Talk:Gaius Calpurnius Flaccus

A problem of identity

One wouldn't expect a name like "Calpurnius Flaccus" to be that common, but there appears to be between two and five people who lived in the first half of the 2nd century with that name. They are as follows:

• A Calpurnius Flaccus to whom Pliny the Younger wrote a thank-you note for the gift of a brace of thrushes. This seems to be the kind of gift one neighbor might give another. (Epistulae V.2)
• A Calpurnius Flaccus who is identified as the rhetor whose 52 declamations are included in three manuscript copies of pseudo-Quintillian's Lesser Declamations. Although one authority dates him to the 2nd century, another admits there is no criteria to assign him a date.
• C. Calpurnius Flaccus, the subject of this article.
• C. Calpurnius Flaccus, father of the next; &
• C. Calpurnius Flaccus, flamen provinciae Hispaniae about the time of Hadrian's visit to Tarraco.

While it would be tidy to combine these shadowy people into as few as two actual ones, reflection will confirm there is need to reduce these to so few. In fact, there are some grounds to make the number larger: Pliny's neighbor lived in Gallia Cisalpina, not Hispania; the subject of this article lived too late to be a contemporary of Pliny; & while a rhetor could be on amiable relations with Pliny, their social standings would be too disparate to make it likely.

This concerns Wikipedia, because the question follows: should we have separate articles for all of these? (Or maybe no more than four, since one article can cover the Spanish father-son pair.) Or merge them into a list article, since so little is known about any of them -- the subject of this article is the best known of the 5, & even this article is little more than a sketch -- & a list article would warn the reader that very little is known about them. -- llywrch (talk) 06:05, 6 October 2017 (UTC)