Talk:Slavery in ancient Rome

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Female slaves and manumission

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This edit and the preceding text reminded me of a quandary mentioned by Marc Kleijwegt,[1] more clearly attested in New World slavery, that "most masters were reluctant to free entire family units" so women who might otherwise be happy to accept freedom had to leave others behind. Evidence is doubly scant, of course. As for Laes's survey showing "more than 30 percent of women traded were of prime childbearing age (20 to 25)", I can't help wondering (I don't have access) if perhaps it was 30+% of trades instead, suggesting some were acquired for the short term and resold. NebY (talk) 20:01, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to recommend a very new source. Not sure how easy it will be to access outside academia, I had to have my university order it for me, but it's the most thorough thing I've ever found on Roman freedwomen: Matthew J. Perry, Gender, Manumission, and the Roman Freedwoman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Heddgehog (talk) 01:30, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Kleijwegt, Marc (2012). "Deciphering Freedwomen in the Roman Empire". In Bell, Sinclair; Ramsby, Teresa (eds.). Free at Last! The Impact of Freed Slaves in the Roman Empire. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 113–114. ISBN 9781472504494.

Citation styles

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This article uses a mixed citation style of short references that uses the date, and short references that use the book title. This needs to be resolved, as multiple citation styles are not permitted. Additionally, even those citation styles are often done incorrectly. There are also multiple duplicate references. I will gradually be improving it as I have time to. Also, I am hoping to enlist help from a seasoned template creator to improve the short formatting that uses the book titles, so that the article benefits from linked citations to the works cited.--Esprit15d • talk • contribs 19:22, 10 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Am looking at this as well. My initial impressions are that there is a lot of nonstandard usage of {{sfn}} and {{harvtxt}} and related templates, with many unlinked short citations, and some identical, but unconsolidated ones. I believe that a good number of these may yield to global regexes to link up and de-dupe them; but that's a hunch and I need to delve deeper. Mathglot (talk) 10:09, 20 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Dealing with the "article too long" issue

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Consensus on how to do so needs to be reached. Personally, I don't believe there's any reasonable way to split off portions of this article; making a "quality of life of slaves in ancient Rome" or a "slavery and roman morality" article would be absurd. I think the sections are distinct enough as is to make this article serve the role of multiple separate ones, and that keeping all the info in one place is the best way to organize this information. Kaotao (talk) 08:17, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Kaotao, there is support for your view at WP:Article size#No need for haste:
Sometimes an article simply needs to be big to give the subject adequate coverage.
And I tend to view the size guideline as just that: a guideline. Articles that merit longer treatment, should get longer treatment. Studies show that most people never read beyond the lead of an article, but that doesn't mean we should drastically cut back every article in the encyclopedia to the size of the lead. If readers are fascinated with this topic and still with us after the first 15,000 words, who are we to say they have to stop reading at that point? Let them read another 15,000 words if the topic merits it, and they want to keep reading. If there is a natural way to break it up into smaller articles and make it available to the interested reader, great; if there isn't, we should not feel hamstrung by a guideline. Mathglot (talk) 09:49, 22 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Some scholars"

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The phrase "some scholars" is frequently used in this article in ways that violate WP:NPOV, WP:OR, and MOS:WEASEL. The statements either assert an opinion without attributing the opinion to a notable source, synthesizes various facts to draw a conclusion not contained in any of the sources, or sometimes outright clearly reflects the opinion of the editor. According to WP:SYNTH: "Do not combine material from multiple sources to state or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources. Similarly, do not combine different parts of one source to state or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by the source. If one reliable source says A and another reliable source says B, do not join A and B together to imply a conclusion C not mentioned by either of the sources." Additionally, according to WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV, "Biased statements of opinion can be presented only with in-text attribution...Avoid the temptation to rephrase biased or opinion statements with weasel words, for example, 'Many people think John Doe is the best baseball player.' Which people? How many?"

