Talk:Hortensius (Cicero)/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: David Eppstein (talk · contribs) 00:09, 23 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Summary: Fail. Major problems with inadequate coverage of available source material, insufficently specific referencing, and close paraphrasing. A sufficiently long way to go to get this into shape for GA that it would require a new and independent review.

Good article criteria

The prose is acceptable, with occasional problems with weasel wording or overly vague wording, but with large fractions of our article too closely paraphrased from a single source. The lead contains some material that should be placed elsewhere in the article and summarized in the lead. The short length of the lead is acceptable given the short length of the overall article, but the overall article is too short to adequately cover its subject.
Many of the references are incomplete, one major reference appears to be nonexistent, and many likely references are not used. On the other hand, the references used appear reliable. Some material in the article is extrapolated past what the reliable sources actually say about the same topics.
The article is too short to cover the topic as broadly as it should be covered. Given this, there are no problems with overly detailed treatments of subtopics.
What material is covered seems to be covered neutrally enough.
The article had a significant edit soon after its nomination, and since then edits have been small but ongoing. I think there is no significant issue with stability at this time.
The article is illustrated by a bust of Cicero, with no copyright issues. Given the subject, and the fact that the original manuscript has been lost, it is not reasonable to expect much more.

Lead section

The one-paragraph length is appropriate for the relatively short (3174B) length of the article
The lead includes an analysis of the content of the dialogue ("that genuine human happiness is to be found...") that properly belongs, with an expansion if possible, in the text of the article, with a summary in the lead.
The source given for this analysis does not support what our article says: it says that Hortensius rebuts a previous argument that philosophy is useless and doesn't contribute to happiness, but does not say what we say here, that Hortensius describes philosophy as being the way to happiness.

History and composition

This section mixes up three different things in a single paragraph: what was happening in Cicero's life as the context for writing this, the content of the dialogue, and the literary connection of the dialogue to other works of the time. Each of these deserves more than a third of a paragraph.
"unhappy time in Cicero's life" is closely paraphrased from the source, "unhappy period in Cicero's life", and "isolated himself in his villa at Astura" is again uncomfortably closed to the source "shut himself up in his villa by the sea at Astura".
What is the point of having two separate copies of the same footnote in the same paragraph with no other intervening footnotes?
Taylor gives some indication of the length of the remaining fragments of this text, but our article does not.
Taylor also says that there are many critical studies, and cites two as the most notable, but these two are not among the sources and aside from Taylor himself the only other study cited is Russell's. Searching Google scholar for Cicero and Hortensius again finds many works on the subject not mentioned nor summarized here.
The whole sequence of sentences from "The Hortensius was modeled" to "Cicero himself praises the virtues of philosophy" is lifted almost verbatim from Taylor.
"inspiring its readers": this is a dangling participial that grammatically appears to attach to "the ancient world". When one attempts to resolve where it should really attach, it is unclear whether Hortensius or Protreptikos is intended.
The source says that Cicero used arguments from Protreptikos, but again that's different from what our article says, that Hortensius is an adaptation and expansion of Protreptikos. Additionally, our article says that Cicero's purpose was to spread Greek philosophy to Rome, but that appears not to be in the source (at least, the one source I could check).

Legacy

"Some have theorized" — who? Be specific.
The entire first half of this paragraph is again cribbed from a single paragraph of Taylor (with the same claims in the same order and very similar phrasing).
Again, what is the point of having two consecutive copies of the same footnote?
The claim that it "survived into the Christian era as a schoolbook" is surprisingly vague in its dating etc., given how we know this: because Augustine used it as a schoolbook. And the effect of this book on Augustine deserves at least a whole paragraph, not a single-sentence summary tacked on to the end of a paragraph about something else (how much of the text survives and how it survived).

Notes and references

Footnote [4], "Augustine 2006", gives me "Harv error: link from #CITEREFAugustine2006 doesn't point to any citation."
The Cummings footnote could use some indication of which encyclopedia entry is being cited, not just which page number it was on, in case a reader has access to a different version of the encyclopedia.
Hutchinson and Johnson is missing an ISBN and indeed I can find no online evidence that this book exists at all. D. S. Hutchinson is known as a scholar of the Protrepticus so the title is plausible, but Worldcat lists nothing by him with anything resembling this title.
The footnote to Taylor should be split into four separate footnotes that give the specific pages in Taylor where the sourced information can be found. Giving the whole range of page numbers for a 13-page article is not helpful. This range should be included in the references section entry for Taylor, not in the footnote.
The other reference to an academic journal article (Russell) is also missing page numbers. The use made of the Russell reference is very shallow; Russell argues that Augustine developed a youthful zeal for philosophy but lapsed into worldly concerns and that his reading of Hortensius marks the beginning rather than the end of his turn towards philosophy. But the editors of our article appear to be using only the opening lines of Russell describing what anyone can read for themselves: the literal words of Augustine, without any such analysis.
The reference to a whole book (Rabinowitz) as "passim" rather than giving specific page numbers is unacceptable, especially when it is an offline source rather than one that can be searched electronically.

—David Eppstein (talk) 01:17, 23 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]