- Speaking of the blasting, you write in the lead that Beulé used dynamite, but that cannot be true. Dynamite is a specific kind of explosive made from nitroglycerin, and according to the WP article (which is helpfully linked in the lead), it was invented in 1866. It was certainly not available to Beulé in 1853, and the sources (Beulé himself, as well as Baelen 1958, which you cite in regard to the blasting later in the article) all say that he used "poudre", i.e. black powder or gunpowder.
- The caption of the photo of the entablature of the Nikias monument reads "Detail of the central part of the monument, showing the dedicatory inscription from the Choragic Monument of Nikias." A more accurate caption might be "Detail of the wall over the gateway, showing blocks reused from the Choragic Monument of Nikias and part of the dedicatory inscription." The whole inscription is not visible in this photo, and even the part that does fall within the frame is very difficult to make out.
- The inscription honoring Flavius Septimius Marcellinus. I recommend citing this inscription as IG II2 5206 = IG II2 13291.
- Explanation: (1) First, take care not to confuse CIG (= Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum) with IG (= Inscriptiones Graecae); these are two entirely different corpora, and you want the latter here. (2) On the variation between IG II/III2 (the older form) and IG II2 (the more recent and more common form), see my note on the Nikias inscription above; these are just two different ways of referring to the same publication. (3) For most of the 20th century the standard reference for this particular inscription was IG II2 5206, but like the 4th-century choregic inscriptions, the Late Roman inscriptions from Athens have recently been republished in a new volume of the IG series, this one edited by Sironen and published in 2009. Unfortunately for scholars and editors everywhere, instead of publishing this work as part of the new third edition (i.e., as part of IG II/III3) the Berlin Academy inexplicably issued it as an additional fascicule of the second edition, IG II2. This was madness, but it's too late to fix it now, and the result is that the Marcellinus inscription has two valid IG II2 numbers, 5206 and 13291, the first reflecting the text of the 1920s, the second Sironen's new and improved text of 2009. (The latter is also sometimes cited as IG II/III2.5 13291, because reasons.) As above, the most helpful thing you can do for readers here is give both numbers, since the old number is the one used in most earlier publications, but the new one is a much superior text, and it will eventually displace the old one in future scholarship. So that's what I've suggested. (4) If you want to provide links to the Greek texts, here they are, both at the PHI inscription site: IG II2 5206 and IG II2 13291.
- Translation of the inscription. The controversial "new poet" and avant-garde composer Timotheos of Miletos, who likened his revolution against the old poetic tradition to Zeus's vanquishing of Kronos, certainly deserves a wikilink. (He also deserves a better article; the current stub is a disgrace.)
- In the gallery, the photo of the back of the gate is mistakenly captioned "looking east"; it should say "looking southwest" or "from the northeast". (Feel free to insert unnecessary fussy hyphens between the compass points if your national pride demands it.)
- Also in the gallery, I'm going to be a nitpicker and point out that the year 1893 is the terminus ante quem for the photo from the Tupper scrapbook in the Boston Public Library, not the precise date. Tupper visited Athens in March of 1893, and that was when he acquired this photograph, which must have been taken before that date, but after 1875 (when the Frankish tower was demolished). Where exactly within that 18-year span it should be placed I can't say, but careful comparison with more precisely dated photographs might be able to narrow it down. (When, for example, was the iron railing between the Beulé Gate and the Nike bastion constructed?). That the photo in the Tupper album was bought from a commercial photographer rather than taken by Tupper himself is indicated by the catalogue number (21) in the lower right corner, the high quality of the image, and the fact that the same photograph is also preserved in other collections (here is one in the Rijksmuseum). The Tupper albums do contain some amateur photographs that were presumably taken by Tupper or someone in his party, but these are easily distinguishable by their smaller size and poorer quality. Whatever the precise date, this is a very informative photograph, and I'd like to see room made for it in the body of the article, rather than tacking it on at the end as part of a gallery of miscellanea. (I've uploaded a higher resolution version of the copy in the Tupper album, and also a cropped version without the surrounding scrapbook page and Tupper's annnotations. But the Rijksmuseum version linked above may be better.)
