{"id":70504,"date":"2025-03-28T01:00:13","date_gmt":"2025-03-28T05:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=70504"},"modified":"2025-03-27T11:05:15","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T15:05:15","slug":"qotd-prosopography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/03\/28\/qotd-prosopography\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Prosopography"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In the History Biz, prosopography<\/em> is the study of quasi-familial relationships, a kind of “collective biography”. It’s different from genealogy<\/em>, which studies direct lineal descent \u2014 So-and-So begot Wossname, like in the Bible. Your classic prosopography is Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution<\/em><\/a>, which you still see Leftards on the Internet hauling out all the time, though of course they don\u2019t know where it comes from (or that modern historians, who are far more flamingly Leftist than Beard ever dreamed of being, consider it largely discredited).<\/p>\n

Prosopography is vital in the study of Classical Antiquity, especially the Roman Republic. The Romans, as I’m sure you recall, practiced “patronage and clientage<\/a>” \u2014 a man’s clients were often in a very real way more important than his biological family. Prove that Wossname was So-and-So’s client, and you know a lot about Wossname, even if you can’t find it in the archaeological record, and what you do know about him from the record takes on a whole new meaning. For instance, under Gaius Marius<\/a> (et al<\/em>.), the patron \/ client relationship got extended to the army \u2014 coteries of officers and NCOs personally loyal to their commanding general, not to the State \u2014 and there’s your Fall of the Roman Republic.<\/p>\n

Kremlinology required something similar. Since the important levels of the Apparat<\/em> all went to the same Higher Party Schools in Moscow, the fact that So-and-So was Wossname’s roommate for a few semesters was potentially of much greater importance than anything So-and-So did as the People’s Commissar of Whatever. He might’ve looked like a real up-and-comer based on his early promotion to a prestige post, but based on his prosopography an experience Kremlinologist might deduce that this was just horse-trading \u2014 someone high up in the Politburo owed Wossname’s father a favor for something back in the Great Patriotic War, and so this was payback; Wossname wasn’t going any higher than that.<\/p>\n

It’s even more important in a completely ideologized society like the USSR. No Roman client would ever go so far as to openly stab his patron in the back \u2014 no one in his society would ever trust him again; he’d get shanked the very minute he donned the purple \u2014 but a Roman could have a change of heart. He might get religion, of either the philosophical (Epicureanism, Stoicism) or the actual cultic sort. This would significantly change the patron \/ client relationship. But in a society like the USSR \u2014 ostentatiously dedicated to the World Proletarian Revolution \u2014 ideology imposed some hard limits …<\/p>\n

Severian, “Alt Thread: A Brief Bit of Brandonology”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2021-12-01.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the History Biz, prosopography is the study of quasi-familial relationships, a kind of “collective biography”. It’s different from genealogy, which studies direct lineal descent \u2014 So-and-So begot Wossname, like in the Bible. Your classic prosopography is Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which you still see Leftards on the Internet hauling out all the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7,53,41,1119],"tags":[968,912,1345,1462,433],"class_list":["post-70504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","category-politics","category-quotations","category-russia","tag-family","tag-privilege","tag-romanrepublic","tag-severian","tag-sovietunion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ila","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70504"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94864,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70504\/revisions\/94864"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}