Prosopography, Methods and Background |
My interest in Prosopography stems from my university days and my final thesis on "Senatorial Adoptions in the Republic of Rome. A Prosopographical study with special emphasis on faction theory" from The University of Copenhagen in 1980. Over the past 20 years I have assembled a mass of prosopographical information, including about 150 family trees of major Roman families. Unfortunately much of this information is still in various text or spreadsheets formats, which need a lot of work before being transformed into HTML ready format. I have found that Excel format is easily transformed into HTML, so the task is now to convert the information into Excel and from there into HTML.
The family trees should be considered the raw material helping to perform the analysis of Roman politics. I am well aware of the many difficulties and uncertainties of constructing a family trees for any but the most well-known Roman families. But presenting the available information in a structured way and combining this with notes on the validity of data, at least gives the possibility of using this information in a more structured way.
Once the raw data has been entered it is my intention to add comments and analysis in each file.
A definition and description of the prosopographical method will appear here.