- (2) You write that the architrave blocks were "topped with marble triglyphs and metopes made from a variety of limestone known as tufa," and cite the Guide Joanne as the source. This is indeed what the French WP article says, but it is not what the Guide Joanne says, and it is exactly backward: in fact, the metopes are of marble and the triglyphs are of limestone (cf. Dinsmoor 1910, pp. 465–466). And while the French may call this ubiquitous soft yellowish limestone tuf, the standard term in English scholarship is not "tufa" but "poros" (Greek πώρινος λίθος or πωρόλιθος). When English-speaking archaeologists use the word tufa, they are usually referring to the Italian volcanic stones used in Etruscan and Roman architecture, which are not limestones at all. To make matters worse, the Italian volcanic "tufas" of the archaeological literature are technically not tufas but tuffs, an entirely different kind of stone, as exasperated geologists keep reminding us. It's a mess, admittedly, but conventional archaeological terminology doesn't always line up with geological fact. In this context, it's fine to simply say limestone, but if you want to be more specific, you should follow many generations of British and American archaeologists and call it poros.
- Fixed (incidentally, I found tufa for it in a Greek archaeological publication from the 1950s earlier this week ... just to make it even more confusing!) UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:40, 17 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- The choregic inscription of Nikias. I recommend that you cite this inscription as IG II2 3055 = IG II3.4 467. (There is no need to preface the citation with the phrase "This inscription can be found at"; just cite the publications, as you would any other sources.) You can stop reading now if you trust me, but if you to know want to know why, a tedious explanation follows.
- (1) First, be sure to superscript the number 2 and remove the space between it and the volume number: this is the second edition of IG II, not the second part of IG II. By convention, when you place a full-size arabic numeral on the same line as the roman volume number (rather than above the line) and separate it from the volume number by a space, it is understood to refer to a part or fascicule number, which is not the case here. So, for example, IG II2 101 = IG II, second edition, inscription 101, but IG XII 2 101 = IG XII, first edition, part 2, inscription 101. Some volumes of IG have both an edition number and a part number, so it's important to distinguish them properly in the formatting. (2) IG II2 3055 is the number by which this inscription has been known for most of the 20th century (before that it was IG II 1246, which is how Dinsmoor refers to it), but it is no longer the best number, because the long-awaited third edition of IG II has begun to appear, and that edition has a different numeration. The new numbers are already being used in recent scholarship, and although it will take some time, they will eventually replace the old ones, just as the second edition numbers replaced those of the first edition. Part 4 of the new edition, the part that contains the 4th-century choregic inscriptions, was published in 2015, and the new number of the Nikias inscription is IG II3 4 467 (= third edition, part 4, inscription 467). (3) For reasons that have to do with the complicated bibliographic history of IG, some epigraphers prefer to cite this as IG II/III3 rather than IG II3; if you want me to explain, I will, but it's not particularly important, and the main point to remember is that these are just two different ways of referring to the same publication. (4) To avoid confusion, many editors put a period between the volume and the part number (IG II3.4 467), or a comma between the part number and the inscription number (IG II/III3 4, 467); these are purely cosmetic decisions that depend on the house style of a given journal or press; they do no harm, and may do some good. I've put a period between the volume and part number in the citation suggested above, because in my experience readers sometimes misinterpret the fully open form IG II3 4 467 as third edition, inscription 4, line 467. (5) Because the third edition of IG II/III is still quite new, and there is already a century of scholarship using the old numbers, during this period of overlap and transition some authors and editors give both numbers. This is a practice I approve of, since it takes little additional space and provides the greatest amount of assistance to readers, so that's what I've recommended above. (6) Finally, you might consider providing links to the online Greek texts of the inscriptions, since readers who know Greek may not be numerous, but they do exist. For IG II2, the best source is the Packard Humanities Institute Greek Inscriptions site; for the latest fascicules of IG II/III3, which are not (yet) included in the PHI collection, the best source is the official IG site in Berlin. The specific links for the Nikias inscription, if you want to include them, are here: IG II2 3055 and IG II3.4 467. OK, wake up now, we're moving on.
