Humanities 110
Paper Topic # 2
Length 1500 words (5-6 pages)

Due Saturday, October 8th, 5 P.M. in your conference leader's Eliot Hall mailbox. 

Choose one of the following:

1. How does Hesiod’s view of the role mythical women play contrast with the role Archaic Age women play in the household in either Theogony and/or Works and Days?   Why or how is this disparity significant?
2. In book II.113-120 of the Histories, Herodotus makes inquiries about the abduction of Helen and evaluates the truth of the story.  How is this process of evaluating the evidence representative of Herodotus’s method throughout the Histories?  Use two other passages where Herodotus evaluates evidence to support your claim.
3. Images of an ancient Greek vase now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art are available at http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/vase/hob_1972.11.10.htm .  This Calyx-krater was made in Athens ca. 515 BCE by the potter Euxitheos and the painter Euphronios. As the online catalog from the Metropolitan Museum of Art explains, the main scene on the vase shows an episode from the Trojan War in which Sarpedon, a son of Zeus and leader of the Trojans' allies, has been slain by Patroklos. All of the figures have been carefully identified by name. Zeus has ordered Sleep (Hypnos) and Death (Thanatos), the winged twin sons of Night, to carry Sarpedon to his homeland for a hero's burial. We see them here gently lifting the body of Sarpedon off the ground. Hermes, messenger god and conductor of souls, stands at the center with his hand raised as he directs Sleep and Death (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/vase/hod_1972.11.10.htm).

Discuss the relationship between form and content on this vase. You may want to consider questions such as how does Euphronios convey information to the viewer? How does he make use of the space created by Euxitheos? What pictorial techniques does he use to give meaning? You may want to pay attention to one or more of these formal devices: pattern, light/dark contrast, visual parallels and antitheses, the use of positive and negative space (positive space is the space occupied by the subject and negative space is the space that is not occupied by the subject), and the relationship of the inscriptions to the images. 

Detailed images of the vase can be seen at

VASE FROM FRONT: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/vase/hob_1972.11.10.htm

DETAIL OF FRONT: http://www.unc.edu/courses/pre2000fall/clar049/MetKrDt.jpg

DETAIL SHOWING DEATH CARRYING A FALLEN SARPEDON: http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/hoving/hoving7-16-2.asp

For the purposes of this paper, you need not consider the other side of the vase, which has an image of a group of warriors (http://www.unc.edu/courses/pre2000fall/clar049/MetKrRev.jpg)

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