Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mithridates (soldier)


 * 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. The arguments citing WP:BIO1E has not been successfully refuted. Stifle (talk) 14:57, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Mithridates (soldier)

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

WP:BIO1E Extremely minor figure in the writing of Plutarch. Current version is essentially a plot summary of parts of Plutarch's Life of Artaxerxes. There's not really any significant coverage of this individual in the academic literature as far as I can see. The death penalty that they were supposedly subjected to, Scaphism seems notable and is a possible redirect target. Any content of this article can easily be covered elsewhere. Hemiauchenia (talk) 01:11, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. Hemiauchenia (talk) 01:11, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Iran-related deletion discussions. Hemiauchenia (talk) 01:11, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Iraq-related deletion discussions. Hemiauchenia (talk) 01:11, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Military-related deletion discussions. Hemiauchenia (talk) 01:11, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep: Before a certain point in history (and 401 BC is certainly before that point), anyone known to us can be reasonably treated as notable; the records are so sparse it's a bit absurd to try make gradients. (The subject seems to have the level of scholarly mention I'd expect of minor-but-known ancient figures, both included and not in the article.) That doesn't necessarily answer whether we should have a stand-alone article, which is closer to the nominator's contention, so it's worth responding to that too. Mithridates is the first known case of (supposed) scaphism, and it's reasonable to have a stand-alone article discussing the specific context of this case; readers could reasonably desire to know more than would be due to include in the scaphism article itself about a single individual. There's also the open question of whether scaphism actually existed, and merging further Mithridates-related content to that article would risk unbalancing its perspective even more in favour of that of its historical accuracy (as it stands the article is already severely imbalanced), while simply redirecting -- or the damnably realistic outcome of a merge that eventually gets turned into a de facto redirect by such content being removed as undue -- would leave the interested reader with no place to find detail they might reasonably want to read. The article could use some work (some of the quotes can be turned into properly contextualized own-words text), but this is a normal-editing matter. Vaticidalprophet 04:35, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Before a certain point in history (and 401 BC is certainly before that point), anyone known to us can be reasonably treated as notable is certainly an "interesting" interpretation of the notability guidelines. There are plenty of individuals recorded in cuneiform transactions and the like that I would not consider notable. The detail surrounding the deaths of Cyrus are better covered at Cyrus the Younger or the battle article. Hemiauchenia (talk) 05:25, 16 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Keep. The argument that everyone whose name is known from classical antiquity possesses some notability is venerable, but unnecessary here—the fact that this Mithridates is mentioned in other articles, about Cyrus, Artaxerxes, scaphism, etc. makes that line of argument redundant.  However, it may be difficult to cover the topic adequately over the course of multiple articles; in each of these he would naturally be mentioned only in passing, or for one aspect of this article.  If someone tried to fold all of this into any of them—although I think perhaps the quotations are excessive, and that they could be trimmed and/or summarized to better effect—the chances are that the material would be significantly edited down because of undue weight in what is, admittedly, a minor episode.  Nonetheless, we have a soldier who ostensibly killed a king, or at least the claimant to the throne, and thereby changed the course of a war.  That makes him notable, and the fact that he later boasted of his exploit and was put to death in what may be the first historical or literary example of a particularly gruesome method of punishment is also notable.  This collection of facts doesn't really belong in any one other article, except perhaps as a passing mention, and this topic deserves a bit more than that.  It may be too long as is, but that can be fixed, leaving a respectable short article.  P Aculeius (talk) 15:59, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete. Surely this –>> "According to Plutarch's Life of Artaxerxes, a young Persian soldier named Mithridates unknowingly struck Cyrus the Younger during the Battle of Cunaxa... Mithridates boasted of killing Cyrus in the court, and Parysatis had him executed by scaphism" <<– in the article of Cyrus the Younger (and similar notices elsewhere) is already enough. Topic doesn't merit a standalone article (the definition of 'notability') due to lack of coverage in secondary sources (WP:NBASIC). And who knows if Plutarch's account can even be taken at face value. Avilich (talk) 23:56, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Whether Plutarch's account is accurate is not the point: figures from legend or mythology are still notable irrespective of their historicity, and Plutarch is generally regarded as a reliable source, even though he reported stories and traditions as well as provable fact—and he admitted as much, just as modern historians mention widely-known anecdotes: they're an indication of how people regarded historical persons and events, whether or not the anecdotes themselves can be proven. The question of secondary sources is relevant, but I found some (including some recent ones) with a simple Google search for "Mithridates, slayer of Cyrus" (perhaps not the best formulation, but the fact that it worked means that the sources demanded exist, and that "Before" was not followed).  