Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ethon

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was redirect to Aethon. —Angr 21:53, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ethon

Ethon (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

Incomplete nomination by User:Ifnkovhg. This is an unsourced article about the eagle who ate Prometheus' liver, but according to Ifnkovhg at Talk:Ethon no ancient source gives him the name "Ethon" (or any other name). Doubt has also been expressed about the other information in the article, such as the eagle's parentage. My recommendation is to delete redirect to Aethon, since even apart from the lack of sourcing I doubt there's anything to say about the eagle that can't be treated at Prometheus. EALacey 15:38, 18 September 2007 (UTC) [Addendum: Hyginus possibly gives the name as "Aethon"; see below. EALacey 10:50, 22 September 2007 (UTC)]

• Redirect and merge to Prometheus. Bearian 21:31, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
  • Merging of unreferenced information is absolutely out of question. It will be deleted on the spot. Mukadderat 18:58, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
• delete' unreferenced and not verifiable quickly. Google for "ethon + prometheus -wikipedia" gives a handful of hits from nonreliable sources. Mukadderat 18:58, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
• Keep, verifiable.^[1]

“

Ethon, a giant eagle, continually feasts upon his liver, believed to be the seat of passion.[2] Prometheus remains there for thirty thousand years, until Heracles, the greatest of Zeus’s sons, performs the act of rescue which Prometheus has foreseen; Heracles kills Ethon and then shatters the chains that have bound Prometheus to the rock.[3]

”

35.9.6.175 18:24, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

• • Comment. That thesis is mainly about Schubert and may not be reliable on mythology. It doesn't cite an ancient source for the eagle's name, and it's not clear whether the references to Thomson and Tripp are meant to cover the name either. (Could anyone with access to either of these check whether they use the name or indicate a source for it?) EALacey 22:52, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
    • How is it not clear? Why else would she say "Ethon, a giant eagle, continually feasts upon his liver, believed to be the seat of passion" and then stick in a reference to Thomson? Unless you have some reason to suspect Angert of dishonesty or incompetence, I'd say it's a pretty clear statement that Thomson says so. 35.9.6.175 04:52, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
      • I don't think it's clear that the reference to Thomson applies to any more than "the liver [was] believed to be the seat of passion". The eagle is not named as Ethon in the Prometheus Bound, and the only possible source anyone here has found for the name is over 500 years later and spells it differently, so I'm not sure why an introduction to the play would call the eagle "Ethon". But you're welcome to check the reference. EALacey 09:46, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
• Keep, other language Wikipedia articles on Ethon have various references. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Eli Rabett (talk • contribs) 04:06, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. "Ethon" doesn't appear in the Oxford Classical Dictionary or Timothy Gantz's Early Greek Myth; if Ethon were a genuine part of ancient Greek mythology he would appear in these sources. Master's theses are not reliable sources, as they are not peer-reviewed. The thesis noted above, however, may be evidence that some post-classical source decided the eagle was named Ethon (which is perhaps an idiosyncratic translation of the Greek aithon). But without a reliable source that tells us so, this remains speculation. --Akhilleus (talk) 05:33, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

• Comment. Starting out with requiring something to be a one particular book misses the point. I see mentions of other books from the 1970's above.Ryoung122 08:46, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment. The books by Thomson and Tripp aren't clearly being cited by Angert's thesis as using the name Ethon, and nobody posting here has yet checked that they do use it. We can't expect information to be found in a single specific book, but this name is consistently omitted by reference works one would expect to include it; in addition to those mentioned by Akhilleus, the eagle isn't named in the articles on Prometheus in Smith's Dictionary, Seyffert's Dictionary, Daremberg-Saglio or J. March's Cassell Dictionary of Classical Mythology, and none of these includes an entry for "Ethon". If the name has any ancient authority, why is it omitted by all these sources and mentioned only in a master's thesis on modern music? I also can't find the name in an search of the Perseus Project's English texts, which include translations of Hesiod, Aeschylus, Apollodorus, etc. ("Aethon" produces a few irrelevant hits, including a horse of Hector in the Iliad.) I doubt we're going to find stronger evidence against the antiquity of "Ethon" than we already have. If someone does turn up a reliable source for the name, it can always be mentioned in the Prometheus article. EALacey 10:17, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

