
(...the Wetman merely mirrors your courtesy...)
Either tomorrow or this evening I'll start doing some category-sweeping too; I'll probably start at the other end of the alphabet.
One question - why did you orphan 'law'? Shouldn't it go with 'Social life' as well? O, and I split Government away from 'Military' and renamed 'Military' 'Roman Army' (to distinguish it from 'Political and Military History'--Hippalus 16:07, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
We just have to keep the length of this article in mind people. Every subsection we create is going to make the overall message smaller. Perhaps it would be easier to keep one large section, and cover the specific sections in detail in a main article for eacb section?--Masamax 08:54, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
That's true, but do you think the page would still get too long if we restrain ourselves to a maximum of, say, ten lines per subsection?--Hippalus 08:09, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
Honestly, given the number of sections, even 10 lines is a bit much. Also, we have to think about the readability of these sections. What is easier to read, 5 or 6 10 line sections, or 2-3 larger but more coherent and flowing sections?
OOPS! Forgot this! --Masamax 23:11, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
I have looked around a bit, and you are right, although some good articles, like the present featured article on Tooth development have as many sections, something like 15-20 sections and subsections is more normal, and maybe more readable (personally I'm more of a sections-scanner than a text-reader, but that is matter of taste).
What do you think of the following procedure: first we go through the category, putting links at the right heading. We use the headings to organize our info, don't see them as sections yet. Right now, they are more like a mindmap. Next, when the links are sorted, we start pruning. We look which sections should stay, which should move to an existing or new main article for the section. --Hippalus 08:28, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
Xackly! Not every bluelink need occupy a paragraph: a single sentence may sweep together several bluelinks. But in this scheme, non-pertinent linking added by well-meaning editors becomes a future vulnerability. Y'all might see the bare-naked schema I made a while ago to cover Medieval Spain, which lacked an article in the History of Spain series. If length is a concern, this project might be retitled Roman Empire, a skeleton key: a brief paragraph followed by bluelinks in outline format. There are other vast subjects, History of Europe, etc, that will profit by whatever we hammer out here. --Wetman 12:46, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
How is the format of the sections meant to be? Is the "Government and administration" part with an introductory text and then a collection of relevant links an example to follow? Or is the link collection meant to be incorporated into a real text? Varana 17:09, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
The link collection is meant to be incorporated into a real text. The links show the global direction the text should/could take to serve as a good entry point to more detailed articles.--Hippalus 17:56, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Bluelinks: The following bluelinks to already existing sub-articles, which all need to be embodied with the briefest mention in the finished text of Roman Empire have been deleted. I can't explain why this trunk article needs to provide links to all Roman Empire sub-articles in Category:Roman Empire if you don't already understand: anything not mentioned here is effectively orphaned. This project is a playpen only big enough for two, so I've removed it from my watchlist. I copy the partial list here for anyone's future reference. The following are complete only as far as I got:

[edit] Roman provinces

[edit] Government and administration

[edit] Political history

[edit] Principate (27 BC - AD 235)

Main article: Principate

[edit] The short third century (235 - 284)

Main article: Crisis of the Third Century

[edit] Dominate (284 - 395)

Main article: Dominate

[edit] Late Empire (395 - 476)

[edit] Military history

Main article: Military history of ancient Rome

[edit] Economic history

[edit] Social history

Main article: Society of Ancient Rome

[edit] Cultural history

Main article: Culture of Ancient Rome

[edit] The city of Rome

Main article: History of Rome

[edit] Topics in Roman history

[edit] Romanization

Main article: Romanization (cultural)

[edit] Historiography

[edit] East vs West

[edit] Explanations for Decline

Main article: Decline of the Roman Empire

[edit] Successors of the Empire

[edit] Final structure?

