Due Date: Saturday, November 14, 1998, 5 p.m. in the Faculty mailboxes in Eliot.

Length: 1500 words.

Write on one of the following questions:

1. In lines 716-736 of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the Chorus tells the fable of a lion cub. In a close reading of this passage, analyze its relevance to an understanding of Clytemnestra and either Electra or Orestes in the Oresteia. How do you account for the application of the fable to characters at odds with one another given your understanding of the narrative of the triology?

2. Compare the political role of argument and persuasion in the Aeschylus' Eumenides and either the Mytilenian Debate or the Melian Dialogue (History of the Peloponnesian War 3.36-50 and 5.83-116 respectively).

3. Compare the basic principles of the Athenian concept of marriage as it is represented in Aeschylus' Eumenides and either Pomeroy's introduction to Xenophon's Oeconomicus or the vase paintings in Sutton's article on "Pornography and Persuasion on Attic Pottery."

4. In Art and Experience in Classical Greece, Pollitt argues for the importance of ethos, pathos and rhythmos in the analysis of Greek art. Compare the use of these concepts in Thucydides' depiction of Pericles or Nicias and either the sculptures of the Parthenon or a Greek vase painting.

5. Thucydides represents Pericles as warning the Athenians that: "Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go." (History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.63). To what extent is this view Thucydides' own in his history as a whole?