Talk:Galeria Copiola

Infobox

Sorry to delete the well-meaning infobox, but unfortunately the overly simplified information was misleading.

• We don't know what Galeria's citizenship status was; there were various levels of citizenship (see Roman citizenship) and entertainers had the ambiguous status of infamia anyway.
• Her performing career and most of her life dates to the Roman Republic, not the Roman Empire; she died in the early Principate, under Augustus, the first Roman emperor.
• The active career dates of 88–55 were wrong; as the article says, she made her debut in 82 BC, and had been in retirement for an unspecified amount of time when she appeared in 55.
• Although Pliny takes note of her longevity, she was famous as a stage artist, so the "known for" strikes me as misleading.

I think this is a case where an infobox doesn't add anything to the article. Cynwolfe (talk) 03:47, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Age and Arithmetic

I note that the previous article (and at least one other article linked thereto) gave Galeria's age as 12 at the time of her debut. This may, of course, be an estimate based on her age of 104 in AD 9, and if no source gives her year of birth, then 95 BC is also an estimate, although the article makes clear that she would must been born that early in order to have performed 82 BC. This has now been changed to an estimate of 13 to 14, since from 95 to 82 makes 13 years.

However, if we accept 95 BC as the estimate for Galeria's birth, then we cannot estimate her age as 14 at any time in 82 BC. For that to be possible, our estimate of her birth cannot be any later than 96. If this had actually been the case, then her age could have been reported as 105 in AD 9. A writer chronicling unusual events would probably have taken advantage of that, even if it meant ignoring the precise day of her birth. Now, if Galeria were born later in the year in 95 BC than her appearance in 9 AD (and I don't know the date of that), she could well have been 12 at the time of her debut. If the games occurred later in the year, she might have been 13. But either way she would not have been 14.

Therefore, in my opinion, if we're going to use 95 BC as the estimated date of birth, then we should continue to use the age of 12 as her estimated age at her debut; or, if we give a range, 12-13. I realize that this is a minor point, but genealogy being an interest of mine, I like to get my numbers straight! P Aculeius (talk) 05:08, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for joining this discussion, P Aculeius. My concern with the numbers is inclusive counting, which as you know is a Roman practice. (Hm. I just followed that link, which I was sure used to describe Roman inclusive counting more fully, and found it less helpful than I did once.) I just mindlessly reproduced what the sources said, but at a couple of points I wondered whether some were counting inclusively, and others not. Inclusive counting, of course, would account for a difference of one year. I think the passage that talked about when girls normally began their career gathered instances that supported 13 or 14, but I'd have to look at that again. As always, I never know what we're supposed to do on WP when a source makes a demonstrable error. For instance, I recently saw a source assert that Juvenal said a particular law had lain dormant, when in fact Juvenal clearly says it was a another law named in the same general passage that was "sleeping." I don't know of a WP policy that covers this—but I also don't know of one that requires us to perpetuate error, either. The year of birth might be my own error, so I'm changing it to 96. Cynwolfe (talk) 11:16, 27 October 2011 (UTC)