Talk:Halotus/GA1

GA Reassessment

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In the portion where it is discussed why Halotus may have been made a eunuch, the information provided is blatantly incorrect and anachronistic. The sources used for such information do not appear to pertain to the Roman world whatsoever. Romans did not at all fear relationships between a master and a slave, it was quite the opposite; Master-slave relationships are a given in the Roman world and to suggest otherwise shows that whomever authored that section was ad-libbing material with little actual knowledge of the topic. The Romans actually would castrate slaves purely for the purpose of maintaining sexual promiscuity found desirable by many masters, see 'Roman Homosexuality' by Craig Williams —or the plethora of other work on the topic. Castrating was done to prevent masculine physical attributes from developing and extend the life of desirable boyish traits. Castrated slaves probably constituted some of the those called glabrorum (or hairless ones), which were specifically kept in a harem-like environment for sexual use.

Oof, the sourcing here is overall pretty concerning. The claims about why Halotus was made a eunuch are sourced to Ephraim Chambers' Cylclopedia of 1728, which is not exactly a high quality reliable source. A couple of things are sourced to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, and quite a lot directly to ancient sources. Others sources I am concerned about are:

• John Augustus Keats An Introduction to Quantitative Psychology. J. Wiley & Sons, 1971. – why on earth are we citing an introductory psychology textbook here?
• Jacob Abbott Nero 1881 – is this still considered a high-quality reliable source? Ancient history from the 19th century is usually super outdated.
• Robert Lynam, The History of the Roman Emperors: From Augustus to the Death of Marcus 1850 – even more dated than Abbott.
• Making of America Project, Jared Sparks, Edward Everett, James Russell Lowell, Henry Cabot Lodge The North American Review page 223 – The North American Review has been publishing since 1815. This is a completely unhelpful citation even if the source is reliable, which given that Jared Sparks was the editor of the NAR in 1818 it almost certainly isn't.
• Cyrus Leo Sulzberger My Brother Death 1977 – nearly fifty years old and written by a journalist rather than an ancient historian.

Lots of these sources individually wouldn't be terrible, but none are great and the sheer number of them really gives the impression that this article is cobbled together out of what the author had to hand rather than what is actually a good source. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 10:57, 10 November 2022 (UTC)