Paper Topics | Fall 2024 | Paper 4
Due Saturday, December 7, 5:00 p.m., to your conference leader
Target length: 1,400-1,600 words
Choose one of the following topics:
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The tragedy Agamemnon and the comedy Lysistrataare are both dominated by powerful female characters. Compare the characters of Clytemnestra and Lysistrata in these two plays, considering the extent to which they embody similar ideas about gender. To what extent do differences in the genres of the works affect the portrayals?
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Analyze the differing conceptions of justice presented by Apollo, the Furies, and Athena in the trial at the end of The Eumenides. To what extent does the outcome of the trial resolve the tensions between their competing notions of justice?
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Using the method of “reading against the grain” described in Kritish Rajbhandari’s lecture on slavery in ancient Greece, examine how the condition of slavery is represented in one of the following: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, or Libation Bearers, or Apollodorus’ “Against Neaera,” or any two images from the gallery. In what ways does the text or do the images reveal or hide the conditions of social death as defined by Orlando Patterson? How is slave-holder ideology represented? What kind of contradictions are present in the text/images?
- Analyze one of the following episodes from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War: Pericles’s funeral oration, the Mytilenian debate, or the debate preceding the Sicilian expedition. Focusing on the arguments presented and the events that follow, reflect on how they portray the nature of Athenian democracy. What is the alignment between the claims and the action, as reported by Thucydides? What ideas about the Athenian polity and democracy does the history develop through this juxtaposition of speech and action?