Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Ancient Greek literature/1
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
- Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • • Most recent review
- Result: Uncontroversial early SNOW close. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 11:23, 3 June 2025 (UTC)
So far, I have reviewed only a few portions of this article so far and found significant problems, so I am submitting it for GAR. I have not found a section of this article so far that did not have significant problems, so if I don't mention it below, it has probably not been reviewed yet in detail. From what I have examined, the problems do seem to largely be the same across the entire article, however.
I believe the article currently does not meet the following criteria:
2b: Citations to reliable sources: numerous citations for verifiable claims are missing, or were cited to news articles, which are generally inappropriate for claims about ancient history. I have added a large number of citation tags to material I believe to be accurate but which is insufficiently cited. However, this lack of citation also lead to numerous other problems, detailed below:
2bc: Factual errors: I have focused mostly on subjects I have enough familiarity with. none of these claims were cited to reliable sources, and I believe that all of them are incorrect and often reflect common misconceptions among the general public:
- Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes of Miletus were stated to have lived in the 5th or 4th centuries. it can be seen from their own pages that this is not correct.
- Empedocles was stated to have been a student of Pythagoras, who, as can be seen from comparing their pages, died a year before Empedocles was born. Most modern scholars also do not believe Empedocles was a Pythagorean, though this is often stated in ancient sources.
- Plato's dialogues were presented as direct reports of conversations Socrates actually had, a misconception often held by those unfamiliar with his works, but one that virtually no scholar either in antiquity or the modern era would ever defend. The description of the Symposium was also incorrect.
- Euclid's elements was not mostly drawn from Eudoxus, *some* parts of two or three books out of were taken from it.
- Euclid's elements is not exclusively about geometry, but also contains work on number theory and irrational numbers.
- Polybius was listed under "Roman" period, probably because he lived in rome, even though he lived in the hellenistic period
I believe that the rest of the article should probably be examined closely for more issues relating to this problem.
2c: Original research: Very few scholarly sources dealing with the broad overall topic of the article, Ancient Greek literature, seem to have been cited, with most sources verifying claims about individual works. The selection of what works and topics were included or not seems to have been mostly arbitrary, and there are numerous omissions, mostly detailed below in part 3.
- One particularly salient example: Diogenes Laertius was presented as an enough of an important contribution to Ancient Greek Literature to merit significant inclusion in this page, with no secondary sources cited whatsoever that supported this inclusion. Given the lack of any literary merit in his works (not insulting his prose, it's just not that kind of book!) I can't find a reason why it ought to have been included.
3: Addresses the main aspects/Stays on topic without going into detail: Overall, the article focuses almost exclusively on listing off a grab-bag of extant writings that are well known, with absolutely no mention of any of the context around them, and rarely even anything about the content of the works themselves. While these most well known works certainly deserve mention, this is not a broad treatment of the subject, and any history of ancient greek literature written in the past few decades will discuss the context, such as other writers who were well-known at the time whose works no longer survive.
- There is no mention of rhetoric or oratory. Demosthenes is only mentioned in a discussion of lost literature, the Second sophistic is not mentioned at all.
- The section on Herodotus and Thucydides says nothing about the contents of their writings, you wouldn't even know that Herodotus wrote about the Persian wars!
- A large portion of the Classical philosophy section was devoted to the Socratic problem, which, while notable, has very little to do with literature, given that Socrates wrote nothing.
- Other than the inclusion of Diogenes Laertius mentioned above, now removed, the roman philosophers are again a grab-bag.
- Hellenistic poetry fails to mention Philitas of Cos, the founder of Hellenistic poetry, and spends almost the entire section talking about a single poet, Callimachus, and the rediscovery of a single poem he wrote.
- The section on Bucolic poetry mentions only Theocritus, not Moschus or Bion of Smyrna, and says nothing whatsoever about their work except that it influenced Virgil
- The Roman poetry section manages to jump immediately from where the hellenistic left off in the 3rd century BCE to the 4th century CE, skipping over the entirety of Greek poetry between for approximately 600 years
- Science and mathematics is, again, a list of works that survive with no descriptions. No mention of Apollonius, Hero of Alexandria, or anything other than Euclid or Archimedes. I'm also not even sure we should include mathematics in "literature" at all though.
- Quite a lot of page time is spent on prose fiction, but the Ancient Greek novels are, in my experience, a very minor portion of ancient greek literary culture compared to poetry, drama, oratory, history, and philosophy. I barely think they need to be mentioned at all.
- There's also nothing on oral literature or the gradual transition to writing over the 8th through 4th centuries BCE. "Orality and literacy" is a fairly major topic in the history of literature overall, and most of it is focused on Ancient Greece, and yet this article provides no mention of it.
4: Neutral: Many of the sections spend more time talking about how great and influential the works discussed were rather than anything about the work. This also related to the criterion 3a problems because this content is entirely in place of any discussion of the contents of the work.
I would really like to know what the Good Article reviewer saw in this article, but unfortunately they left almost no comments whatsoever on the review! Both the nominator and the reviewer are inactive, so I don't believe that we'll get much clarification on this, but it seems to me that there was a significant failure of process here.
Next steps for improving the article are probably to continue examining the remaining sections of the article for factual errors, tagging sentences that are uncited, finding more appropriate secondary sources for the broader topic, determining the proper scope of the article, and adding the missing sections such as oratory that have been omitted. Psychastes (talk) 20:52, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
- Notified Wikiprojects Literature, Classical Greece and Rome, and Greece Psychastes (talk) 20:59, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
- Delist per OP. Ifly6 (talk) 01:20, 15 May 2025 (UTC)
- Delist Psychastes makes a detailed and convincing case. (May I suggest, however that section maintenance tags be used in cases where practically every other clause needs a citation? While I generally support maximally targeted tags, there are a few places where there are so many superscript tags that they interfere with readability.) Cheers, Patrick 🐈⬛ (talk) 22:49, 15 May 2025 (UTC)
- good point about readability, i've now replaced many of the inline tags with an overall page tag Psychastes (talk) 19:24, 22 May 2025 (UTC)
- Delist per Psychastes' comment. – Michael Aurel (talk) 09:21, 1 June 2025 (UTC)