- The modern inscription by Beulé. Your transcription leaves out the last two words, ΒΕΥΛΕ ΕΥΡΕΝ, in which Beulé makes sure that everyone who reads it knows that he was the man responsible for the discovery. These words are clearly visible in the photo in the article, at the lower right, in letters smaller than those of rest of the inscription, but still legible, and I am sad to see them omitted from your text and translation, because they tell us something about Beulé's character. (As Baelen puts it, "l'ivresse du succès était montée à la tête du jeune archéologue".) If you want to cite a printed source for the Greek text of the inscription, may I recommend Thomas Dyer, Ancient Athens: Its History, Topography, and Remains (London 1873), p. 361? Dyer disapproved of Beulé's "little outburst of national and personal vanity", and wrote that "It would have been as well if M. Beulé had not thought fit to record his achievement, and that of France, however valuable, by a somewhat vainglorious inscription inserted at the side of the new entrance. The Germans have done more than the French for the restoration of the Acropolis, and their doings will not be the less remembered because they have not inscribed their names among those of the ancient Greeks." Zing! If you prefer to present it from Beulé's point of view, the Greek text is also reproduced in the preface of the 1853 edition of L'Acropole d'Athènes.
- Thanks for all this: all done, and I've added Dyer's remark to balance the so-far all-positive view of B.'s work. UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:55, 17 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- I'm probably too sensitive, but it really bugs me that the photo of Beulé's inscription currently in the article (this one) cuts off the edges of the letters at the right side. There's another photo (this one) which shows the whole stone, and for that reason I prefer it, even though the lighting is less satisfactory and text not as clear.
- Mason's marks on the geison blocks. Better to cite Dinsmoor 1910 for this (pp. 463–465), since he gives more detail, as well as illustrations, and Rous is just reporting his observations. Incidentally, these geison blocks are called cornice blocks in the "Description" section above. Either term is fine, but if you use two different words for the same architectural element in the same article, you are likely to confuse some readers (by which I mean those readers whose eyes haven't already glazed over from the triglyphs, metopes, and mutules).
- First paragraph. The battle of Pydna notwithstanding, I don't know of anyone who would call 167 BCE the "Roman period" in Athens. The date at which most scholars stop talking about Hellenistic Athens and start talking about Roman Athens varies, but it's always in the 1st century BCE, most commonly after the sack of Sulla in 86, but sometimes later. In any case, this is all irrelevant here, because the big marble staircase that replaced the original ramp leading up to the Propylaea has been dated to the mid-1st century CE, probably during the reign of Claudius: see Graindor, "L'entrée de l'Acropole sous l'Empire", BCH 38 (1914) pp. 272–295; Shear, "Athens: From City-State to Provincial Town", Hesperia 50 (1981), pp. 356–377, at 367. Graindor's article, although now out of date in many respects, has some observations regarding the relationship of the towers of the Beulé Gate to the staircase, as well as a detailed discussion of the inscription honoring Flavius Septimius Marcellinus (on which see below). Shear's article is a helpful overview of Athens from Augustus to Hadrian, accessible and well worth reading (although of course it has nothing to say about the Beulé Gate itself).
- (1) It seems bizarre to me to cite Lalonde's monograph on an Archaic sanctuary on the Hill of the Nymphs as your source for the date of the post-Herulian wall. Much better sources are easily available: for the archaeological evidence, see Alison Franz's volume on the Late Antique Agora (Agora 24, pp. 5–6, available via JSTOR or the ASCSA); and for the epigraphical evidence, see Sironen 1994, pp. 19–22 (on inscriptions 3 and 4). Since you already cite this article by Sironen elsewhere, I assume you have access to it, but if that's no longer true, let me know and I'll email you a copy.