After adding the last links from, I took a critical look at the structure of the article and changed a lot, keeping in mind Masamax' comments. What do you think? Can we start writing, or won't this structure get us anywhere?--Hippalus 12:12, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I know that I have been very absent in roman articles (I have been doing ASoIaF userboxes) and that I have in fact not contributed in this reorganization, but don´t you think that this article is going to be "way too big" ? Flamarande 13:53, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
Still, I like the many links at the beginning of the single paragraphs. Flamarande 13:56, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
Why do you think it will be "way too big"? It all depends on the length of the individual sections - of which there aren't very many left. I personally think they should be quite short, mainly summaries of the 'main articles'.--Hippalus 14:11, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
By the way, I haven't contributed any text yet either - only sections, links, and lots of blabla ;-) --Hippalus 14:13, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] More subjects to cover

I've gone to Special:Allpages/Roman — the list of articles beginning "Roman"— and added into the reorganization schema those followed by a capital letter. A huge list of Roman subjects followed by a small letter follows them, still to decide on. Not all of these need to be signalled by a Main article: heading, of course, but all need to be mentioned and linked. --Wetman 15:34, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

List of Ancient Rome-related topics: have all these been entered in this outline?
I am now adding all of them as far as they are relevant to the Empire - finished the job this morning.--Hippalus 10:16, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Title

IMHO the title of this and the "traditional" Roman Empire article are wrong. The Roman Empire is the dominion of the Romans, growing from small beginnings in Latium to encompassing the entire Mediterraennean. It is not identical with the rule of the Roman Emperor(s), but existed regardless of the form of government. It started under the Kings, grew throughout the Republic and the Civil Wars and continued under the Emperors. Any thoughts? Str1977 09:57, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

No, the Roman empire, as classified by any historian, began under Augustus in the 1st century BC and ended in 476 AD. We don't need to be redefining what the roman empire is. This is not a class project or a debate forum. People will be using this to help them write their term papers. We need to stick to the regular definition.Politicaljunkie6 16:27, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
I was wondering about the regular scholarly defintion. Are there any ancient historians who have English as their mother tongue? Str1977 17:11, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
I'm sorry? Politicaljunkie6 18:48, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
Str1977, interesting point. Every division of history into periods is in essence arbritrarily. However, AFAIK there seems to be a consensus to divide Roman History into Kingdom/Republic/Empire for the lack of any better division. Wikipedia does consider Roman history as a whole too: have a look at the article Ancient Rome, which covers the whole history of the Roman period, from monarchy to empire. And one level lower you'll find articles on even shorter periods, like the Crisis of the Third Century. To make this structure more clear, we need to create a template like the one on History of Ancient Egypt.--Hippalus 19:05, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
P.S. Sorry, not a native speaker either :-(

Thanks for the reply. If "Empire" is really the term historians of the English tongue use when referring to the state Augustus established, as opposed to the Kingdom and the Republic, then I shut up. I am German so I don't know, but it sounded much too "Star Wars" to me. Str1977 19:17, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

If I might be so bold, the writing in what we have on the page is full of innacuracies, typocragphical errors and mistakes in logic

"Roman rule lead to the romanization of the empire's regions"
This reasoning is circular
"The Roman Empire is responsible for much of the culture and tradition that exists today throughout Europe, including the Roman Alphabet now used throughout Western Europe"
Not true, much of the culture of eastern europe is greek, asian, and even some middleastern. Besides this, there is no such thing as a "Roman alphabet." The content does not speek mainly Romance langagues as is suggested. English, German, and several others are Germanic, not Romance. Some of the languages are even Greek or eastern in origan.
"After its peak during the Five Good Emperors the early empire or Principate slipped into a period of decline in the late 2nd Century. this decline climaxed during the 3rd Century crisis from which, according to some scholars, it never fully recovered"
Some would say the empire was at its peak during Augustus.
"Traditionally 476 is considered the end of the Roman Empire "
There has to be a better way of putting that
"The Roman Empire at its height stretched from the Iberian Peninsula and British Isles in the west to Mesopotamia in the East."
A map would be a more efficient way of showing this
"The government of the Roman Empire was a dictatorship, with the head of state being the Emperor"
This is false. The regime of Julius Caesar was a dictatorship. The Roman empire was officially a constitutional monarchy, but really it was always an autocracy.

I wont continue.

(Unsigned comments by User:Politicaljunkie6)

Thanks, Politicaljunkie6! I edited the text to fix two of the flaws you mentioned, the seeming circularity concerning romanization (hope the sentence is more clear now), and the POV statement that the period of the Five Good Emperors was the empire's peak.--Hippalus 07:03, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
Placing the Empire's peak in the 2nd century isn't that uncommon - even the Romans called Trajan "princeps optimus".
Junkie is wrong about the influence of Roman culture on all of Europe. Any Greek influence came from the Byzantine Empire, which itself was Roman in its foundations. Roman culture forms the basis for all of Europe (with only a few exceptions) and none of the languages you mentioned is untained by Latin. You are right, however, that the alphabet is called Latin and not Roman. Str1977 (smile back) 09:00, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Major overhall

