Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Caecilia Metella (daughter of Calvus)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete.  JGHowes   talk  03:15, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

Caecilia Metella (daughter of Calvus)

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The only known detail about this woman's life is a passage in Plutarch's Life of Lucullus (1.1): "... his mother, Caecilia, had the bad name of a dissolute woman". The secondary source used in the article adds nothing aside from this and cites the same source I just mentioned. The very few known facts of her life are all already described in Lucius Licinius Lucullus (praetor 104 BC), Caecilia gens and Lucullus; a separate article for her is totally unnecessary. Avilich (talk) 23:56, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Women-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 00:07, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 00:07, 11 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Delete. Several articles that have been created on Roman Republican women fail the notability test. They often only say "she was the wife/daughter/sister/mother of..." and that's it. This Caecilia existed, but this is not enough. I feel that most of these articles on Roman Republican women were created to reduce the gender gap on Wikipedia (there are much more articles on men than women), but this should not be a reason to make articles like this one. We will not create an article for every Roman that existed, they need to have done something notable, or held a particular position that made them notable. There is an entry for Caecilia Metella in the RE (a better source than the A to Z of Ancient Greek and Roman Women, which I do not find convincing), but Münzer could tell very little on her, apart from quoting the slur by Plutarch. T8612  (talk) 03:39, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
 * For those who wish "RE" to be deobfuscated it is the Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:19, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete -- Apart from her scandalous affairs, we have nothing here but genealogy. Perhaps REdirect to a family article.  Peterkingiron (talk) 16:22, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete Does not meet WP:GNG, not enough coverage.Peter303x (talk) 21:31, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Comment: Apart from Plutarch, I cannot see anything about her in any of the other sources mentioned in the RE article—but perhaps that's due to my difficulty finding the corresponding passages cited. This article seems to contain several specific details that are not mentioned by Plutarch, although they're not so voluminous that they couldn't fit in an entry under "Caecilia gens".  Can anyone find any of these details, or does the A to Z of Ancient Greek and Roman Women appear to be the source?  Without even one corresponding source for these details in Greek and Roman writers, I hesitate to add them there, and I'm uncomfortable deleting material that might have a reputable source, if doing so makes it unlikely that anyone will look for or find them.  P Aculeius (talk) 15:42, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
 * I presume you mean the specific allegations of affairs with slaves and an eventual divorce, in which case I could find nothing anywhere. The source for these allegations is not the A to Z book, which was added in fact only a couple days ago (the article had no sources at all during its previous 11 years) and adds nothing not already in the RE.
 * Arthur Keaveney, in his Lucullus: A Life, says of her, "all we know is that she was said to be a bad woman". Neither him nor Münzer seem aware of any fact about her other than that she was the sister of Metellus Numidicus and that she had a dissolute life, the latter being attested (it seems) only by Plutarch. Based on this, I'm inclined to view the part about slaves and divorce as an error or invention by the article's creator. Avilich (talk) 18:04, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
 * I'll also add here that the 19th-century Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, which served as the starting point for many Wikipedia articles and could be expected to have underpinned this one too, likewise adds nothing beyond that "her moral character was in bad repute". Avilich (talk) 18:11, 12 December 2020 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.