Talk:Ceionia gens

Clodius Albinus

Is there any reliable evidence that Albinus was a Ceionius, aside from the Historia Augusta? Nowhere else but here is he associated with the Ceionii Rufii who were urban prefects of Rome in the 4th century. The evidence provided by HA is garbled and coincidental beyond belief. All entries using the HA as a source should be removed, they seem pure invention. The RE entry on Albinus says it's all false. Avis11 (talk) 00:27, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

It's not our place to decide which sources are right and which are wrong in this regard. We have an account that claims he was descended from this gens, and various literature since that time follows it, so readers would expect to find the information here. If that claim is disputed by modern scholars, the proper course of action is to explain that in the article—not to delete the emperor and everyone mentioned along with him from the article, along with other citations to the Historia Augusta in the article, then delete even this discussion from the talk page, as if hiding the entire process. Talk page discussions should only be deleted if they were posted by accident, or are completely irrelevant to the article. P Aculeius (talk) 12:57, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

This was deleted under the presumption, after a few days of wait, that no opposition to the measure was forthcoming. I didn't cynically expect to "hide the entire process": I'm aware that it's impossible to hide anything in Wikipedia, and I knew any of this wouldn't escape your notice, even if you only went through the trouble of responding after this supposedly irregular deletion. The RE rejects the coincidental evidence for his ancestry that he was called Albinus both because of light skin and supposed descent from the Postumii. Syme in Ammianus and the HA says his Ceionius relatives all inventions, since "Ceionius Albinus" only came to be after a family union in the 3rd century, after Clodius's death. What do you expect to elaborate on here? You want there to be a whole paragraph explaining how and why a single individual X's ancestry in a source of known unreliability (whose removal is out of the question for some reason) is false? It's established that the family connection is fictitious, and therefore doesn't belong in an article which outlines non-fictitious family relationships. Avis11 (talk) 15:37, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

It's improper to delete talk page discussions about page contents simply because nobody objects to proposed actions within a few days—or ten hours, apparently, which is the amount of time between your proposal to delete half the contents of the article, and the time you deleted them, along with the proposal. Any discussion of the article's contents stays on the talk page unless and until it's archived. If you're acting on a proposal, you make the changes or you reply to the topic on the talk page saying what you're doing or not doing—but either way, you don't delete the discussion just because nobody replied.

I didn't respond at first because I was busy and didn't have time to investigate the issue of whether the emperor belonged on this page—but the deleted material went far beyond removing the emperor himself, and extended to deleting several other individuals, based solely on the argument that anything in the Historia Augusta which isn't verified by independent sources must be pure invention. I responded once I had some time to look at the sources and figure out what had happened.

These articles aren't limited to what historians and archaeologists agree is true. They include persons who have been asserted as members based on various sources, which may or may not be true, but which are nonetheless important pieces of evidence. By your logic, once a scholar dismisses some piece of information, other scholars and sources should ignore it—and it needs to be expunged from Wikipedia articles about the topic as well, along with the reasons for doing so. That's not how the process is supposed to work.

After translating the first 170 lines of the article in PW, my impression of what it says about the emperor's lineage differs from yours significantly. Does the author of the emperor's Life present two contradictory explanations of his surname? Sure. Lots of ancient sources provide alternative explanations for something. We don't pick the one we think is best and ignore the other one. PW, relying on Dessau, seems to be saying that the Postumii Albini and Ceionii Albini have been confused, perhaps deliberately, in order to link the emperor's lineage with an ancient republican family. It does not clearly state that the emperor could not have been descended from the Ceionii, nor does it clearly state that any of the Ceionii mentioned in the relevant portions of the Historia Augusta are inventions—in fact we know they're certainly not simply dismissed as retrojections of the names of later persons, because there were plenty of prominent Ceionii during this period known from other sources. That doesn't mean that all of them are correctly identified, or that none of them could be inventions of the author—merely that we can't assume they were fictitious persons. Ronald Syme may well be correct in suggesting that they are—but even if he's correct, and there's no way to be certain—they're still persons who may be encountered in reading the history of this period, or in various secondary sources about it, and thus they belong here even if their existence is in doubt; otherwise nobody would be able to account for their absence unless they themselves have read Syme, and taken his word for it. That's not particularly useful for our readers!

The Historia Augusta is far from an ideal source, and it contains much that is contradicted by or cannot be corroborated by other sources. But that alone doesn't justify simply dismissing everything it says, and deleting anything cited to it. Few scholars would go that far, and neither should we. There are good reasons to cite it even when its contents are doubtful or widely dismissed, because it's still an important source. Where it's less reliable, explain why and cite the sources for that. But don't just expunge it and everything cited to it from articles. P Aculeius (talk) 22:13, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

Look, this was deleted a full two-and-a-half days after it had been posted on the talk page. I only removed the original comment and the relevant passage in the main page (with a 10 hour gap between them according to you) after I convinced myself this wasn't a controversial topic at all. Obviously I was wrong, since here you are, so I apologize for that. With regards to the subject matter, I'm not sure in which way the RE is at variance with what I had said previously: it rejects the claim that Clodius Albinus was a link between the earlier Postumii Albini and later Ceionii Rufi and grants nothing as fact with regards to these supposed relatives of his, rendering thus the related HA passage as unworthy of consideration. This comes a long way from the status quo of the WP page, which has these people's existences presented as undoubted fact. The "half of the article's content" I deleted was basically more of the same, mostly comprising a digression on the origins of the surname Postum(i)us whose evidence in this gens is only attested, again, by the hA.

Your whole approach isn't "useful to readers", it is actively misleading. Syme and others, if not the RE itself, absolutely do dismiss the related HA passages as "made-up retrojections". The presence of all those entries with questionable information implicitly give credence, in the eyes of a first-time reader, to a version of events which experts simply don't believe to be true, even if you add a comment besides explaining said experts' views. And that's not even to mention how awkward the entries would sound: "Ceionius Postumus, father of the emperor Albinus, whose existence is doubted by historians" – completely pointless, and lacking cohesion too, introducing the subject as a real entity and suddenly saying reliable authorities don't believe he exists. Avis11 (talk) 22:58, 2 October 2020 (UTC)