History 100, Spring 2006 Professor Ogilvie
Study Guide for Midterm Examination Format of the exam The exam, on Wednesday, March 15, will be a 50-minute, closed-book, in class exam. Please do not bring your class notes or books. We will provide bluebooks and scratch paper. Do bring a couple of pens. In the exam, you will be asked to identify eight terms of your choice from a list of twelve, and to answer one essay question of your choice from a list of two. What makes a good short identification answer? A good answer to a short identification question will address the themes on which the course has focused. It should be brief yet specific. Here are examples of short identifications of “Odysseus”: 1. “A mythical ancient Greek hero.” While true, this is a poor answer. It shows some knowledge of who Odysseus was but it doesn’t indicate why he is important in the course. 2. “A Greek hero from the era of the Trojan War. He was famed for his cunning, but in Sophocles’s play Philoctetes, he was portrayed as having no morals. He represented expediency in political decisions.” This is a much better answer, since it shows both a knowledge of who Odysseus was and why he is important in the framework of this course.
Terms for short identification Hellenic era Peloponnesian Wars ataraxia (imperturbability) Hellenistic era Great Dionysia Epicureanism worldview Philoctetes Stoicism ideology chorus orthodoxy Homeric question deus ex machina (god from heterodoxy stock epithet the machine) orthopraxis Parry, Milman Alexander the Great monotheism oikos Hellenization Torah blood price Library of Alexandria gospel Persian Wars philosophy Documentary Hypothesis
What makes a good essay answer? When you answer an essay question in an examination, it’s important to be clear and direct. Since you don’t have a lot of time, it’s tempting to just start writing what you think. You should resist that temptation. If you just start writing, you’re likely to express yourself in a confused and disjointed way, even if you have a good answer to the question. Instead, you should take a moment to plan your answer. Your first paragraph should set out, in a schematic form, the points you want to raise in your essay. There are two reasons for doing this. First, it means that you don’t need to think about topic sentences for your paragraphs: you will already have thought about them. Second, if you run out of time to
1 2 finish the essay, your first paragraph will indicate to the grader that you have at least thought about a point, even if you didn’t have time to develop it. Some students find it helpful to write a mini-outline on a piece of scrap paper before they start to answer an essay question. For this exam, we suggest outlining the answers for all the questions in advance. In answering an essay question, just as in writing a paper, you should not try to cram in everything you know, regardless of its relevance. Instead, you should think about which facts are relevant to answering the question and what they mean. Since the exam is closed- book, you do not need to provide exact quotations or page references, but you should indicate the source of your information (i.e. “Aristotle defined citizenship...,” not “They defined citizenship...”).
Essay questions 1. What is the Homeric Question? What are some of the features of the Homeric poems that led scholars to dispute when and by whom the Homeric poems were written? What is the conclusion of modern scholarship as described in lecture?
2. How does the worldview of Homeric Greece, as expressed in the Iliad, differ from the worldview of classical Athens, as expressed in Philoctetes (The Cure at Troy)? Use specific examples from each text to support your claims.
3. Why did the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt sponsor the Library of Alexandria and its scholarship? How was it part of the extension and preservation of Greek culture in the Hellenistic era? Mention and explain at least two important reasons for their cultural patronage.
4. Describe the changing views of the gods in the ancient world from Homeric Greece through the Hellenistic-Roman period, using examples from lecture and course readings including Cicero’s The Nature of the Gods. How do changing views of the gods relate to social and cultural changes?
5. What was the goal of Hellenistic philosophies like Epicureanism and Stoicism? How did this goal differ from the orientation of philosophy in classical Greece? How does Cicero’s treatise on The Nature of the Gods illustrate the goal of Hellenistic philosophy?
6. In the Iliad, Achilles tells Priam the story of Zeus’s two jars, one of which holds good fortune, the other bad. How does this story compare with the explanation for the Israelites’ sufferings found in Nehemiah 9? How do the differences in the stories reveal differences in the worldviews of Dark Age Greece and ancient Israel?
7. How have scholars explained the facts that the first five books of the Bible (the Torah or Pentateuch) contain a number of duplicated passages (e.g., the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5), and that they sometimes use the word “God” and sometimes “Yahweh” (translated as “the Lord”)? What does this imply about how the Bible as we know it came to be composed?