Due Date: Saturday, November 13, 1999, 5 p.m. in the Faculty mailboxes in Eliot.

Length: 1500 words.

Write on one of the following questions:

1. What is the significance of the net imagery in the Agamemnon?

2. How does the identity of the chorus in the Agamemnon and the Libation Bearers contribute to our understanding of these plays?

3. On pages 184-187 of Archaic and Classical Greek Art, Robin Osborne draws on Thucydides' History and the Athena Nike temple to advance an argument about "the violence at the heart of the representation of classical art." To what degree is he persuasive?

4. Select two images or objects from Osborne's Archaic and Classical Greek Art that represent either the male or female body. In a comparison of their visual characteristics and their subject matter, analyze how each image or object conveys cultural attitudes towards gender and sexuality.

(Figures 6, 34, 36, 67, 68-69, 73, 77, 78-79, 92, 120,139 in Osborne represent male bodies; Figures 7, 33, 37, 49, 50, 75-76, 81 and detail, 111, 114, 119, 140, 126 represent female bodies.)

5. In his funeral oration, Pericles states: "Taking everything together, then, I declare that our city is an education to Greece..." (Thucydides, 2.40-41). What does Pericles mean by this statement and is his view confirmed by Thucydides in the rest of his History?

6. In Book 1.75 of Thucydides' History, the Athenian representatives in Sparta make the following claims:

We did not gain this empire by force. It came to us at a time when you were unwilling to fight on to the end against the Persians. At this time our allies came to us of their own accord and begged us to lead them. It was the actual course of events which first compelled us to increase our power to its present extent: fear of Persia was our chief motive, though afterwards we thought, too, of our own honour and our own interest.

Is this theory concerning Athenian motives in the war borne out by Thucydides' account in the rest of the History?