User talk:Erniep1972
Your draft article, Draft:Pylia (surname)
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Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia! UnitedStatesian (talk) 16:57, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
Reversion of edits to Pilia (gens)
Hi there, thought I'd explain why I reverted your edits to this article, in case you were confused and my edit summary wasn't sufficiently clear. This article is about a Roman gens, and while it's not absolutely impossible for a gentile name to be of Greek origin, it's highly unlikely, particularly in the Republican period. Such a family would probably not have been native to Italy, and not likely been granted Roman citizenship at this early a date—unless perhaps descended from freedmen, who would normally have taken the nomen of the official who granted them their freedom. A connection with "Pylas" seems speculative at best, based on nothing more than a vague similarity of the names; but 'y' is more likely to have been latinized as 'u' than as 'i'. In any case, the Pomponii were amongst the plebeian nobility at Rome, and despite the surname 'Atticus' were not really of Greek descent; Atticus derived his surname from having studied Greek at Athens, and because he was attached to that city. But it's unlikely he married a Greek woman, and less likely still that the Marcus and Quintus Pilius mentioned by Cicero were freedmen, rather than free-born Roman citizens.
There were, as you note, a large number of Pilii bearing Greek surnames, which if they constituted a single family would perhaps suggest a Greek descent. But these are either all or nearly all freedmen and women, and would not have been born into the Pilia gens. They would have been slaves, perhaps of Greek descent (although if born into slavery, their masters may have given them Greek names, irrespective of their ethnicity), and received the gentile name Pilius upon their emancipation, at which time they appended their original names as cognomina. While this outwardly gives the appearance of a large family of Greek descent, all it really means is that the Pilii owned a lot of slaves with Greek names—or rather, we know more of the freedmen of this gens than we do of the original family. Since wealthy Romans could own many slaves—as for that matter, could freedmen—it's not that surprising that we have a disproportionately large number of freedmen in the inscriptions of a small family. Of course, there may be many lost generations of Pilii from Picenum, Etruria, or wherever else they lived under the Republic; by far the greatest number of inscriptions are from Imperial times, and the greater number of early inscriptions are from Rome and its environs, not a very rural area such as Picenum.
In all, the gist of the reversion is that we can't learn anything about the ethnicity of the Pilia gens from the surnames of their freedmen; individually many of the freedmen may have been Greek, but these wouldn't have constituted a distinct family, and even then we can't be sure of whether they were Greeks or merely given Greek names as slaves. The earliest Pilii mentioned were probably not freedmen, since it's unlikely that Pomponius married into a family of freedmen; and the similarity of "Pilius" to the Greek name "Pylas" seems rather attenuated at best, and based on nothing more than a superficial resemblance. It's far more likely that the gentilicium is a native Latin or Picentine name. P Aculeius (talk) 14:38, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
- I never suggested that Titus Pomponius Atticus would have been greek or that he married a greek woman, you misunderstood me at that point. Neither him or Caecilia Pilia were from Greece. The greek name of Pylia is traslated usually as "Pilia" in modern spanish and italian languages. In effect the translation of that name from greek to latin is most common like "Pulia", but there are some evidence that in the past some times the cognomen of Caecilia, (the friend of Cicero), was written either as "Pylia" or "Pilia" (I attach you some reference about this).
- 1) https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=OHM2WyneOr4C&pg=PA46-IA1&lpg=PA46-IA1&dq=Caecilia+pylia&source=bl&ots=GLAOOlEdSp&sig=ACfU3U1UTfQnc72UVGGUgKDwVJ5PGN7NLA&hl=es-419&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi7v52es6vhAhVeFLkGHairB0EQ6AEwCXoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=Caecilia%20pylia&f=false
- Futher more there were some sources analizying both possibilities for the meaning of "Pilia" with the "i" and "y".
- 1)Benito Jeronimo Feijoo - Teatro critico universal (1726-1739)pag.362 https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=-KdSAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA362&lpg=PA362&dq=pylia+pilia&source=bl&ots=HubrzpS_W1&sig=2ilILQk2uKmzAJwWMlvmPANoJCM&hl=es-419&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiRrJPYnaLcAhXLwFkKHXwLCmoQ6AEITDAE#v=onepage&q=pylia%20pilia&f=false
- 2)In this book there is a reference about a theory of greek people carrying the cult of Asclepius at Iberian Peninsula pag. 41 https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=0y5fj2REfEIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=piladis&f=false (the text is in spanish).
- I know that some some sources have suggested that the cognomen of Pilia could come from the hat "pileo" that slave people from Rome were wearing at the moment of achieve their their freedom, but in romance languages the pronunciation of both words have a big difference. "Pilia" and "Pylia" are homophonic words with accentuation in the second "i" while the "pilia" word resulting of the object "Pileo" is accentuated in the first "i" (if you speak only in English you should write in the Google translator "Píleo" and "Pilía" withe the different accent marks to notice the difference of sounds).
