Talk:Calvisia gens

Proposed revisions

This article is probably a good candidate to be moved to [[Calvisia (gens)]] and added to the [[List of Roman gentes]]. However, several of the persons mentioned have much more detailed biographical information than would normally belong on such pages. Since there appears to be enough information to justify separate articles on several of them, I'd like to propose doing that at the same time.

I'm also concerned that Publius Calvisius Sabinus Pomponius Secundus is an erroneous entry. It appears to be an amalgamation of two different individuals. This would be an unusually long name for the period in question, and the person's nomen appears to have been Publius or Lucius Pomponius Secundus, as he was the brother of Quintus Pomponius Secundus. These are the names as they appear in Tacitus and the DGRBM; I found Quintus in my index to the RE (Pomponius 72) but am not sure how his brother is identified. I see a Publius Pomponius Secundianus (Pomponius 71), and a Titus Pomponius Calvisius Sabinus Secundus (Pomponius 103).

One of the on-line links in this article mentions an inscription supposedly referring to him as ...isius Pomponius Secundus, but it seems possible that two different individuals are intended, or a different individual (as I cannot review PIR or see what others have made of this name). Since someone in the RE does have this combination of names stuck together (even though he doesn't appear to be the same person), I suppose it's possible they are correct. But in either case it looks as if his nomen was Pomponius and that Calvisius, if it was part of his nomenclature, had some other significance. He and his brother would belong in [[Pomponia (gens)]]. P Aculeius (talk) 16:06, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

I think I agree on all counts. I'm the one who put in the lengthier entries when I was trying to figure out the various Calvisii Sabini, and I was too lazy to create the obvious article on the very interesting consul under Tiberius (but felt I should just go ahead and deliver what goods I had). If you also have no immediate desire to develop it into an article, just call it a Roman bio stub, go with the refs here, and do whatever you need to in making it respectable.

As for our tragedian, I don't think it's up to you or me to decide whether two men are being conflated here: only that there is substantial scholarship that deals with the question. I came to no conclusions, and found the family relations confusing, thanks to our busy Vistilia. So confusing that I had almost all this down before I realized there was an article (of sorts) that already covered him. I didn't get the impression that the identification is made solely on the basis of the one fragmentary inscription, but rather that the inscription was one piece in the puzzle, and it's found in very mainstream and even major sources, with its conjectural nature noted: [1], [2] [3]. This last one seems to gather all the old sources like RE and Cichorius; Rudich implies (as Rose on Petronius does here), that RE makes the ID, and that it was affirmed in the 60s by Cichorius. According to Google Books search results, he's also as a Calvisius in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, but when I clicked on the link it didn't deliver the previewed snippet.

The reasons for the identification don't strike me as necessarily less cogent or coherent than the way the identity of Quintus Valerius Soranus is pieced together; in fact, that article probably ought to place a possible identification with Valerius Aedituus a little more prominently.

I'm not sure that name length is a compelling argument in the time of Tiberius: we aren't that far from Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica and Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus, where so-called 'adoptions' make for profligate and unconventional nomenclature.

If you find you absolutely cannot stomach putting the tragedian in a list of Calvisii, list him under a "See also" at the bottom of your gens article, and move any non-duplicative material here to the preexisting article. Rudich seems to offer the best summary of his career under a unified identity. So again, it's not our job to declare him misidentified and in fact two men; but we may provide both sides of the issue if you find scholarship arguing against the unified identity. Cynwolfe (talk) 18:55, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

On the proposal to split, I'd be happy to make some separate articles on the individuals with enough information. They'd be stubs, I suppose, but easy enough to find and expand at a later point, since they'd all be listed with links on the page about the gens.

I'm sure I can stomach leaving Pomponius Secundus here, although as Tacitus calls him simply Publius Pomponius Secundus in one place and Lucius Pomponius Secundus in the other, and his brother was named Quintus Pomponius Secundus, I have a hard time understanding how Calvisius Sabinus gets to be part of his name. I admit, I'm used to the idea that every Roman citizen has one praenomen and one nomen, and that everything else is a cognomen of some sort (inverted or otherwise), or some weird affectation of the imperial household. I guess that would get me labeled as an extreme reactionary in the first century!

