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I see that this article cites Eusebius directly, which isn't generally accepted because ancient sources are not WP:RS. Since this is a 2009 promotion, it could certainly stand to get looked at again at Featured article review. buidhe08:09, 3 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Buidhe: I see that Eusebius is still used as a source in the article. Is this on your list to bring to FAR? Are there other editors who are interested in bringing this to FAR? Z1720 (talk) 14:37, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Z1720, I don't really have a queue of articles to bring to FAR. This article may not be a top priority because other ancient history articles that have gone to FAR have significantly worse sourcing issues. (t · c) buidhe18:20, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Worse, Eusebius and Lactantius (also cited directly) were prominent Christian polemicists contemporary to the persecutions. Lactantius in particular may have suffered directly as a result of them, resigning his post as professor of rhetoric at Nicomedia soon after they began. Extreme bias is to be expected. DestroyerOfSense (talk) 18:47, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Eusebius has been evaluated as dishonest in his historical works, but unfortunately he is the oldest surviving source for several historical narratives. We can not exactly exclude him from the article. Lactantius is even more biased. He was a political adviser to Constantine the Great, and closely affiliated to the imperial family. Part of his work seems directly aimed at glorifying his employer. Dimadick (talk) 12:34, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Due to the nature of the sources, the narrative is never going to be able to do without Eusebius, Lactantius etc, but we shouldn't be basing the article directly on them: instead, per WP:PRIMARY, the article needs to use modern, high-quality secondary sources, whose narratives will be based on those historians but also play according to the accepted view of what we can and can't use them to say.
Just scanning through the citations, the ancient historians seem always to be cited alongside modern ones quoting or citing them, so this may be a matter of citation style rather than substance: it's quite a good thing, in my view, to cite (e.g.) a passage of Syme that acknowledges its own dependence on a passage of Tacitus, and then to give the reader the Tacitus source as well (not instead) so that they can, effectively, check Syme's working. At the risk of being incredibly obnoxious, I'd offer some of the footnotes in Temple of Apollo Palatinus as examples of how this can be done "right" within the FA criteria. However, without going into those sources and seeing whether they contain the interpretative/analytical material in the scholar's own voice, it's difficult to know exactly what's going on here.
EDIT: Looking at the article's FAC, the nominator claimed that this is exactly what they have done: that primary sources were cited only when they were acknowledged as the basis of the secondary sources cited alongside them. Whether this remains true almost two decades later may be another matter, and I'm not sure we can treat an individual Wikipedian's word as the end of the conversation anyway. UndercoverClassicistT·C12:44, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This quote: "As the author Stephen Williams wrote in 1985, "even allowing a margin for invention, what remains is terrible enough. Unlike Gibbon, we live in an age which has experienced similar things, and knows how unsound is that civilized smile of incredulity at such reports. Things can be, have been, every bit as bad as our worst imaginings."
It references to a book by Williams written in 1997, and the quote is not in that book, and I cannot find any reference of any kind to anyone ever saying this. It's a great quote and I'd like to reuse it elsewhere, but I need to know where it comes from.
According to this blog [1] it's at Stephen Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery (New York: Routledge, 2000), 179 (originally published in 1985). But gbooks wont let me peek at that page. WP:RX? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:13, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