Notability is a given: he's the killer (or assassin, even unwittingly) of a king, whose deed changed the course of a civil war.  Not to mention the first known victim of an infamous form of execution.  The only reason for not having an article would be if there's not enough material, but the fact that a thorough discussion of this fellow, even pared down from the article's present state, would be unduly long in an article about Cyrus or Artaxerxes, means that a stand-alone article is justified.  P Aculeius (talk) 05:45, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
 * It would not be unduly long because that sentence contains all that is known about him. "Notability" (not has nothing to do with someone being a killer or associated with someone important: it's just Wikipedia's term for a topic having received enough coverage that it requires an article for the information not to be unduly long elsewhere. This is not the case here. A standalone article simply adds nothing, and is just an unnecessary content fork, though those large quotes may give the opposite impression. Avilich (talk) 14:04, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
 * The notion that the assassin of a king lacks notability because "notability cannot be inherited" contorts Wikipedia's notability guidelines beyond recognition. By this argument, none of the twentieth century's famous assassins merit inclusion—all of them were nobodies who came to public attention solely because of a single act, achieving nothing particularly noteworthy before or after it.  You may well argue that "other facts are known about them", but that is a separate argument, and has nothing to do with notability.  And the claim that "that sentence contains all that is known about him" is demonstrably false.  The passages quoted, however excessive, include a number of details about his motivations, conduct, and personality, just as they do about the motives and character of the man who ordered his gruesome execution.  But most of these details would likely be excluded from any articles about Artaxerxes or Cyrus, since Mithridates is not the subject of those articles, and in them a brief summary would be expected—much as we would not expect all of the facts about Lee Harvey Oswald to appear in the article about John F. Kennedy, or even the article about Kennedy's assassination (which is actually considerably shorter), or all of the details about Gavrilo Princip to appear under Franz Ferdinand or his assassination.  A lack of notability cannot reasonably be argued in this case—the sole question is whether there would be sufficient content to justify a stand-alone article once the current contents are edited down to a reasonable length; and this can be determined from the fact that the various details that are properly be included here would be excessive in articles about other persons or topics that could discuss Mithridates, while even the main facts would have to be dispersed amongst multiple other articles.  P Aculeius (talk) 15:13, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
 * A lack of notability cannot reasonably be argued in this case—the sole question is whether there would be sufficient content to justify a stand-alone article once the current contents are edited down to a reasonable length In Wikipedia, those are the same thing. And besides, after removing those gigantic quotes, all that remains can be summed up in one or two sentences in Cyrus the Younger's article with no loss of information. If you don't think that, then we'll have to agree to disagree. Avilich (talk) 00:31, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Notability has nothing to do with the length of an article; many notable persons have very short articles, or none at all. And it would be utterly inappropriate to "remove" the quotations without summarizing or paraphrasing the relevant passages, which would leave a great deal more than your one-sentence summary.  What we have here is an article where the original editors identified the relevant facts, but failed to extract them from the original source, or provide additional context from secondary sources.  That means that we have an article in need of improvement—not deletion.  P Aculeius (talk) 05:04, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I said nothing of the length of the article specifically, just pointing out how WP:SIGCOV works. There's no evidence so far that the sources which the editors "failed" to find actually exist. Avilich (talk) 06:14, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