I just did a major overhall on the page. I am up to the beginning of the Crisis of the Third Century. I believe the best way to do this is basically have it similar to the main article, only substaintially cleaned up. That main article is a mess. The orginization of it is unbelievably bad. I see no point in having just links on the page. The history of the roman empire, as it is always classified, is told based on the line of emperors. I don't see any reason for all of these little topics that no one will be able to find any information on. Politicaljunkie6 16:27, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Political Junkie, could you please first discuss your views with other contributors before moving along? I for one don't agree with you that Roman History should be only Political History. That is basically a 19th century view on history. The whole point of this reorganization is to create a more balanced article, which refers not only to emperors, battles and dynasties. There is more to Roman History than that.
As to the lists of links, this isn't a final article. It is a reorganization. The links are an investigation of subjects the article could refer to. The final version shouldn't necessarily cover all those links, but they give a sense ofdirection when writing the sections.--Hippalus 16:50, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
Again, if you want a page on roman trivia, you can do this. History is a timeline, not a collection of intersting facts. When someone is doing a paper on the history of the roman empire, they don't care about salutes, the currency, or other trivia tidbits. They care about the history. That means what happened at this point, what turning point resulted in this, what battle happened here, what leader guided them through this. More or less, they want a timeline. In American history, you would organize the history of the nation based on the major wars (revolutionary, 1812, mexican, civil, spainish, WW1, WW2, and the end of the cold war). There are established methods for telling history. Telling the history of the Roman Republic is similar to that of the American republic. This is because it is the easiest way to do it. The way that the main article did it was the correct way. The only base to establish a timeline around the events that occured in the 500 years of the roman empire is to base it off of the emperors. I also noticed there has been almost no activity on this discussion board in a month.Politicaljunkie6 17:15, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
To start with you last remark: yes, that is true. There has been little traffic to this page recently. Does this mean the page is essentially flawed? Not necessarily. It could also mean that the immense task of rewriting this article scares people off. It does scare me off, in fact, I hardly know were to begin. You seem to do, but I wonder why you don't make your edits on Roman Empire instead, if you think the basic structure of that article (namely, a political and military timeline) is correct. As you can see when reading the earlier contributions tot this page, the consensus on what the article should look like is slightly different here (fellow contributors, correct me if I'm wrong!).
If you are right in stating that Roman Empire doesn't need to be rewritten, but can be improved by changing some details and rebalancing it, give it a go! If others agree with you, this 'reorganization' article will soon become obsolete. Right now, you are recreating the older article with minor changes, and just undoing the work others put into it. That doesn't make sense to me. Cheers, Hippalus 18:50, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
I came here to make very much the same suggestions as Hippalus. I don't suppose Politicaljunkie6 will pay the least attention to anyone. --Wetman 02:04, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, this is hardly what I wanted. People who want to learn about the Roman Empire don't just want to know the history, let alone the political history alone. There is so much more than we can discuss, and the fact is that this article covers an entiry FAR to large to effectively inform people on everything. What we have to try to do is cover the main topics and give them an easy to navigate article from which they can explore what topic interests them the most. What the current article looks like is what an article on the political history of the empire might look like, but not an article that is supposed to be about the Empire itself. Btw, appologies for not being here to manage this or work more, I've had a lot of personal problems that have distracted me, not to mention far too much school work. :) --Masamax 07:08, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

I have to state that this article contains some highly problematic wording, using some "modernizing anachronisms" (e.g. "dicatorship", Augustus created a "democratic" illusion), or quite misleading sentences ("succession rules" - there were no succession rules - were "very dynastic" - what it very dynastic?)

Politicaljunkie6's edits are also problematic, first of all because of their bulk without any explanation on the talk page or in edit summaries, breaking the AD/CE policy, introducing carricatures ("routinely murdered") and unsuiting wordings ("ironically", "Empire falls to its knees", "Barrack Emperors"), too much detail - I agree with Hippalus on that - making this article a copy of the "traditional" Roman Empire article is in fact to destroy this article.