- Final paragraph. "The gate situated beneath the Temple of Athena Nike." I know what you mean by this, but that's because I already know where this gate was located. Readers who don't already know may have a hard time figuring out that this means "the gate situated at the western foot of the large Classical bastion on which the Temple of Athena Nike was built."
- (2) It's misleading to imply, as I think your current wording does, that Sarah Rous was the first person to suggest that the demolition of the Nikias monument and the construction of the post-Herulian wall and the Beulé Gate were contemporaneous. The dismantling of the Nikias monument has always been tied to the construction of the gate, and the view that the gate and the wall are part of the same post-Herulian fortification is what I would call the scholarly consensus, and has been for decades: it is the view held by, for example, Camp, Hurwit, and Tanoulas, to name only three well-known scholars whose works are already cited in the article. Even John Travlos, whom Rous singles out as an influential supporter of a pre-Herulian date for the gate, did not always think so; in his first book, Πολεοδομική ἐξέλιχις τῶν Ἀθηνῶν, published in 1960, he treated the gate as part of the post-Herulian fortification and dated them both to the end of the 3rd century, just as Camp et al. do today. So in arguing that the Beulé Gate was contemporaneous with the wall, Rous is reaffirming a widely held view, not breaking new ground. I understand your desire to avoid putting anything even faintly controversial into Wikivoice, but there is an opposing risk of misattribution and misrepresentation if you spotlight a source simply because it is convenient, or it happens to be where you first encountered a piece of information or a particular interpretation. When you give the name of a specific author a prominent position in the text of the article, accompanied by a phrase like "so-and-so suggests" or "so-and-so has argued", you imply, whether intentionally or not, that the named author is the person who first made the observation or formulated the hypothesis, which is not the case here. I have no objection at all to citing Sarah's book -- she provides a good discussion of the evidence and a vigorous defense of a common view -- but she should not be treated as if she saw and argued for something that everyone else had missed. It would be more accurate to write something like this: "Although the date of the Beulé Gate itself is not entirely certain, it is commonly assumed that the dismantling of the Nikias monument and the construction of the gate and the wall formed part of the same post-Herulian fortification project"; then, in the footnote, you could cite Hurwit 1999, Camp 2001, and Rous 2019 as representative examples of this widely held view. (There are plenty of others as well, but these three sources are already cited in the article.)
- First paragraph. If Rous implies, as you do here, that Tanoulas was the first to suggest a connection between the construction of the Beulé Gate and the protection of the Klepsydra spring on the northwest slope of the Acropolis, she was mistaken. Tanoulas discusses the fortification of the spring in detail, but the connection was made as early as 1960 by Travlos (Πολεοδομική ἐξέλιχις τῶν Ἀθηνῶν, p. 128 of the 1993 edition), and probably a good deal earlier by others. (Incidentally, "Klepsydra" here is a proper name and should be capitalized; cf., e.g., Camp 2001, p. 241, and Parsons in Hesperia 12 (1943) 191–267. If you leave it lower case, it means "water clock".)
- The caption of the photograph currently placed in the "Excavation" section of the article should specify that this is the north side of the gate, and perhaps say something about the buttress walls, since these are the most conspicuous feature of the photo. But I'm not sure it's a great photograph to include in any case: it's likely to be confusing to readers who don't know exactly what they're looking at, and who don't understand how it relates to the part of the gate that looks, well, more like a gate. Maybe consider replacing it with something else?