• Keep. IF the issue is 'verifiability' then perhaps the article should be tagged as such. If there is another spelling, that can be mentioned and a re-direct added.Ryoung122 08:44, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

• Comment. I believe I've found the supposed source for the name. Following Eli Rabett's comment above, I checked the foreign-language Wikipedias, and found that the French article cites Hyginus as giving the name Ethon, and Hyginus does indeed include in a list of Hercules' conquests "aethonem aquilam quae Prometheo cor exedebat". However, Oxford Latin Dictionary understands aethonem as an adjective (not a name) transliterated from Greek αἴθων and as probably meaning "red-brown, tawny".
  In summary, we have a late Latin source that can be understood to give the eagle's name as Aethon (although we still need a reliable source which interprets Hyginus this way). Based on that, I'd be happy to redirect Ethon to Aethon, and include a note about the eagle at Aethon. I maintain that (a) there is nothing to say about the eagle that shouldn't be treated at Prometheus and therefore we don't need a separate article, and (b) we should not use the name Aethon/Ethon in the Prometheus article, since it was clearly unknown to the major ancient authors and is ignored by modern reference works, except perhaps in a single sentence along the lines of "Hyginus has been understood to give the eagle's name as Aethon". EALacey 10:44, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment. An unregistered user got there before me and noted the Hyginus reference at Talk:Ethon, also citing the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae which understands Aethonem as a name. EALacey 10:55, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
• Thanks to EALacey and the anon for the research. Considering that a wide range of sources has been checked and only one ancient source possibly calls the eagle by the name "Aethon", I'd say retaining Ethon as a separate article is giving too much attention to a minority view. Redirecting Ethon to Aethon should be sufficient. I noticed in the google results that there's a Stargate episode that's titled "Ethon", after this eagle; I wonder what source they got their information from? I'm afraid it's Wikipedia, and that we've been spreading factoids. --Akhilleus (talk) 15:24, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
• Delete (or possiibly redirect) per EAL/Ak William M. Connolley 15:39, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. No evidence from any ancient source that this was the name of Prometheus' eagle. Note: eagle in Ancient Greek ’αετός, eagle in Modern Greek αετός, scientific name of the golden eagle Aquila chrysaetos. It makes more sense for aethonem aquilam to be a tawny eagle. In Apollodorus' story of Prometheus, the bird is just an ’αετός. I think by keeping this entry, even as a redirect, we will be retaining misinformation, so it is better to delete it. I think the note over at Aethon that this might be the eagle's name should also be removed, since we have no source that Hyginus intended the word to be a name. EdJohnston 01:37, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment. The standard ancient enclyclopedia (Pauly-Wissowa) has an entry for aithon. It says it is really an epithet to aquila, but Muncker (1631) to whom they refer for this view has this (after first playing with the mistaken idea that the word is αετος):

in mentem mihi veni, Hyginum forsan ... deceptum fuisse Graeco epitheto αἴθων, quo ἀετὸν ornant Poetae, ut Homer. Iliad. O. 685. putasse, inquam, proprium esse nomen, cum adjectivum esset τὸ αἴθων in Graeco scriptore, ubi hanc fabulam invenit.

That is

it occurs to me that maybe Hyginus was deceived by the greek adjective aithon, with which the poets decorate the aeton, as at Homer Iliad 15, 685 [690 in current editions]. I mean that he thought it was a name, althought the word aithon in the Greek writer where he found this story was actually an adjective.

This seems plausible to me. The latest editor of Hyginus (Marshall) treats it as an adjective, but other good editions treat it as a name; and you would not expect Hyginus to have added a Greek adjective if he recognised it as such (you wouldn't expect any merely ornamental adj., and Latin has its own fulvus for this). If it was an error, it was most likely made by Hyginus or by someone before him. The other standard work for this subject, Roschers Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie has a brief entry s.v. Aithon 7. ‘Der Adler, der den Prometheus quälte,: Hyg. f. 31. Vgl. Il. 15, 690.’ --Nigel Holmes —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.246.7.133 (talk) 09:28, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.