 * You said that the two things I mentioned (lack of notability, sufficient content to justify a stand-alone article) were "the same thing". There are many notable persons about whom not much is known.  And I clearly indicated that I found additional sources with a simple Google search, which you could have replicated just by typing in the same search terms (which I said were probably sub-optimal).  But it's not my job to pile up evidence in order to save the article—I'm merely pointing out that the nomination is premised on the claim that there are no academic sources, when the most cursory of searches would have found some.  This nomination fails to demonstrate lack of notability or lack of sources, so the discussion should be closed as "keep".  Any editor is free to improve the article by reworking and/or editing down the quotations—bearing in mind that the subject is historically significant, and that there is more to say about him than would justifiably be merged into other articles; the "improvement" should not be done with the goal of reducing the article to one or two sentences in order to renominate it for deletion.  Just because the quotations are overly-long doesn't mean that there shouldn't be any; just because some of the details don't seem important to the course of history doesn't mean they shouldn't be mentioned.  Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not just a collection of highlights with all of the details squeezed out.  P Aculeius (talk) 16:03, 19 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Comment At a minimum this article has way too much coatracking about things not directly related to the subject, and way too many and too long quotes directly from sources. If it is kept, we need to rework it to focus on the subject and to not look like it belongs in Wikisource.John Pack Lambert (talk) 16:18, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete. There is quite a lot of discussion on Mithridates in Carsten Binder, Plutarchs Vita des Artaxerxes, de Gruyter, 2008 (ISBN 9783110202694). However Binder does say that nothing more can be said of Mithridates than what Plutarch tells. He mostly deals with the sources of Plutarch for the story and a literary analysis of its use within the narrative. I don't think Wikipedia should reproduce that kind of in-depth analysis of a text and therefore think the article has to be deleted, or possibly redirected to Cyrus the Younger#Expedition against Artaxerxes II (401 BC). There may be more room to talk about the story in an article Life of Artaxerxes. I have Binder's book in pdf if someone wants to create this article (but it's in German). T8612  (talk) 10:48, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Weak keep/merge to scaphism. This seems to me to be right on the borderline of being worth keeping – but I think that a lot of discussion of notability in this AfD so far is utterly unrelated to what our guidelines actually say.  WP:GNG sets out as a standard for notability "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject", and I think this is the standard we should be considering the article by.
 * P.Aculeius' assertion that assassins of world leaders must be notable in general because otherwise we wouldn't be able to have a page on e.g. Lee Harvey Oswald seems to me to be clearly wrong – Lee Harvey Oswald meets GNG through being the subject of several books. If Mithridates had likewise been the subject of several books, he would be unquestionably notable. (And, uh, Mithridates wasn't an assassin, and he didn't kill a world leader; he was the soldier who happened to be credited with the death of a claimant to the throne!)
 * Not what I said. I said that the argument that "notability can't be inherited" can't be used to claim that "assassins aren't notable, because their notability is derived from their relationship to their victims".  It's true that there are lots of reliable sources about 20th century assassins—because they're recent, whereas Plutarch may be the only source for Mithridates, simply because the death of Artaxerxes occurred more than two thousand years ago.  But few if any of these persons did anything notable before or after killing someone famous; they are notable solely due to one act, but cannot be described as non-notable because "notability cannot be inherited".  I'm not going to quibble about the loose description of Mithridates as an "assassin", which was never relevant to any point I made, but arguably two people claiming to be king, each one leading their own army against the other, could reasonably be described as "leaders"—in fact it sounds like Artaxerxes was on the verge of winning the war and becoming the undisputed king, when Mithridates happened to kill him.  But whether you call him a "world leader" also isn't really important.  My argument for notability is that he's the pivotal figure in ending the war (at least according to Plutarch), and sufficient details are known about him to justify an article—details that would not be adequately covered in any of the other articles that would naturally mention him.  The fact that several modern writers discuss Mithridates—even if not in great detail—both strengthens the argument for keeping the article, and demonstrates that one of the premises for this nomination was incorrect.  P Aculeius (talk) 00:04, 22 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I also am highly suspicious of the argument that "once you get far enough back in history, anyone who we know the name of should be considered notable". If all we know about a figure is their name, and there is no discussion of them in reliable sources, then just blindly making an article which says "X was a figure in Greek history, mentioned on inscription Y" when nothing further can be said about them is pretty much pointless.