- Third paragraph. The final sentence in this paragraph reads "Later in the Roman period, an arch was constructed out from the eastern tower of the gate." This statement baffled me when I read it, because I had no idea what it could possibly be referring to, and there were several obvious problems in the way it was expressed: (1) "Later in the Roman period" makes little sense chronologically, since the Beulé Gate as we have it was constructed near the end of the 3rd century (if not later), at which point the "Roman period", as that phrase is normally used in the context of Athenian archaeology, was over. Everything after that (roughly the 4th through the 6th or 7th century) is conventionally known as "Late Roman" (or sometimes "Early Christian" or "Early Byzantine"), and your own use of the term "Late Roman" in the first paragraph of the "Date" section acknowledges this. (2) What is meant by "the eastern tower of the gate"? The Beulé Gate faces west; it consists of a entrance flanked by two towers, one on the north and one on the south. Which of these is "the eastern tower"? (3) How and why was this arch "constructed out" from the tower? Was it an ornamental arch, spanning an entrance? Or a purely utilitarian structure designed to buttress the tower or support some kind of superstructure? Or something else entirely? The sentence as it stands gives readers (at least this reader) nothing that enables them to understand the date, location, or function of the arch.
- The citation provided for this statement is a page in Tasos Tanoulas's big book on the Propylaea in the Middle Ages, and a look at vol. 1, p. 240, of that work makes it clear that the sentence is based on a complete misunderstanding of what Tanoulas actually wrote. What he's talking about there is not an arch, it's a longitudinal (north–south) barrel vault that was constructed against the inner (east) side of the towers and the gate wall as part of a remodeling that he assigns to the Byzantine period. The remains of this vault are clearly visible in the wall today, especially in the east wall of the north tower. If you look at any photo of the back of the gate, like this one or this one, you can see the beginning of the spring of the brick vault built into the wall above the door leading into the north tower. An English description of the remains can be found in vol. 2, p. 303 of Tanoulas's book (note that volume numbers are necessary in references to this work, since the two volumes are paginated separately). So it is a vault, not an arch; it is medieval, not Roman; and it was constructed against the east side of the towers, not "out from the eastern tower." Oy.
- This appears to be the only reference in the Wikipedia article to Tanoulas's work, which I would have expected you to cite several times, since he has published more than any other scholar about the western entrance to the Acropolis after the end of antiquity. Given your usual thoroughness and your tendency to milk productive sources for more than just a single piece of information, this leads me to suspect that you didn't actually consult his book yourself, but instead got this reference at second or third hand, which might explain how the description became so badly garbled. In any case, it's a source that you should certainly look at more closely, not just to correct the problems in this sentence, but to fill out your discussion of the later history of the gate. It is freely available at the web site of the Athenian Archaeological Society, in two giant PDF files, one for each volume. It's not an easy read unless your modern Greek is very good, but happily it includes a detailed 30-page English summary (in the second volume, pp. 283–313, following the illustrations). That summary will give you a good overview of his conclusions, and it's probably be the best thing to cite in the English Wikipedia, even if you sometimes find yourself checking the full Greek text for further detail. There's some interesting information in there about the later history of the Beulé Gate: for example, according to Tanoulas, the large masonry buttresses against the outer north wall of the gate (which are prominent in the photograph currently placed in the "Excavation" section of the WP article) date to the 6th century, along with the reduction in the height of the doorway by the addition of a second, lower lintel (now removed, although the cuttings for it in the doorjambs are still very conspicuous); and in the Middle Byzantine period a second story was added to the gate, the back of which was supported by the barrel vault mentioned above, constructed along the eastern side. (For these dates, see vol. 2, pp. 307–309; and note that Tanoulas keeps his suggested chronology separate from his discussion of the physical remains, so to get the whole picture you need to look in two different places.)