I invite other editors to join me in providing proper attribution for opinions taken from notable sources, rephrasing statements that rely on weasel words, and removing blatant POV and OR violations.--Esprit15d • talk • contribs 17:19, 19 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate all the work you're putting into this, but if I may, I'm not sure you're reading the cited articles closely. The names of scholars don't always need to appear in the body text; that's what citations are for.
For instance, in the following statement, the source cited says that ancient sources representing the elite don't seem to get the distinction between selling a child and apprenticing a child. The source cited says some of these contracts were arranged by mothers. Now, we could reproduce in the article the list of papyri, literary sources, and inscriptions that the cited source accumulated to arrive at this conclusion, but why? That's why we cite the secondary source.
Sources[who?] that moralize from an upper-class perspective about parents selling children may at times be misrepresenting contracts for apprenticeships and labor that were necessary for wage-earning families, especially since many[quantify]of these were arranged by mothers.
There's definitely some vague stuff in here, but when a statement refers to "scholars" or the scholarship on the topic and that statement has a citation, it's because the cited source surveys the history of the scholarship — often for several pages. We can't repeat all that here, especially given the complaint about the length. I don't know what the solution is. I stopped working on the article without feeling satisfied about it because the topic is so vast. Cynwolfe (talk) 04:29, 1 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If something is a subjective statement, it has to be attributed to someone in the body of the text. If the subjective statement is a conclusion reached by a consensus mentioned in a single source, that's perfecty fine, but can't be made without attribution. In the example you provided above, it should be rewritten to say "XYZ publications says" or "asserts" or "explains" that scholars have concluded... Please review WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV, especially the last paragraph. "Most scholars" would only be appropriate if there was statistical evidence to substantiate that assertion. Like "The Pew Center polled 400 scholars, and 67% said XYZ."--Esprit15d • talk • contribs 21:59, 4 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV doesn't apply to a modern unbiased study of biased ancient POVs. "Sources" in the italicised statement above isn't a reference to modern scholars with whom one cited modern scholar is disagreeing. Here, we have a modern scholar who has made a study of ancient sources up until late antiquity who – the ancient sources, that is – opined about the immorality of parents selling children. We should not itemise those WP:PRIMARY sources, whom we're not using anyway. They include a couple of names our reader might recognise, such as Ambrose of Milan and Martial, and plenty that few will such as Zosimus and Ammianus Marcellinus; we're already giving our readers plenty to take in without drowning them in ancient names in foreign languages. Instead, we rely on and summarise a pertinent key point from our WP:SCHOLARSHIP-compliant source. NebY (talk) 22:49, 4 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm also quite baffled by the idea that we can provide a specific number for the apprenticeships arranged by mothers. The demography of the Roman Empire is extremely hard work with many uncertainties, even for those freeborn males who might be counted. Numbers for women and children are even harder to estimate, and we don't have tallies for different types of contracts either (we do have much legal discussion about what might and might not constitute a valid and enforceable contract in different situations which illustrates that contracts were very often unrecorded). Sound modern scholarship often doesn't quantify such things and is no less fully WP:SCHOLARSHIP-compliant for Wikipedia or less well regarded; it works with what we've got and so must we.
In all, these two tags are inappropriate for an article presenting modern scholarship about ancient Rome, placing impossible demands on editors and indicating to some readers that greater specificity is appropriate and feasible and to others that we don't understand our sources and subject. With no response here, I'm ready to go through the article considering and on occasion removing other such tags, referring to this discussion but not documenting each here. NebY (talk) 15:57, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Also, in spot-checking some requests for page numbers, I'm finding that some citations have been garb in the course of subsequent editing, like the one on Frontinus and the 700 waterworks personnel. I've seen this happen before, where a previously complete citation didn't conform to someone's idea of how citations should be formatted, but in the course of reformatting, crucial information was actually deleted. So again, I wish you luck. Cynwolfe (talk) 04:50, 1 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for pointing that out. If you have found that a specific page number was provided, but now is gone, please restore it so it can be included in the article once again.--Esprit15d • talk • contribs 21:59, 4 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]