Choose any one of the following topics:

1. What is the significance of the yoke imagery Aeschylus frequently employs throughout the Agamemnon?

2. J. J. Pollitt and Joan Connelly interpret the Parthenon frieze in very different ways. Evaluate their arguments, paying attention to points of agreement as well as disagreement. What core issues are at stake for the two authors?
3. In "Parthenon and Parthenoi" Joan Connelly puts forward a controversial interpretation of the Parthenon frieze. Evaluate Connelly’s arguments regarding the attitude towards women presented on the frieze in light of your reading of the portrayal of women in any one of the following works: Herodotus’s Histories, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sophocles’s Antigone, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, or the rest of the Parthenon itself.
4. What criteria does Thucydides establish for the just or appropriate use of power? Why do these criteria matter to him?
5. Thucydides comments in Book 1.10 of his History regarding the powerful and important city of Sparta that

[s]ince…. the city is not regularly planned and contains no temples or monuments of great magnificence, but is simply a collection of villages, in the ancient Hellenic way, its appearance would not come up to expectation. If, on the other hand, the same thing were to happen to Athens, one would conjecture from what met the eye that the city had been twice as powerful as in fact it is.

Why is this disjunction between perception and reality important for Thucydides? How, in particular, does the distinction between appearance and reality inform Thucydides's understanding of political affairs throughout the text?

6. With the express consent of your conference leader, write on a topic of your own devising.

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