Talk:Servilia gens

Ancestors of gentes: content dispute

Moved to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome § Gentes and the single common ancestor

This carries over from a potential edit war over the claim that the praenomen Servius "must have been borne by an ancestor of the gens", meaning the Servilii. This strikes me as a tautology, but Iffly6 cites OCD4 for the claim that the ancestors of gentes were frequently fictitious, and therefore the claim "fails verification".

The traditional definition of a gens is a family defined by a shared nomen gentilicium and the belief in descent from a common ancestor. That such an ancestor cannot always be shown to have existed, or is imagined to have been a "fictitious person" (though I doubt there are many cases in which this can be proved), or that some persons bearing the name only did so because they or an ancestor of theirs had been manumitted or otherwise granted citizenship by a member of the gens, or possibly because two or more unrelated instances of families bearing the same surname became confused, does not change what is meant when we refer to a Roman gens, or what the Romans themselves meant by it; they were surely aware that technically some people bearing the surname would not have been blood relatives of the original family, but I cannot recall any instances in Roman writing where such a distinction was retained, beyond the immediate family of a freedman or some such person.

More immediately, as applied to the Servilii, it seems transparently obvious that anyone whose nomen is derived from Servius was presumably descended from someone named Servius at some point in the distant past. Since it is a patronymic surname and Servius was not a rare praenomen (particularly in the early years), it is by no means inconceivable that multiple families could have borne the name due to their descent from different persons named Servius. But we have no evidence that this in fact occurred with the Servilii, or with most other Roman gentes; the notion that it could have been the case because we cannot prove otherwise strikes me as pure speculation or invention, and it defies the basic understanding of what the Romans understood a gens to be, as well as how we treat it today.

From a practical perspective, that is also why all persons named Servilius are included in this article; we rarely can prove how people or their ancestors acquired their gentilicia; Quintus Servilius Caepio Brutus is an obvious exception, but as he was adopted by a Servilius, under Roman law he became a member of the Servilia gens and legally the descendant of the Servilii. The same would have been the case for other adoptees and their descendants. It is unclear whether the descendants of freedmen of any gens were ever treated as gentiles, but within two or three generations the nature of their relation to the rest of the gens would have been lost, as we seldom if ever read of Romans (as opposed to foreign families that had been enrolled as citizens and adopted the nomen of their patron) being distinguished as separate gentes bearing the same gentilicium, and we are even more in the dark than the Romans when it came to how specific persons other than the freedmen themselves came by their nomina.

But to return to the Servilia gens: by tradition the Servilii bearing the surnames Priscus and Structus were all one family, which is why we sometimes find the two surnames together, and the Ahalae were descended from them. Looking at other indications, such as their filiations and use of a relatively small set of praenomina (Quintus, Publius, Spurius, and Gaius), everything is consistent with these families having been related. We do not need to know whether they claimed descent from a particular person named Servius or simply assumed that they had a common ancestor, but there is nothing to contraindicate that they were related and shared a common ancestor, and even if they did not, it is self-evident that all of them would have been descended from someone named Servius.

A century separates the last of the Servilii Structi and Ahalae from the rise of the Caepiones and Gemini, which appear in the record simultaneously, both claiming descent from a Gnaeus Servilius. The Caepiones then used Gnaeus and Quintus, while the Gemini used Quintus, Publius, Gaius, and Marcus. As Geminus means "twin", it seems fairly evident that Gnaeus Servilius, the father of Gnaeus Servilius Caepio, the consul of 253 BC, and Quintus Servilius, the father of Publius Servilius Geminus, consul in 252 and 248, were in fact brothers, and that their descendants assumed different surnames and employed slightly different sets of praenomina (though that of the Gemini is very similar to those of the earlier Servilii, with the substitution of Marcus for Spurius) to distinguish two branches of the same family. The Servilii Vatiae were then descended from the Servilii Gemini. This was certainly Münzer's interpretation, and he is cited for it with the chart following. There is no reason to doubt it; it is consistent with everything we know both of Roman practice and what is recorded of the families.

