Paper Topics | Fall 2015 | Paper 4
Due Saturday, December 5th, 5 p.m., in your conference leader's Eliot Hall mailbox.
Length: 6-8 pages (1500-2000 words)
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It has been suggested that lyric can be thought of as a mode of composing poetry rather than a genre of poetry, a mode distinguished by such features as the use of present tense and a first person speaker, apparent direct address to a hearer, reliance on deixis or "shifters," and a tendency for the voice in the poem to become the voice of the reader/hearer. Choose any poem by Solon, Theognis, or Sappho. Does this poem use the lyric mode? To what effect? Questions you could consider include: How might the lyric mode complicate or be complicated by choral, rather than individual, performance? What are the social, religious, and/or ideological functions this poem might serve? How do these functions change depending on the reader or readers?
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Heraclitus and Parmenides appear to be philosophical opposites. Heraclitus says everything changes; Parmenides says nothing does. Heraclitus seems to flout the law of noncontradiction; Parmenides gives that law more weight than the evidence of our senses. Heraclitus says everything is fire; Parmenides says it is one, unchanging, qualitatively homogeneous sphere. But our fragments from both thinkers are famously obscure and open to various interpretations. Consult the fragments and consider the question of whether Heraclitus and Parmenides are fundamentally opposed.
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In Book 9.27 of Herodotus' The Histories, before the battle of Plataea, the Athenians provide a long list of their past accomplishments in order to claim an honored position in the fight against the Persians. According to Herodotus' account of the Athenians throughout the book, is this position deserved?
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Historian and Classicist Carolyn Dewald explains, "[History] was a noun formed out of a very old Indo-European stem vid- meaning sight, or knowledge gained through sight. We have its cousin words through Germanic Old English in wit, or wisdom, and through Latin, another cousin language, we have vision, and video. In Greek very early, before Homer, the digamma or w-sound was lost, and the stem came in as the verb idein, to see, and in its noun of agency, a (w)istor, or histor, a witness, a man who knows things because he has seen them. In the Iliad, a text written three hundred years or so before Herodotus, a histor is in one passage a judge of a horse race, waiting at the end goalpost to declare the winner, and in another passage he is one of a group of judges gathered to weigh the evidence and determine the outcome of a manslaughter trial." At the outset of Book 1, Herodotus explains his scope and method in different terms. To what extent do we see this older conception of the histor as witness or judge in Herodotus?
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At lines 383–386 of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the Chorus says:
"Bastions of wealth
are no defence for the man
who treads the grand altar of Justice
down and out of sight."How does the Oresteia as a whole address questions of the relationship between wealth and justice? Does the trilogy make an argument, implicit or direct, about this relationship?
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Carefully examine the Bisitun monument. Consider the imperial ideology constructed by the conjunction of the images, the accompanying text, and the site itself. In comparison to one other object from our study of Persia--the Cyrus Cylinder, the Persepolis Apadana, the statue of Darius or the Susa Foundation Charter--describe the distinct tactics of authority, legitimacy and power at work in the monument and in the other object. Do the tactics of the Bisitun monument and your second object serve the same ideology, or do they point to different ideological underpinnings for the Persian Emperor's rule?
Relevant Images: (libray proxy required for off-campus access)