 * On the other hand, the fact that an ancient figure only appears in one ancient source does not mean that they are inherently not notable – Neaira (hetaira) is an example of a figure who exists in only one ancient source and yet has been the subject of a book-length biography by a modern scholar, and thus I would argue is notable. In the case of Mithridates, the fact that (per T8612 - I don't have access) Carsten Binder discusses the case in depth in his commentary on the life of Artaxerxes, plus the discussion by Bruce Lincoln in From Artaxerxes to Abu Ghraib makes me think that there is just about enough commentary in reliable sources to pass the notability barrier.  I wouldn't object to a merge to scaphism given that all of the coverage seems to be about his execution, however. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 13:21, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Your source doesn't seem to offer any actual commentary on Mithridates though, just of Plutarch's portrayal of his torture in the context of "imperial violence". He even just quotes the entire thing and takes Plutarch's account at face value (offering, thus, as little additional commentary as possible) while making his point. Your source may be usable on scaphism, though. As for Binder, his analysis of Mithridates himself appears to be limited to (Google translation, p. 208) "nothing additional can be said about the Mithridates mentioned by Plutarch in addition to the information handed down here after Ctesias: He is said to have participated in the killing of Cyrus the Younger in the battle of Kunaxa may have been involved and later executed by Artaxerxes II at the instigation of the Parysatis" – which seems to confirm that the subject fails GNG. The rest of what Binder says concerns spelling, etymology (pp. 207–8), passing mentions, and, as T8612 said, a "literary analysis" of the story within the narrative, none of which is really relevant to Mithridates himself. So I still think that a brief notice in the article Cyrus the Younger (and others) is already enough, and that this should not be a standalone page. Avilich (talk) 20:20, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Yeah, as I said I think it's at best a marginal keep, and I could definitely be persuaded that merging to scaphism is the way forward. That said, I think that literary analysis of the story of Mithridates in Plutarch's narrative absolutely could fit into an article on Mithridates – just as, say, an analysis of the place of Aspasia in Old Comedy and fourth-century philosophy fits into an article on Aspasia. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 20:13, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Sandstein   15:35, 25 January 2022 (UTC) Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Less Unless (talk) 08:09, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep -- If this were about a modern murder, we would make if "murder of foo", but I think there was more than one Artaxerxes, so that the best answer is to do nothing. Peterkingiron (talk) 19:11, 23 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep: per Vaticidalprophet. –– FormalDude  talk  00:13, 25 January 2022 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.


 * Delete per Avilich. Lkb335 (talk) 21:39, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete: I'm sympathetic to lots of the keep arguments here, but the article has a problem beyond just notability: it's almost entirely giant block quotes. If anyone were to clean this up to try to match current en-wiki standards there'd be barely anything left - and what is left is covered on Scaphism and Cyrus the Younger. I think someone else should check to make sure there isn't anything important missing from either of those articles that is here (I didn't see anything I was inclined to copy over, but someone else might?), but both of those articles already link to each other, so deleting this one won't even really leave a hole there. -- asilvering (talk) 01:26, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete. This is a WP:BIO1E case: the man is known only for killing a ruler and being executed for it, and there's nothing to say about him that can't or shouldn't be said about him in the articles about the ruler and the execution method.  Sandstein   08:38, 10 February 2022 (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.