All in all, there are enough problems to move his edits to a sub talk page for discussion, see here Talk:Roman Empire/reorganization/Politicaljunkie's additions. Str1977 (smile back) 09:21, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

I find it somewhat distressing that you can apparently still write history in the opinion that things like currency are "trivia tidbits". To phrase it as the opposite: If I want to know something on the Roman Empire, I'm not concerned with every minor battle. In the course of the *Empire*, there are very few battles which really need to be mentioned in an overview article like this. Economical history, social history, history of the arts and literature and sciences, even history of everyday life or of "mentality" (is there an English expression for 'Mentalitätsgeschichte'?) are equally valid subjects. We maybe won't be able to cover all of them here, but a broad view including many subjects is always preferable to just political and military history (which have their place, too).
And yes, I'm guilty of neglecting this project, too... Varana 17:01, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
It seems all of us have been neglecting it... Let's mend our ways and give it a go!--Hippalus 18:01, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Outline

All sections of the outline are beginning to gather links, except for the four 'topics in Roman History'. I think we might as well delete the whole section 'topics in Roman History', and move the links to the relevant earlier sections as follows.

In my opinion this will make the page more compact and the structure more logical. What do you think?--Hippalus 17:53, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Consider it done.--Hippalus 10:17, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ancient Rome article

Just stumbled upon the article Ancient Rome, which I never noticed before; sometimes Wikipedia is scary. :D While it is about the Roman history as a whole, its structure IMO is quite similar to the one proposed here (though less extensive). Maybe it can be of use...

[edit] Academic language

I'm fairly new to Wikipedia, but I noticed that in this article there's a general lack of academic language in places--maybe because the article has recently been developed? Just thought I would point that out.139.57.125.52 15:17, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

That's true. Development of this article has started only about two months ago. It has got a long road to go before it is ready for 'publication'.--Hippalus 07:07, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
Considering a lot of what I wrote was in the wee hours of the morning, and strictly as a starting point, I can vouch that, yeah, lack of academic language! :D --Masamax 09:43, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Openning

The openning feels far too long, specific, and reads a little boring in my opinion. I may rewrite it, any complaints? --Masamax 17:26, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

The second paragraph can be shortened significantly I think. Nobleeagle (Talk) 07:20, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
I have shortened the opening. Hope it is acceptable. Flamarande 16:43, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] following our best "Roman" example

Ok, I really don´t know if anyone (besides me) really cares about this reorganization or not. Well no matter anyway. I really think that the current "Roman empire" article is really flawed, and I am really interrested in rewriting and improving it here, along much better lines of quality. I am planning to follow, more or less, the example of the article "Roman republic" which in my view (and I hope yours) is a lot better than the imperial article. I will slowly begin a text under the title "history of the Roman Empire".

There, a good condensed summary of the history of this empire will be writen down. As good as I (we?) can get it and as short as possible. The text will NOT be focused upon every single emperor (a major flaw in the current imperial article, it reads way too much like a "list of every emperor and his mighty or incompetent deeds"). It will describe larger political, economic, social and religiuos developments. I am planning more like summaries like "the year of the four emperors" in which the proper emperors will be intruduced without describing them thoroughly (it will provide links to the proper articles).

Again, please see the article about the republic to get a feeling of what I am propossing. If anyone wishes to contribute fine by me, but if anyone begins to disagree then let him speak (write) HERE and nowhere else. No revert wars, please (I noticed that they are increasing in the republican and imperial articles). Write any comments HERE. Flamarande 21:14, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

A commendable goal, but keep in mind as you work that it is important to note some of the deeds and mistakes of some of the more important emperors, but doing this from a social, political, or religious viewpoint. Just make sure to be specific =p Tev 02:09, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Government and administration

The image of the empire of Parthia is under the header "Government and administration", which doesn't have anything to do with the Government and administration of Rome. I believe that image should be removed from the article, or at least place it under another header that is suitable for its purpose. Funnybunny (talk/Counter Vandalism Unit) 01:27, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

You are right, but first I have to write the suitable header. Flamarande 10:25, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] This article was abandoned and will logically be deleted

Okay, as anyone can see by the history of this article, it has been largely abandoned. It is simply way to booring to continue this singlehandledly, and thereby I propose that this article be merged with the Roman Empire article asap. Hopefully it will improve the article (I believe it will). Flamarande 14:16, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

I wish I could disagree, but given my busy schedual I haven't had a chance to make any significant edits to this in a while. I'd still like to work on it, but while i was gone it seems to have spiraled OUT of control. If this was trimmed down it wouldn't be bad. Currently both this article and the current Roman Empire article are way too big.

--Masamax 03:45, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

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