Talk:Hestiaea

Worthless article created by a fool
Don't believe any of this. Most of it is wrong, and the creator is an ignorant idiot who reverted a real Greek scholar who came along, happened to see the error, and fixed it; only to be reverted and insulted for his pains. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.147.171.145 (talk) 10:47, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Grammarian, antiquarian
Several works describe her as a grammarian; e.g.:
 * "Hestiaea was a grammarian who wrote a treatise on whether the Trojan War had been fought around the city named Ilium in her own day."
 * "Hestiaea, the grammarian, is cited in pseudo-Didymus in his comments on the third book of the Iliad."
 * "Hestiaea, a learned lady and grammarian of Alexandrea"

Luce (cited in the article) describes her as an antiquarian. Should we add any of these descriptors, or just leave her as a "scholar"? I am not clear how many classical sources there are that say anything about her, apart from Strabo, and how much they do say.  J N  466  15:26, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
 * We should figure out whether "Pseudo-Didymus" (who i had never heard of) actually did mention here, and what he wrote. If there is indeed a second source on Hestiea, we should figure out what's there and add as appropriate. We should be careful not to write based on the imaginations of much, much more recent writers.Bali ultimate (talk) 15:42, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Cited in the Homeric scholia?
Check out footnote 6 of Schliemann here: He says she's "cited repeatedly in the Homeric scholia." He seems to be talking about this: Venetus A. I'll look into this later when I have time but I thought I'd put a note up here in case someone else wants to do it or already understands what's going on with this. One issue, of course, is that previously the article said that she was known only by the mention in Strabo. I was investigating whether or not that claim should be replaced and found this. On a separate note, is it worth putting in something about how Schliemann strongly disagreed with her? He goes on about it at length. Although of course he could be seen as having a COI POV, given that "Mrs. Schliemann" excavated some of the stuff that Hestiea talked about (joke).&mdash; alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 15:52, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Since I was asked. . .
Mentions in secondary works, in my opinion, are not worth much. Often, those works have started to slide down the slope of error. A lot of 19c popularizing works are full of serious errors, and it's not because they're available (read: online) that they can be trusted, although in the case at hand, MacLaren was a good scholar, as far as I can tell: and he certainly didn't say anything that could lead one to write the earlier version of this entry.

So primary sources it is: and I was roundly mistaken in stating that Strabo was our sole source for Hesti(a)ea: kudos to those who've ferreted out ps-Didymus and the Venetus B scholiast etc.

The spelling of the woman's name matters little; I suppose Hestiaea is somewhat better, but Hestiea is acceptable as well. Usually I don't think much of spelling Polykleitos where Polyclitus is meant, but here she's so obscure that there's no traditional spelling, and the more pedantic spelling is probably better. It's a preference, not something to argue about: a redirect page for whichever spelling is decided to be the alternate might be useful.

24.136.6.162 (talk) 17:04, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
 * This blog post ("Posted by Bill Thayer") relates to some of the discussion above and to the frenzied activity on the article on 14 September. Andrew Dalby 19:44, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I removed the reference to a book by John Lascelles, which is described as "fiction" on its Google Books page, and (whether or not that is true) is produced by a so-called self-publisher. It was cited only for a detail that's better-sourced already. If anyone thinks I was wrong, please tell me.
 * And now I've found a citation (not repeated citations, cf. Schliemann quoted above) in the Homeric scholia, so I have added this in the article. Andrew Dalby 20:32, 13 October 2012 (UTC)