My impression is still that he was one of the Pomponii, not one of the Calvisii, even if he had Calvisius in the place we normally find a nomen. I wish I could just look him up in the RE (even if I can't speak German, I might be able to get the gist of it, or work out what it says with help). But if this reading of his name is correct (I note that both the second and third source seem to be based on the same inscription, but I don't know how or why it was interpreted the way it was), then it makes sense to mention him on the page for the Calvisii. P Aculeius (talk) 23:12, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Well, as I said, this seems to be a complicated family, and if you checked out the nomenclature issues of the two individuals named above, you can see how complicated family relations can lead to ungainly names. D. Brutus's nomenclature is completely unconventional, in contrast, say to Marcus Marius Gratidianus, who after adoption used his natural father's name Gratidius in adjectival form, which is usually the way it worked — you carried on your adopted father's gens name, because that was part of the "deal," but acknowledged your birth father. D. Brutus was not about to give away a name like "Junius Brutus," whatever the attractions of Albinus's fortunes. And Jerzy Linderski examines the nomenclature of Metellus Scipio at exhausting length that is barely touched in the article. This is why I think we need to yield to the professional classicists who have found no reason to reject the identification. Actually, I haven't found anyone who actively rejected it; only sources that don't mention a Calvisius connection.

As you say, the fact that the name can be found in respectable secondary sources is sufficient justification for listing it, with a qualifier, particularly since these sources cite RE. I will say quite emphatically that the absence of a piece of info in Smith's is never grounds for deleting statements that are supported with citations of 20th-21st century scholarship. Cynwolfe (talk) 15:14, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Actually, I never found any discussion of the name, or any reason to identify Pomponius with the Calvisii other than the partial inscription cited to the Prosopographia Imperii Romani. I found the references to him in Tacitus and Cassius Dio but none of them mention him as a Calvisius. We don't know what PIR actually says about the inscription, if anything, nor the RE unless you have a chance to look it up. And as I said, it is a rather strange name for him to have in the absence of any known relationship to the Calvisii, especially if his brother's name was Quintus Pomponius Secundus.

But that aside, until we have a better idea how the names got connected in modern scholarship, it may be better simply to mention it in its proper context and wait for someone else to clear up the confusion. I added a subsection to his biography specifically discussing questions regarding his name, and citing the inscription in question. I hope you approve of my approach.

One note, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't keep referring to the DGRBM as "Smith". William Smith was the editor, not the author. Thirty-six different scholars contributed to the encyclopedia. It's not the work of a single scholar, and it deserves to be treated as authoritative except to the extent that the suppositions or assumptions of those scholars have been disputed or disproven by other scholarship (irrespective of period). I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge the primacy of the RE in these matters, but other scholarly works of the period should not be dismissed so lightly. P Aculeius (talk) 17:31, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

No, it is absolutely not up to us to decide whether published scholarly works are 'right' or not. We can weigh their relative value, but not just say "I have one 19th-century source that says this, therefore I can dismiss ten 20th-century sources". If you think the identification is based solely on one inscription, you don't understand the full context of the identification, and the methodology of placing that piece in the broader social and political context. And I can call Smith's whatever I want to (you say that as if it's some personal insult to you); the apostrophe implies that it's short for "Smith's Dictionary" etc, which we abbreviated in grad school as SMIGRA, as a matter of fact, and regularly referred to as "Smith's". So don't talk down to me. I'm not dismissing it, and the articles on Roman law by George Long are particularly good, but it doesn't have authority over RE and it doesn't account for more than a century's worth of work in prosopography and epigraphy. It also has marked political biases characteristic of the era of British imperialism, and these have to be taken into account by balancing them with the biases of later scholarship. Cynwolfe (talk) 03:05, 7 February 2010 (UTC)