Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire

150 pointsmetiscus3 days ago37 commentsView on HN

Driving home from work one day, I wanted to know how many people we knew the names of who lived during the Roman era. Searching around, I found lists of Consuls and officials, but nothing that covered ordinary people or even most people like freedmen and slaves. So I ended up building a pipeline to process the more than 500k Latin inscriptions in the Epigraphic Database Clauss-Slaby https://edcs.hist.uzh.ch/en/ and extract the names of people (and attempt to cluster them, but this is a work in progress).

There are databases where Classicists have done this manually for specific regions, Trismegistos https://www.trismegistos.org/ and Latin Inscriptions of the Roman Empire (LIRE) https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/publications/latin-inscriptions... are two major efforts I found. But there doesn't seem to be a project that did what I set out to do, although I have read in some places that it was believed to be possible.

I am not a classicist or a web developer, but I have Claude and Gemini and I can sort of read basic Latin - so I set to work. I used LIRE and another database as ground truth and built a pipeline to extract and process the inscriptions to recover the names. The process I developed uses a high end LLM like Sonnet or Gemini Pro to supervise the extraction and tuning process on a regional basis until the obvious error rate is reasonable. For this, so far, reasonable to me means less than 1-2% in the smaller initial samples of 100-500 and no observed systemic issues. The different regions often need different prompts, so this basically became an exercise in letting the higher level AI tune the prompt for the lower level AI. The extraction when measured against LIRE produces an F1 score between 0.64 and 0.87, but take this with a grain of salt.

Once I had done a few regions, I wanted to see the work, so I threw together a pretty crude website but as I am not a web developer, it was crude in how it accessed its data. It does look cool and I also added summarization, and machine translation to each entry. I wanted to eventually get feedback from an actual team of classicists and make the website work better, so I am rewriting it as we speak but it is broadly functional now with a few extra bugs but substantially improved performance compared to the old one. All entries link back to the proper sources, and the old web app linked to several additional sources where the data was present, but I haven't gotten that working again just yet on the new one. (The old web interface is still available at https://roman-names.com, but I will warn you it is clunky and not mobile friendly at all)

Key findings so far:

AI supervised AI extraction saved me time. I was manually tuning things for a while and then the runbook became an idea that I feed my instructions in and let the big AI go with sparse oversight from me.

The extraction improved significantly (by about 10 F1 points) when I fed the model the raw text including the markers, vs a cleaned up version of the text.

I just thought it was a cool little project and wanted to share. If you happen to work in any adjacent space and there is something I could do better etc let me know.

metiscus2 days ago

I am hoping to push a few fixes to the new web interface later today, so if you looked at this and saw anything off, hopefully by COB today I will have the known issues fixed.

metiscus41 minutes ago

And thank you to whomever flagged EDCS-31400647 and EDCS-21700214. The militia militia militia attribution was hilarious, wrong, and has been fixed.

oezi10 hours ago

Very nice. Are you using the roman roads which were also on HN a couple of weeks ago?

countrymile9 hours ago

There's a lot of new roads being mapped in England. Interesting how the inscriptions on the map are often between roads, suggesting an unmapped pathway:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44622543

metiscus2 hours ago

So the points are georeferenced when the underlying source data is otherwise I georeference them back to the findspot, which tends to cluster many at one point.

jdthedisciple10 hours ago

Very nice idea but please, check the performance: I had to close the tab 3 seconds in because it got stuck and my CPU fan got noisy.

So I couldn't even check it out properly.

andai9 hours ago

Could you elaborate on the multi level LLM workflow? Did you set up a benchmark, and you're having a LLM mutate prompts?

metiscus2 hours ago

Full code and data available at https://github.com/metiscus/roman-names/

The running version on new. is the webapp branch. Eventually I will get it all fixed up.

metiscus1 hour ago

But yes, the runbook in the project gives the llm instructions on how to use the scripts and what to modify. I let Claude code read that and tell it to work on a province. It runs a small segment and analyzes the results until it hits 1-2% error with no systemic errors. If it can't get all the errors out then I have it switch to using gemini-flash-lite-latest instead of 2.5, which costs slightly more but performs much better. Basically Claude code runs a self governing loop with my oversight mutating the prompts and data inputs to extract all the names.

EDIT My instructions to the supervising LLM are in here https://github.com/metiscus/roman-names/blob/feature/webapp-...

1. Laepoca / Laepocus — Piquentum, Venetia et Histria (1–50 AD) Three family members: two women (Laepoca Regilia, Laepoca Tuia) and a man (Metellus Laepocus). The nomen appears in both feminine and masculine forms in the same inscription, pointing to a genuine local gentilicium, likely of Istrian or Liburnian origin. https://new.roman-names.com/#edcs_id=EDCS-04200530

2. Tocernius — Eraclea Veneta, Venetia et Histria (3rd c. AD) Father (C. Tocernius Hermeros) and son (C. Tocernius Maximianus), the latter a soldier of Legio II Italica. Probably a Venetic name surviving into the imperial period. https://new.roman-names.com/#edcs_id=EDCS-04200461

3. Laulenia — Thibilis, Numidia Two sisters, Laulenia Matrona and Laulenia Naxina, daughters of the same Marcus. The name looks Berber/Numidian in origin. (I should note that our pipeline transcribed the nomen as Lauzenia — the raw EDCS text reads Laulenia, which is probably the correct form.) https://new.roman-names.com/#edcs_id=EDCS-13500401

4. Kanulanius / Nansinia — Flavia Solva, Noricum Father (C. Kanulanius Eumitus) and son (C. Kanulanius Nepos, a soldier of Ala III Thracum). The K-spelling may reflect local Celtic orthographic convention. The wife's nomen, Nansinia, also appears unattested in standard sources and may be a second find in the same inscription. https://new.roman-names.com/#edcs_id=EDCS-14500644