- I think I've got all I can out of Tanoulas; please prod me if I've missed something striking. UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:33, 25 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- Agonothetes. I see from the comments before mine that some of the explanation of this term was added in response to suggestions from another editor, but result is unsatisfactory, because most of what you say in the text and the two explanatory notes is irrelevant to the institution of the agonothesia in Roman Athens. Athenian agonothetai never had anything to do with the panhellenic festivals at Olympia, Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea, and even if they had, is this really the right place to explain who was eligible to compete in the ancient Olympic games? There are plenty of places where Wikipedia readers can go to learn about such things, but an article about a Late Roman fortification on the Athenian acropolis is surely not one of them. The term athlothetai is also irrelevant here; this was the name given to the organizers of the Panathenaia in the Classical period, but by the time of Marcellinus these organizers had been known as agonothetai for centuries, so the athlothetai really have no business popping up in a discussion of agonothesia in the Roman and Late Roman periods. The problem with conflating evidence from different Greek states and different periods, as your footnotes do, is that the role of an agonothetes in city A during the 4th century BCE may tell you little about the role of an agonothetes in city B during the 2nd century CE. In Athens, happily, there is quite a bit of evidence, both literary and epigraphical, from the origins of agonothesia in the late 4th century BCE right down through the end of the Roman period, so there's no need to drag a bunch of festivals in other parts of Greece, administered by other cities, into the discussion. When agonothetai first appeared in Athens, it was as organizers of the Dionysian dramatic festivals, but by the Roman period the title was also given to those who organized the Panathenaia, the Eleusinia, the games associated with the Imperial cult, and just about every other festival in the Athenian calendar. How many of these were still going on in the mid-4th century CE is a different question, and the Marcellinus inscription, if correctly read and correctly dated, is one of the latest attestations of the term in Athens, so it's hard to be sure exactly what it implies. Under these circumstances, it would be better to keep things simple and write something like this in the text: "It also identifies him as a former agonothetes, an official whose duties in the Roman period included organizing the Panathenaia and other Athenian religious festivals." That much is undeniably true, easily sourced, and I think more than enough for the purposes of this article, especially since Marcellinus's role as an agonothetes is unconnected with his (still very hypothetical) involvement in the construction of the Beulé Gate. If you think something more is necessary here, and you want to put together a different explanatory note that more accurately reflects meaning of the term agonothetes in Roman Athens, a good place to start is the discussion in the chapter on liturgies in Geagan's The Athenian Constitution under Sulla, pp. 132–135, which is available on JSTOR or via the ASCSA web site (the latter open access). (That's also what I would recommend as a citation to support the sentence I propose above.)
- Dörpfeld's hypothesis. The article as it stands reports the differing opinions of Dörpfeld and Dinsmoor about the original location of the Nikias monument as if they were two equally viable alternatives. They are not. Dörpfeld made a lot of excellent observations about the building, many of which were confirmed by Dinsmoor, but there's a reason why Dinsmoor's 1910 article is so famous among students of Athenian archaeology: it's a master class in architectural detective work and it established beyond any reasonable doubt the form of the monument reused in the Beulé gate and the fact that it stood on the foundations at the eastern end of the Stoa of Eumenes. Dinsmoor's presentation of the evidence and the conclusions he drew from it are solid enough that they have survived more than a century of close scrutiny in a field where many other old assumptions have been modified or overturned by more recent scholarship. You will not find a single Athenian archaeologist who disagrees with him. Giving Dörpfeld's obsolete hypothesis equal weight with Dinsmoor's is like saying that some people think Wuthering Heights was written by a man named Ellis Bell, while others think it was written by a woman named Emily Bronte. We know who wrote it, and the fact that once upon a time some people didn't know is now just a historical curiosity.