Perhaps the question is whether the Caepiones and Gemini were descended from the earlier Servilii. That is certainly what the Romans themselves assumed, and as they were patricians like the earlier Servilii, I can see no reason to doubt it. As already stated, the Servilii Gemini used roughly the same praenomina as the Servilii Prisci, Structi, and Ahalae, with the substitution of Marcus for Spurius, and this list—Publius, Quintus, Gaius, and Marcus—accounts for all those used by the later Servilii in the article, even the ones of Imperial times whose relationship to the Servilii of the Republic is unknown. The use of a restricted list of praenomina was also a common, if not invariable incident of Roman gentes. New names crept in from time to time, such as Gnaeus among the Caepiones or Marcus among the Gemini, but otherwise the tradition remained stable—and the last known Gnaeus was a Caepio of the late second century BC, leaving only the names used by the Gemini to be used by all other Servilii in this article.

I have little doubt that if we plumbed epigraphy for Servilii with other praenomina, we would find some perhaps named Lucius or Titus or some other, more unusual names. And we would rightly suspect them to be freedmen, the descendants of freedmen, or newly-enrolled citizens with no direct descent from the Servilii of the Republic—although some of them probably would be their descendants, as any family that existed for over five centuries would likely have countless obscure descendants. But we would have no way of knowing, except for those individuals who were themselves freedmen. Their descendants are more undistinguishable from lineal descendants of the Republican Servilii by modern scholarship than they would have been to the Romans, and we have no indication that the Romans were able to make such a distinction once the facts in any specific instance had been forgotten.

But as this article does not attempt to account for every Servilius mentioned in epigraphy—for the practical reason that there are already plenty of them illustrating the importance of the family to history, while epigraphy would presumably add only scores or perhaps hundreds of obscure persons from Imperial times—there seems to be no reason to dispute the basic assumption that the members of the Servilia gens who appear in history were all descended from a common ancestor, either lineally or through the legal fiction of adoption, or in the case of freedmen (none of whom are currently identified in the article) of ambiguous legal relation to the lineal descendants. And all of them would certainly have received their nomen as the result of one person named Servius, even if we have no idea who he was or when he lived, or whether the Servilii claimed to know of such an ancestor or had any traditions relating to him.

There is a tradition that the Servilii were enrolled among the patricians when they were removed from Alba Longa after its destruction by Tullus Hostilius. Whether the war of Tullus or the removal of the Servilii to Rome during his reign should be regarded as historical events is not particularly important, so much as the belief that the Servilii already existed as a distinct family at a remote period during the Roman monarchy. And as far as I know, no individual Servilii are mentioned until the consul of 495 BC—though I have not combed through Dionysius or Plutarch to see whether there were legends of any such persons, they did not appear in any of the sources I consulted when writing this article and are still not mentioned in it. That means that we can say nothing about the ancestors of the Republican Servilii except that the Structi, Prisci, and Ahalae all appear to constitute one family that separated into two distinct branches, the Prisci and Structi not really being clearly separable, and that their nomen gentilicium was derived from some person, perhaps lost to memory even by the early Republic, named Servius.

What is the point in mentioning that the eponymous ancestors of some gentes were or probably were fictitious? We are not discussing concrete traditions about the various supposed sons of Numa Pompilius, bearing such otherwise unknown names as Aemulus, Calpus, or Pinus, claimed as descendants by the Aemilii, Calpurnii, and Pinarii (though, as various authorities point out, the Pinarii are also said to have received the rites of Hercules in the time of Evander, long before the time of Numa). We know nothing of the Servius who gave his name to the Servilii, and any traditions relating to him have been lost. But that Servilius is derived from Servius seems to be beyond disputing, and I can see no reason to dispute it here, any more than we would argue that persons named Johnson only claimed to have been descended from a "fictitious person" named John (failed verification), or that persons named Smith didn't take their name from someone who was a blacksmith. The fact that we have no idea who these persons were is immaterial; we know that that's how these names arose. So it is with the Servius who was presumably the ancestor of the Servilii; all authorities agree that Servilius is derived from Servius, so why are we going to argue that the Servius whose descendants were named Servilius in Republican Rome was a "fictitious person" whose existence cannot be verified? It seems an utterly pointless exercise, when all that is said is that some such person must have existed, and no particular traditions relating to him are known or mentioned. P Aculeius (talk) 16:47, 15 November 2024 (UTC)