- But there is not another source that David Chase that could suggest about the picenian origin of Pilia gens.
- But if you take in count that some Pilia families were from Puglia (Apulia) then you'll understand why I'm suggesting the greek origin of that ethnia. Apulia was a region plenty of greek people in its origin. Some of theme arrived there from the expansion of Megara between the centuries VI and VIII BCE. (see the history of Apulia if you wish).
- I leave you some reference about all of these for your consideration or analysis. Best whises.
- By the way, "Pilia" today is a well known surname in Italy in special in the Sardinia island where they wrongly believe that its origin come from a saint called Priam, possibility that result completely anachronic by almost 1 century of difference! Erniep1972 (talk) 05:52, 14 June 2020 (UTC)
- That's quite a lot to digest, but I'll do my best. First, I didn't misunderstand you to say that Atticus was Greek; I was unclear about the reason why I said that he was not. Part of your argument is that the Pilii might have been Greek because a lot of them have Greek surnames. I was explaining that the reason for this is that most of the ones with Greek surnames were either freedmen of Greek origin, or had been given Greek names during their servitude; they were not born into the Pilia gens. The fact that Atticus' wife was Pilia, together with the fact that Cicero mentions a Marcus Pilius and a Quintus Pilius, are a good indication that they were native Italians, rather than Greek transplants or the descendants of freedmen (who, however, would most likely have taken a Roman name, rather than inventing a new Nomen based on a Greek name, although that was not absolutely impossible). I pointed out that Atticus' surname was also evidence that having a Greek surname did not make one Greek; and because if it did, his name might also be construed as evidence that Pilia was from a Greek family.
- The sources for spelling "Pilia" as "Pylia" are not very helpful, and may actually be duplicative of each other, but in any case are all very old and all seem to refer to one or two obsolete spellings in Cicero, as all occur in lexicons/concordances of Cicero, and to the same one or two passages, neither of which spells it "Pylia" in modern versions. They were published in 1556, 1561, 1582, 1713, and 1753. I do not claim these are without value because they are old. But they do little to prove that the name was spelled "Pylia" in antiquity; had it been, modern editions would surely employ or at least mention this spelling. These instances seem to be better evidence of a former scheme for modernizing Latin than as an example of what Cicero himself wrote.
- The next two sources don't actually discuss the possible spelling of "Pilia" as "Pylia". The first one seems to concern the etymology of "pilaster", and the argument that it's derived from "pyliastris". Although the discussion mentions the words "pilus" and "pileus", it doesn't mention anybody named "Pilius" or "Pilia", so it's really not on point; and even if it were, it's not clear to what extent the Universal Theatre Critic" from the early 18th century would be authoritative as to the ethnic origins of the Pilii. The next source comes slightly closer to saying something useful, in that it discusses the cognomen Piladis found in Spain, and the theories that it's derived from either Latin "pilus" or Greek "Pylades". But again, this isn't a discussion of the Pilii—so it's not really on point.
- I'm not sure what sources you're pointing to that attempt to derive Pilius from the pileus, since the UTC is discussing "pilasters" and the one discussing the surname Piladis doesn't appear to mention the pileus or any of the Pilii. Perhaps you're confusing the cognomen and the nomen gentilicium—they are not the same, and there is no apparent connection, as the surname Piladis is cited as belonging to some of the Fulvii. The article on the Pilia gens says nothing about pronunciation, nor would it normally do so unless there were competing theories. But at this point no source indicates that its etymology is disputed between "pileus" and "Pylas", because no source besides Chase seems to mention the nomen gentilicium. However, I concede that there is no source for a Picentine origin; Chase doesn't actually say they were Picentines: I evidently misread the passage in which non-Latin gentes were classed together, in which related names are separated by commas—Pilius is separated by a semicolon, which means that Chase was not including it with the subsequent nomen that he described as Picentine. I'll correct that.
- The presence of several Pilii in Apulia is an important clue, but it doesn't rule out the possibility that they settled there as Roman colonists. It certainly would be explainable if they were the descendants of Greek colonists, but again we don't have any source saying that they were Greeks or connecting their nomen with "Pylas". And without a source directly saying so, it looks as though you're inferring it by examples of similar names. This would be "original research", i.e. your own analysis of various evidence, rather than anything found in scholarly literature. Wikipedia doesn't permit the use of original research in articles. I know the distinction between presenting what different sources say about different aspects of a topic and synthesizing them can be a bit blurry. If we had a source—such as a Latin dictionary, preferably a modern one—explicitly saying what "pilius" means in Latin, I would probably not consider that "original research". But concluding that it's likely to be Greek because it vaguely resembles "Pylas", and because 'y' and 'i' could possibly have been interchanged is a big leap, and not a terribly probable one; it needs an independent source that explicitly raises the possibility that Pilius was etymologically related to Pylas, and we don't have that here. P Aculeius (talk) 15:12, 14 June 2020 (UTC)