- @Choliamb: I have no dispute with this, but am struggling to find it in print. I have Ida Thallon Hill in 1953 saying that Dörpfeld's ideas about the location of Nikias' monument were then considered out of date, but she is silent on the date, and I can't find a source which goes as far as saying Dörpfeld was wrong and Dinsmoor was right. Do you know of anyone who does? UndercoverClassicist T·C 16:57, 17 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- The reason why I (and Hill, and everyone else) focus on the location is because any chronological implications follow directly from, and are dependent upon, that location. You're unlikely to find anyone specifically addressing Dörpfeld's date separate from the location, because when the location fell, the date fell with it. (The only reason I listed this under the heading "Date" was because that's the section of the article in which you reported his hypothesis.) The reasoning that led Dörpfeld to propose a mid-2nd century date for the Beulé Gate was his belief that the Nikias Monument stood on the site of the future Odeion of Herodes, and must therefore have been dismantled ca. 160 to make way for the theater; under other circumstances few people, probably Dörpfeld least of all, would have suggested such an improbably early date for the gate as we see it today, which is impossible to reconcile with what we know of Athens and Athenian building in the Antonine period. His date for the demolition of the monument, if not for the construction of the gate, was a logical necessity if you accepted his hypothesis about its location. But once that hypothesis was shown to be wrong, the date of the Odeion became irrelevant, and we were left with the situation that we have today, in which the gate itself is pretty much the only evidence we have for the dismantling, and therefore the dismantling must be dated by the gate, rather than the other way around. It's not impossible, of course, that the monument was taken apart some years or even decades before the construction of the gate, and the pieces stored somewhere for future use, but if that was the case, there's no way to demonstrate it, so most scholars assume that the two events were closely linked in time. When Hill (in The Ancient of City of Athens, p. 110, which I assume is the passage you are referring to) states very clearly that (in your words) "Dörpfeld was wrong and Dinsmoor was right" about the location, she doesn't need to say "and also about the date," because the location was the only prop holding that date up. This may be unsatisfactory, but I'm afraid it's probably the best you can hope for. Whatever the correct date of the gate, it has nothing to do with the date of the Odeion, which was always a red herring, and was exposed as one as soon the true location of the monument was revealed. Choliamb (talk) 22:15, 17 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- Gotcha. I'll see what I can do: I suspect there's enough in Hill to say something like "by the 1950s, Dörpfeld's interpretation of the monument was no longer considered current". Wary of WP:SYNTH but also of the more pressing desire to not write stuff that's clearly wrong...! UndercoverClassicist T·C 07:41, 18 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wary of WP:SYNTH but also of the more pressing desire to not write stuff that's clearly wrong . I understand the problem, but I have to push back and say that even your hedged version is little misleading, since Dörpfeld's hypothesis was "no longer considered current" as soon as Dinsmoor's article was published. It didn't take 40 years to be gradually discarded. But is it necessary to pin the change to a precise year or decade? Or can you just write something like "Dörpfeld's hypothesis was directly challenged by Dinsmoor, who identified foundations at the eastern end of the Stoa of Eumenes as the original site of the monument, and Dinsmoor's view has since been unanimously accepted." And then cite, e.g., Hill 1953, Wycherley 1978, and Camp 2004 as examples of the modern scholarly consensus. That's a nice spread of three good secondary sources, each a synthetic work by a respected scholar aimed at general audiences and summarizing the existing specialist literature (i.e., platinum WP:RS), spread out over half a century. Would any of that violate WP policy? Choliamb (talk) 15:27, 18 January 2024 (UTC) (Editing to add that Wycherley 1978 = The Stones of Athens, which was the successor of Hill and the predecessor of Camp as the go-to general account of the topography and monuments of Athens; for the Nikias monument, see p. 184.) Choliamb (talk) 15:38, 18 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- I knew you were going to ask me for a source to prove that Dörpfeld's hypothesis became obsolete as soon as Dinsmoor published his article, so I didn't wait around, I just went out and rounded up a couple for you. Here's one: G. H. Chase, "Archaeology in 1910: Part II", CJ 7 (1911) 114–125, at 115. And here's another: Athens and Its Monuments (New York 1913), pp. 215–216. That should give you cover for anything you want to write. It really did happen overnight. Choliamb (talk) 16:11, 18 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- I'm surprised not to find Beulé himself among the references, especially since a good chunk of the article is about him and his exciting adventures in the world of high explosives. Consider the following?
- And speaking of Baelen 1958, what a marvelous article! I hadn't encountered it before, and knew nothing of the poetry contest. It was a very entertaining read. So thank you for that.
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